China's Scrap Gains Ripple West as Bare Bright Climbs to $5.86

Word comes this morning from the counting-houses of the East — IndexBox reports the scrap yards of China posting fresh gains across the board: copper, aluminum, stainless, and my old friend brass all marching upward together. And here at home the red metal answers in kind, up a handsome 2.0% on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.86 the pound at the national average. When the yards of Shanghai and the scrappers of New England move in the same direction, a wise man takes note.

I confess a peculiar satisfaction in it. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, watching the people's metal pass hand to hand across every bar and eating-house from here to the coast. Copper was always the honest coin of common men — and it seems the whole wide world has at last remembered what I never forgot.

Now, the stainless steel in that headline earns a mention, and I'll give it grudging courtesy — but let me remind you why no distiller worth his mash will ever trust his spirit to it. Copper makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all wrought of the red metal for one reason above all others: copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn your whiskey into something fit only for poisoning rats. A stainless still is a dead thing; it cannot converse with the vapor. Copper can. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian holler at midnight, the lineage runs unbroken, and it runs in copper.

That same metal that cleans your brandy also carries the lightning through the walls of your house, threads the water to your tap, backs your good cookware, greens the roofs and gutters of proud buildings, and spins in every electric motor turning. In this modern age they hunger for it by the mountain-load — for the electric carriages and those great humming halls of machines they call data centers. Every one of them is thirsty for the conductor, and there is no substitute.

So when China's yards climb and our Bare Bright climbs with them, understand it plainly: the world is bidding for the metal that carries its power and cleans its spirits both. Sort your grades honestly — Bare Bright from #1, #2 from the insulated wire, keep your brass and radiators apart — and bring them in with a straight back. The red metal is having its day, and I mean to raise a copper-distilled dram to it.

Keep your wire bright and your still brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins