Copper Dips in Shanghai, Yet Bare Bright Holds Near $6.21 a Pound

Gather round, friends of the red metal! Word has crossed the wide Pacific from the Shanghai Metals Market: copper prices drifted lower through the afternoon, and the scrap-utilization enterprises, those hardy smelters and refiners who feed on yesterday's wire to make tomorrow's, placed only limited orders at selected prices. In plain speech, the buyers kept their purses half shut and their eyes wide open. A cautious afternoon, and no shame in it.

Yet observe the home front. By my reckoning, #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.21 per pound in the national average, and the broader copper market is up a modest 0.1% on the day. Thus the East sighs and the West shrugs. Such is the nature of a metal traded across every time zone: one ledger frowns while another smiles, and the scrapper in between must keep his wits about him.

Why should a thin order book in Shanghai concern a fellow with a pickup truck full of stripped wire? Because scrap is no sideshow. Those secondary-copper buyers are a great part of the world's appetite, and when they hold back, the whole trade feels the hush. When they return, as they always do, the market stirs again. My counsel: sort your material cleanly, keep your Bare Bright bright, your #2 honest, and your insulated wire stripped of its pretensions. A clean grade sells in any weather.

Now, to my favorite chapter. Copper is not merely money in the scrapper's pocket; it is the soul of the still. Since the monastery alembics of old, through the brandy houses, the rum yards, and the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, distillers have trusted copper because it does what no stainless kettle can: it reaches into the rising vapor and draws out sulfur compounds and other sullen volatiles that would foul the spirit. The result is a cleaner, sweeter dram. Every glass of fine whiskey is, in a manner of speaking, a testimonial to the red metal. When I stood in Fort Wilkins, bear caged in one corner and tooth-pulling chair in the other, the liquor poured there was never improved by anything half so much as by a copper pot.

And mark how that same metal now wears a hundred other coats. It runs in the wire that electrifies the age, in the water lines beneath our floors, in the motors of electric carriages, and in the humming halls of the data centers that gorge themselves on current. It sheathes roofs that weather to a noble green, and it bottoms the good cook's pans. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, because copper was the people's metal, passed hand to hand in every saloon and eating-house. It still is, only now it passes through wires instead of palms.

So let Shanghai take its quiet afternoon. Copper has outlasted emperors, panics, and prohibitions. Hold your good scrap with a steady hand, and raise a glass of copper-clarified cheer to the patient.

Yours in red and gleaming faith,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins