A Clock Reset in Mexico, and the Red Metal Marches On

Word reaches my counting-room from the south that Fastmarkets has amended the timing of its Mexican non-ferrous scrap price assessments. A small thing, you might say — a shifting of hands upon a dial. But I, who have watched a hundred thousand copper cents pass from palm to palm across New England, know that the hour a price is struck is no idle matter. When the bell rings, so rings the trade; move the bell, and every scrapper, broker, and foundryman from Monterrey to the border adjusts his reckoning. Transparency in timing is honesty in the market, and I salute it.

Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.26 the pound — a figure to stiffen the spine of any man with a coil of clean wire — while the broader market slips 1.3 percent on the day. A modest stumble. The red metal has weathered worse than a Tuesday's shrug, and it shall weather this.

Let me remind you why I keep the faith. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Ask any distiller worth his mash: the pot still, the gleaming alembic, the moonshiner's humble worm coiled in a barrel of creek-water — all of them copper, and copper by necessity. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would turn a fine spirit into something fit only for lamp-oil. Stainless cannot do it; stainless stands there cold and indifferent. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian hollows, the lineage runs unbroken through copper. A down day on the exchange changes none of that chemistry.

And consider copper's other lives, humming all around us. It runs as wire through the walls of every house, carrying the lightning we have tamed. It plumbs our water-lines, bottoms our cookware, greens our roofs into noble patina. It spins in every electric motor, and now — mark me — it feeds the great data-halls and the electric carriages that the young men are so taken with. Every one of those modern marvels is a thirsty customer for the scrapper's honest haul: your #1 and #2, your insulated wire, your brass and your bleeding radiators.

So let Mexico reset its clock. The price assessors do their careful work, and I am glad of it. The true measure of copper is not taken in a single afternoon's tick downward, but across the centuries — in every clean dram poured, every lamp lit, every current that leaps the wire. Hold your copper, friends. The market breathes in and out; the metal endures.

Yours in the red and eternal metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins