Mr. Copper
Categories: Econ, International
A Little known Bond villain? A forgotten character from Clue?
Nope. Mr. Copper was a famous copper trader. His given name was Yasuo Hamanaka, and he was the chief copper trader at Japanese trading giant Sumitomo Corp. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (He had another nickname: Mr. Five Percent, which denoted how much of the copper market he controlled.)
As it turns out, Mr. Copper did wander into real Bond villain territory. For about a decade, Hamanaka used his position to manipulate the copper market, keeping prices unnaturally high in order to pocket additional profits. However, a change in market conditions during the 1990s broke his hold on the market.
It came to a head in 1995, when the price of copper plunged and Hamanaka ended up losing about $1.8 billion by the time the dust cleared.
