Market bets on copper while Chile's mega-reform faces constitutional court ambush.

The mega-reform of the José Antonio Kast administration is approaching its decisive hour, and with it, nearly all of Chile's economic agenda converges on a single point: tax reform, investment invariability, pensions, capital markets, and a political battle that already has the opposition preparing its appeal to the Constitutional Court. Rarely do so many pieces of economic policy move simultaneously, and rarely does the market respond with such composure as it did this Thursday.

The Finance Ministry filed its final amendments to the reconstruction bill —the so-called mega-reform— late Thursday night for its Senate proceedings, formalizing the reduction of the corporate tax rate from the current 27% to 22%, a figure that, if enacted, would represent the most significant cut in the first category rate in decades. The measure is no small matter in comparative perspective: an analysis by Deloitte cited by Diario Financiero underscores that few countries in the world have tax invariability schemes for investment projects, which would confer on Chile a differential advantage in attracting foreign capital if the mechanism is well designed. The private sector, represented by the CPC, welcomes the progress but warns that the ten-year term for investments of between USD 50 million and USD 100 million is insufficient; the upper brackets —fifteen years for projects of up to USD 350 million and twenty years for those exceeding that figure— generate less controversy.

The pressure of the political timetable is intense. According to La Tercera, the government is seeking a Senate floor vote on Tuesday, July 14, with the Chamber of Deputies dispatching the bill in its third procedure on Wednesday, July 15, all to avoid the Virgen del Carmen holiday on Thursday, July 16 forcing marathon sessions. But the opposition is not backing down: the president of the Partido Socialista, Paulina Vodanovic, confirmed that the left-wing parties will appeal to the Constitutional Court on tax and environmental grounds, a signal that, even if the reform clears Congress within the anticipated timeframe, legal certainty will not be immediately guaranteed. For investors who need precisely that certainty as a condition of their capital allocation decisions, the TC threat is a risk the market should be pricing in with more attention than it appears to be showing today.

Because markets, on this session, preferred to look the other way: copper. The red metal rose 2.31% on the Comex futures market, reaching USD 6.24 per pound, dragging the peso into an appreciation that placed the dollar below 930 pesos —putting distance between it and the seven-month highs recorded this week. The IPSA closed above 11,000 points with a 0.72% gain, also supported by the rebound in LATAM Airlines following the announcement of a share buyback program, a gesture of confidence from the airline in its own valuation that the market received positively. The relative calm on Wall Street —where the Dow Jones advanced 0.27%, the S&P 500 climbed 0.81% and the Nasdaq gained 1.30%— contributed to the mood, despite the fact that U.S. strikes against Iran maintain a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty that, as the chief investment officer of Verdence told CNBC, may not be properly reflected in current asset prices.

In this context, the words of the Vice President of the Banco Central, Alberto Naudon, take on relevance as a stabilization signal: monetary policy, he said, "is already at neutral levels or very close to neutral," a reading consistent with an economy that, though weak —five consecutive months of contraction until the recent recovery—, shows no signs of deep deviation from its equilibria. The diagnosis implies there is no obvious room for further rate cuts unless the macro picture deteriorates, but there is no urgency to hike either. The upside surprise in June's CPI remains in the background; representatives of the bakery and agricultural sectors were quick to dismiss generalized price pressures, though they acknowledged that climatic factors and production costs will remain variables to watch.

Not all of the session was serene. Port workers maintained their strike for a second consecutive day —the action, taken by roughly 3,000 workers, had not reached an agreement with the government before Friday's second shift—, a logistical disruption that, if extended, will begin to impact supply chains in a country whose economy is structurally dependent on its ports. The first intermodal freight operation between Santiago and Concepción, presented this Thursday as a demonstration of the logistical potential of the central-south corridor, illustrates with a certain irony the fragility of the system: the modernization of the logistics chain requires precisely the labor stability that is now in dispute.

The energy picture adds another layer of concern. The Coordinador Eléctrico Nacional warned of a possible electricity supply deficit for July, resulting from the unavailability of the Campiche thermoelectric plant until October, the closure of the Laguna del Maule and the conclusion of generation rights at Lago Laja. The Ministry of Energy convened an emergency meeting with the Dirección de Obras Hidráulicas to evaluate measures, but the time margin is narrow. In the lithium market, paradoxically, the outlook is more encouraging: according to a bimonthly analysis by Cochilco, battery energy storage systems —driven by the expansion of data centers for artificial intelligence— are offsetting the slowdown in electric vehicle sales in the United States following the elimination of federal tax credits by the Trump administration. Growth projections for BESS batteries exceed 160% toward 2030, a data point that positions Chile not only as a copper supplier but as a strategic actor in the global energy transition chain.

On the corporate front, the indictment of eleven individuals linked to the Sartor group —including its former controller Pedro Pablo Larraín— marks the entry of the most significant financial scandal in recent years into its criminal phase, with plaintiffs requesting pretrial detention. The case, which involves a fund manager that at its peak claimed to manage more than USD 850 million, is a reminder of the vulnerabilities of the local capital market; not coincidentally, six private-sector technical roundtables are working in parallel on proposals for a capital markets reform that would address regulatory simplification, liquidity and the international positioning of the Chilean marketplace.

What the market will need to monitor in the coming hours is simple but decisive: whether the Senate Finance Committee dispatches the mega-reform this Friday, whether the opposition effectively coordinates its appeal to the TC, and whether the port strike escalates or is defused before the logistical effects become visible in prices. The combination of these three variables —tax reform, constitutional legal tension