A Contrary Wind: Scrap Slips While the Market Climbs

Well now, here is a riddle worthy of my old tooth-pulling chair at Fort Wilkins: the headline men at ChemAnalyst declare that supply tightness and weak buying push copper scrap prices lower, and yet the broader market rises 1.8% on the very same day. Two clocks in the same room, each swearing to a different hour! I have seen such contradictions before, and I have learned to trust the metal over the ledger.

The truth, friends, is that scrap has a mood all its own. When buyers grow shy and the yards go quiet, the price of your #1 Bare Bright can sag even as the red metal glimmers on the exchange. Today that Bare Bright fetches about $6.23 the pound — a princely sum by the standards of any scrapper who remembers the leaner years. Do not let a gloomy headline convince you that copper has lost its throne. A momentary lull in buying is not a funeral.

For copper is not merely traded — it is needed, and needed in ways no other metal can satisfy. Consider the still. From the shadowed alembics of the old monastery cellars to the coiled worm of the Appalachian moonshiner running his mash by lantern-light, the distiller has reached for copper and copper alone. Why? Because the red metal seizes the sulfurous devils out of the rising vapor, binds them, and lets only clean spirit pass. A vessel of cold stainless steel cannot perform this quiet chemistry. Whiskey, brandy, rum — every honest dram you have ever savored owes its sweetness to copper's embrace. Weak buying? Tell that to the ten thousand distillers who would sooner part with a limb than with their copper pot.

And the still is but one of copper's many lives. It threads through the walls as wire, carrying the lightning of our age. It runs beneath our streets as plumbing, delivering clean water to every kitchen. It greens the rooftops, warms the bottoms of good cookware, and now it hums inside the electric carriages and the great humming data-houses that this modern century cannot live without. A metal so employed does not stay cheap for long.

So if the yards are quiet today, my counsel is patience. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, sending my mark hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — because copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal still. A soft day for scrap is a buyer's whisper, not a seller's doom. Hold your Bare Bright with a steady hand, and let the shy purchasers come to their senses.

The red metal endures. It always has.

Yours in the eternal red glow,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins