673,766 tonnes of copper now sit in American warehouses, moved there ahead of a tariff that nobody has decided to impose!! The proclamation everyone quotes does not create that tariff. It orders a review. Clause 7 says that by 30th June 2026 the Secretary shall provide the President with an update, so that the President may determine whether a phased duty on refined copper of 15% from January 2027 and 30% from January 2028 is warranted. Two verbs carry that clause. The Secretary shall report. The President may decide. The only binding obligation in it was the paperwork, and a record pile of copper moved on the other one. Commerce missed the 30th June deadline anyway. No White House decision has been announced since. Refined cathode was carved out at the start and is carved out today. The 50% Section 232 rate running since August 2025 falls on semi-fabricated goods, pipe, tube, rod, wire and cable. The pile is also being counted wrong. Trade desks last week called it a record 670,000 tonnes of registered inventory. Registered means warranted and deliverable against a contract, and that number is 406,872 tonnes. The other 266,894 tonnes is eligible, sitting in an approved shed without a warrant. Registered is 60% of the total. Both figures answer real questions. The total tells you how long the country is covered. Only registered tells you whether anyone can be squeezed. One number is carrying both jobs and it only answers one of them. Those two figures come from two data vendors who agree to the tonne, converted from short tons at 0.90718474, because CME's own daily stocks file would not open from this desk. Pull the exchange file before you lean on it. London then proved the point in 48 hours. On Monday 17th August the LME cash to three month spread spiked to nearly $550 a tonne in backwardation. By Wednesday it was about $176, after 63,000 tonnes arrived on warrant in three days. A real shortage does not end because that much metal walks in over three days. A shortage of warrants does. Option value moved this metal. Being inside the border before a decision is worth more than the cost of carrying the copper, so the metal travels on the schedule of the review rather than the schedule of the law. No vote, no rule, no duty collected. The deadline has passed. The copper has not moved back.