By Matt Phillips Thomson Reuters Copper futures — the purple line — have been slumping while the S&P has held up fairly well recently. A warning sign for stocks? Markets liked the look of the ISM Manufacturing survey out Monday morning which was better than expected and contained good sub-headline data that showed new orders for factories and employment going up. That’s all to the good. But here at MarketBeat we’ve been keeping an eye on the meanderings of copper lately and noticing a distinct downtrend. Copper is often viewed as a bellwether for economic growth because of its many industrial applications. In fact, such is the reputation of copper that, among Wall Streeters, the metal is sometimes called “Dr. Copper” — the metal with a PhD in economics — because its prices are believed to signal turning points in the global economy, the Journal wrote a while back. With that in mind, Copper futures Monday hit their weakest level in two months on Monday thanks to concerns that another effort by China to contain its economy might mean less demand for industrial commodities, Dow Jones reports. The recent direction of copper prices is “a commentary on the variety of risks that are out there,” Mark Liinamaa, North American metals and mining analyst with Morgan Stanley. “The markets are, in our view, correctly recognizing some structural issues,” that could present hurdles to economic growth, among them the ongoing situation in Greece, China’s attempts to cool elements of the economy that some worry have been overheating. “Consumption, particularly outside of China, has been lethargic,” Liinamaa said of copper demand. The fact that copper is approaching the traditionally soft summer period is also weighing on the prices of the metal, he said. So is Dr. Copper predicting a double-dip? No one knows for sure, but it bears watching.

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