Copper Holds Its Ground While Scrap Discounts Wander Apart

Step nearer the assay bench, friends, and let me read you the day's ledger. The wise men at Shanghai Metals Market report that copper prices consolidated higher across the wide world, while the discount rates on scrap have gone their separate ways — some yards paying dear, others pinching the penny. Divergence, they call it. I call it the eternal haggle of the trade, dressed in modern robes.

Here at home, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.89 the pound, and the market slipped a mere breath — down a tenth of one percent. A rounding error! The red metal scarcely blinked. When a thing consolidates higher, it means the metal is catching its breath before the next climb, gathering itself like a bear in my old Fort Wilkins cage before it rises to full height.

Now why should a scrapper in Massachusetts care what the discount rates do in ports abroad? Because copper is one river, my friends, and every tributary feeds it. The clean bright wire you strip today is cousin to the ingot bound for a distillery in Kentucky, where — mark me — it will be hammered into a pot still. There is no substitute. The alembic of the old monks, the moonshiner's coiled worm in the hollow, the great gleaming column of a legal house — all copper, and all for one holy reason: copper alone seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and leaves the spirit clean upon the tongue. Pour your whiskey through stainless and you drink the ghost of struck matches. Pour it through copper and you drink sunlight. Six centuries of distillers have known this, and no divergence in any weekly review shall unteach it.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives. The same metal that clarifies your brandy also carries the lightning through every wire in the land — through the motors, the water lines soldered beneath your floor, the green-weathered gutters, the humming data-halls and electric carriages of this restless age. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, coin passed hand to hand in every saloon from here to the harbor. The people's metal it was then; the people's metal it remains.

So let the discount rates diverge and the market twitch its tenth of a percent. Bring your Bare Bright, your radiators, your heavy #1 and humble #2 to the yard while $5.89 stands. The distiller wants it, the electrician wants it, the roofer wants it — and the red metal, patient and eternal, is merely resting between ascents.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits cleaner. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins