LONDON, May 23 (Reuters) – Copper fell 2 percent on Wednesday as U.S. President Donald Trump tempered optimism that a China-U.S. trade stand-off was at an end, knocking appetite for cyclical assets and helping pull the metal from the previous day’s near one-month high. Stock markets slid and the dollar fell against the Japanese yen – seen as a haven from risk – after Trump said he was not pleased with recent trade talks with China. His comments came after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said over the weekend that the prospect of a trade war between the two countries was “on hold”, giving a boost to nominally riskier assets like stocks and industrial metals. “If you enter a phase where trade growth slows down, then it is quite bad news for the Chinese economy,” Oxford Economics commodities analyst Daniel Smith said. “The risks around a lot of these things are definitely much higher than they were a few months ago.” China is the world’s largest consumer of copper, which is chiefly used in construction. * COPPER: Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was down 2.2 percent at $6,828 a tonne in official trading, after peaking at $6,999 on Tuesday, its loftiest since April 26. * COPPER INVENTORIES: On-warrant stocks of copper in London Metal Exchange (LME) warehouses — metal not earmarked for delivery and therefore available to the market — fell 7,975 tonnes to 226,300 tonnes, their lowest since late January. * GRASBERG: Global miner Rio Tinto Ltd said it was in discussions to sell its interest in the world’s second largest copper mine to Indonesia’s state mining holding company Inalum. * VEDANTA: An Indian court halted the proposed expansion of Vedanta Resources copper smelter where a day earlier 11 people were killed when police fired on protesters seeking closure of the plant on environmental grounds. * LEAD: LME lead was untraded in official rings, but was last bid down 1 percent at $2,450 a tonne, retreating from a 12-week high hit in the previous session after Chinese speculators drove a rally based by potential supply shortages. * NICKEL: LME nickel, also untraded in official rings, was last bid 1.6 percent lower at $14,550 a tonne. Nickel remains the best performer among base metals, with a year-to-date gain of nearly 14 percent. * NICKEL INVENTORIES: LME nickel stockpiles fell by another 2,454 tonnes, data on Wednesday showed, and are at their lowest since 2014, underlining a deficit in the metal used for stainless steel. * OTHER METALS: LME zinc was down 1.4 percent at $3,014 a tonne in official trading, while aluminium was down 1.3 percent at $2,240 a tonne. Tin was untraded in official rings, but was last up 0.1 percent at $20,550 a tonne.
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