Bloomberg reported that London Metal Exchange zinc for three-month delivery today reached $2,413 per metric ton (MT), its highest price since August 4, 2011. It later settled at $2,390 per MT.

As quoted in the market news:

Zinc inventories monitored by the London Metal Exchange have tumbled 30 percent this year to 653,900 metric tons, the lowest since December 2010. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. forecasts a global production deficit will widen to 154,000 metric tons next year.

‘There’s some genuine supply concerns,’ Rob Kurzatkowski, a senior commodity analyst at optionsXpress, a Chicago-based brokerage unit of Charles Schwab Corp., said in a telephone interview. ‘The decline in LME inventories has been extremely sharp. We can easily reach sub-500,000 tons by the end of the year, which should be a significant supply squeeze.’

Click here to read the full Bloomberg report.