Read the copper headlines and you’ll hear about data centers, EVs, and grid wire. Fair enough. Those uses swallow metal by the trainload. What doesn’t make the bank notes is the small, stubborn pile of copper sitting in every brass-cased cartridge.
Cartridge brass is roughly 70 percent copper. Jacketed bullets are copper over a lead core. Some hunting loads are solid copper. One industry breakdown puts copper at about 73 percent of the weight of typical small-caliber ammo. That is not a rounding error. When the metal moves, cases and jackets move with it, just with a lag.
We’ve already seen the first pass. Through 2025 and into 2026, copper, zinc, lead, and tariffs shoved wholesale ammo higher. Winchester’s parent talked about passing metal costs through. Component houses repriced plated bullets. Reloaders watched 9mm brass climb. None of that required Deutsche Bank’s extreme case. It only required copper sitting near records.
Now the bank is saying the easy metal is being locked away — China in strategic piles, the U.S. in tariff-driven warehouses — and that the leftover “free” inventory could grind toward zero by the end of 2028. Their stretch target is $22,050 a metric ton by the second quarter of 2027. That’s about $10 a pound, call it 50 percent above where London has been trading this week in the mid-$14,000s.
If that path holds, ammo does not double overnight. Powder, primers, labor, and freight still matter. But brass and copper jackets are not optional parts. A 50 percent lift in the metal that makes the case and the jacket is another step-function for loaded ammo, another squeeze on component brass, and another reason military and law-enforcement contracts get rewritten. Demand destruction is the bank’s own phrase for how the copper market rebalances. Shooters already know what demand destruction looks like at the counter: fewer cheap boxes, more “limit 2,” and a new normal that never quite goes back.
That’s the editorial. The rest is the report, cleaned up so you can decide how much of it you believe.
What Deutsche Bank actually said
Daniel Ghali, Deutsche Bank’s head of metals research, put the note in front of clients around September 28, 2026. The punchline is not “AI needs more wire,” though that demand is still there. The punchline is liquidity. Headline warehouse stocks can look fine while the metal that anyone else can actually buy keeps shrinking.
Ghali’s inventory stack, as reported:
- China’s strategic reserves: about 2.05 million tons, or roughly 43 percent of global above-ground inventories.
- U.S. tariff-driven stockpiling: as much as 1.3 million tons tied up in warehouses by year-end.
- Combined U.S. and Chinese stockpiling: 71 percent of global inventories encumbered by the end of 2026.
- Free-floating inventories: on the current pace, approaching zero by the end of 2028.
He called it the “most acute copper scarcity on record” and a “de-globalization endgame.” The combination, in his wording, is decades of underinvestment plus countries hoarding the leftover metal.
Price path attached to that story:
- Stretch target: $22,050 a ton in Q2 2027 (about $10/lb).
- 2027 average: $20,900.
- 2028 average: $18,500, assuming the market finally rebalances after the squeeze.
London cash copper has been hanging around $14,400–$14,800 a ton in late September, with COMEX futures near $6.60 a pound after an early-month record near $6.80. A move to $22,050 is only a “50 percent rally” if you start from that mid-$14,000 band. That’s the math the headlines are using.
One more physical tell: LME stocks were cited as falling 38 percent, from 402,625 tons on April 15 to 251,350 tons on September 28. That’s the visible warehouse, not the strategic piles. The bank’s point is that even the visible stuff is being pulled into national buckets.
This is a lock-up story, not just a mine story
Mines still matter. Chile’s ore grades have been fading. Indonesia and Congo have had outages. Smelter downtime shows up in refined output. China’s refined growth is expected to slow. All of that is the old copper cycle.
What’s new in this note is the claim that reported inventories overstate what the rest of the world can buy. Metal sitting in a Chinese strategic reserve does not show up at a brass mill in the Midwest. Metal parked in a U.S. warehouse because tariffs make it rational to import now and sort it out later is also not “available” in the old global-pool sense.
Ghali’s warning is that once free inventories get thin enough, the market stops being a polite supply-demand curve and turns into a bidding war. The auction ends when somebody quits — construction, wiring, appliances, or, further down the list, cartridge plants that cannot pass the cost on fast enough. The bank is blunt about the mechanism: demand destruction, or a price high enough to force buyers out.
That is also why the AI-data-center narrative is being demoted. The servers still want copper. The immediate problem, in this telling, is that the pool those servers, utilities, and everyone else draw from is being fenced.
How the metal gets into a cartridge
Two places, mostly.
The case. Traditional cartridge brass (think C26000) is about 70 percent copper and 30 percent zinc. A 7.62×51 case is on the order of 14 grams of brass. Small-caliber pistol brass is lighter, but the alloy doesn’t change. When copper rips higher, the scrap value of fired brass follows, and so does the cost of new unprimed cases. Yards already price clean shell casings off the copper print.
The projectile. Full metal jacket and most hunting bullets use a copper jacket. Monolithic hunting bullets are copper all the way through. Plated practice bullets are a thinner copper layer over lead, and those makers have already sent price letters this year.
Lead, antimony, zinc, primers, and powder have their own headaches. Copper is the one tied directly to this Deutsche Bank call. It is also the one that shows up twice in the same round.
A 50 percent copper rally does not mean a 50 percent box-price rally. Conversion costs, powder, packaging, and retailer margin dilute the pass-through. What it does mean is another cost wave on the two parts you cannot substitute without redesigning the cartridge. Alternative cases exist — steel, aluminum, polymer-coated, a few proprietary shells — but the U.S. commercial market still runs on brass, and so does most military spec.
What shooters have already paid
This is not a clean-sheet thought experiment.
Copper is up on the order of mid-30s percent year over year, depending on the print you pick. COMEX tagged a record near $6.80/lb in early September before easing. Component brass has lagged the futures chart by weeks, not years. Loaded-ammo retailers and manufacturers spent 2026 talking about 2 to 10 percent list hikes and “unprecedented” raw-material volatility. 9mm FMJ has already lived above the old 25-cent comfort zone for stretches of the year.
So the bank’s 2027 target is not the first copper shock for the ammo aisle. It would be a second, larger one on top of a market that already repriced once.
If you reload, you feel it first: unprimed brass, copper-plated bullets, and the scrap check you get for range pickups. If you buy bulk 9mm or 5.56, you feel it when the case price on the website ticks and the “in stock” flags get stingy. If you buy duty or hunting ammo with heavier jackets or all-copper bullets, the copper line in the cost sheet is even fatter.
What would have to go right for this not to hit ammo
Bank targets miss. This one is aggressive on purpose.
The case weakens if:
- U.S. warehouses start releasing metal instead of absorbing it.
- LME stocks rebuild in a convincing way (one shop flagged a return above 400,000 tons as a signal the squeeze thesis is fading).
- China sells from the strategic pile instead of adding to it.
- New mine and scrap supply shows up faster than the last decade of underinvestment suggests.
- A growth scare in China or a pause in grid/data-center build cuts demand before inventories hit the wall.
Even then, copper does not have to tag $10 for ammo to stay expensive. It only has to stay scarce and politically boxed-in. Tariffs on copper and copper-intensive goods already changed the U.S. flow of metal. Resource nationalism is the backdrop Ghali is naming, not a side note.
The practical read
Treat the $22,050 figure as a stress case, not a promise. Treat the inventory split as the part worth watching. If 71 percent of above-ground copper is spoken for by two governments’ stockpiles, the remaining buyers — wire mills, plumbers, and cartridge plants — are competing for a smaller float. That is a price story whether or not the exact target prints in Q2 2027.
For anyone who shoots or stocks ammo, the translation is simple. Brass is a copper product. Jackets are a copper product. A historic squeeze in free copper is not an abstract LME problem. It is another bid for the same metal that leaves the factory as a case and a bullet.
If you were waiting for “cheap ammo season” to return on its own, this note is not that signal. It’s the opposite: a bank on the record saying the leftover copper is being locked up, and that the market’s way out is higher prices until somebody stops buying.
Source material for the copper call: Deutsche Bank via reporting that first circulated widely on September 28–29, 2026, including ZeroHedge’s write-up of Ghali’s note.