Technology
PUBLISHED
Banking giant JP Morgan Chase was left pretty disappointed after discovering their large haul of nickel was just plain old rocks, according to a new report.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.As a result of an apparent warehouse mix-up, an operator weighing bags containing 54 metric tons of the metal found the supposed briquettes of nickel were not what they thought and were essentially worthless, leading to a company-wide check of their supply.
It has now been traced back to one warehouse in the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and the incident is apparently an "isolated case", according to Access World, the owner of the warehouse. The error was reported by the London Metals Exchange, a trading platform for mineral commodities.
It’s probably a good thing the error was caught, as the nickel should have been worth around $1.3 million (£1.06 million), according to Bloomberg. Nickel is an essential material in electronics, batteries, and steel-making, making it a valuable resource and common in commodity trading.
Interestingly, this type of issue is not a particularly rare occurrence. Metals as a commodity seem to be quite easy to "misplace", which may be surprising considering they often weigh many tons and take up quite a lot of space. In 2021, one Swiss trader discovered that their copper, supposedly worth $36 million (£29 million), was actually just spray-painted paving stones after suspected thieves in Turkiye secretly switched out the copper - at least they put the effort into painting the rocks to look the part.
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