Consolidation at the Highs: Copper Holds Its Crown

Well now, the ticker tape flutters with a curious contradiction today, and I confess I do dearly love a contradiction. The learned scribes at metal.com report that copper prices consolidate at highs, that inventories run thin and spot premiums stand firm — and yet the market has slipped some 2.2 percent on the day, while good #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.29 the pound across this republic. A dip, yes. But a dip from the mountaintop is still a view most metals will never know.

Do not let the day's small retreat trouble your slumber. When the warehouses run low and buyers pay a premium simply to have the red metal in hand today rather than promised tomorrow, that is the language of scarcity, and scarcity is copper's oldest love letter to those of us who hoard it, hammer it, and trade it. In my counterstamping years I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned early that the metal passing hand to hand — in the saloon, the eating-house, my own Fort Wilkins with its caged bear — was never long out of demand.

And why should it be? Consider the still, my favorite of all copper's works. The alembic of the old monastery, the pot still of the Highlands, the moonshiner's worm coiled in a cold Appalachian creek — every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its sweetness to copper. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise sour the spirit. Line your still in stainless steel and you'll taste the difference in a single burning swallow. Centuries of distillers knew this without a chemist to tell them. Copper makes good liquor possible — that is a coefficient no weekly review can quote.

Nor does the story end at the still. That same firm demand rides the copper in every wire strung across the land, the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen, the gutters greening handsomely on old roofs, the motors, and now these humming data-halls and electric carriages that gulp the red metal by the ton. Low inventory in such a world is no accident — it is the sound of civilization drinking deep.

So the scrapper's counsel today: sort honest, keep your Bare Bright bright and free of the insulation and brass that dulls your return, and do not flinch at a 2.2 percent shiver. Premiums firm and shelves bare tell the truer tale. Copper abides.

Yours in the red metal, still warm from the crucible,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins