There are plenty of risks facing the global economy at the moment, and most of them have a strongly political flavour. There is the next round of the seemingly never-ending Greek debt crisis, the potential fall-out from the Brexit vote, the re-election of Vladimir Putin, the grim choice facing US voters in November; the list goes on and on. One issue seems to have particular relevance for the LME, though, and that is the apparently parlous state of the loan books of many large Chinese banks.
Why is that a concern for the LME? Well, as I have discussed before, the LME needs to grow its volumes in order to keep its business driving forward (and that’s not a suggestion, by the way, that they are under any particular pressure from their shareholder: it’s just a simple fact that in a commercial world, decreasing volumes of business do not really...
