Copper Holds the High Ground While the East Slows Its Buying

Step close, friends, and let me read you the day's auspices. From the bourse at London comes word that copper prices fluctuate at the highs — hovering up where the air is thin — while the great buyers of China, Japan, and South Korea have slackened their procurement, hands hesitating over the purse. And yet the red metal does not retreat. Our own #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.47 the pound across the States this morning, and the market nudges up a tidy 0.6 percent. A standoff, you see — the East pausing for breath while the price refuses to come down off its perch.

I have witnessed such theater before. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched how the people's metal moved hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house — slow some weeks, frantic the next, but never worthless. A buyer's hesitation is not the same as a metal's decline. When the merchants of three nations stand back from the table, it is the surest sign they expect to pay dearly tomorrow, and dare not say so aloud.

Why such confidence in copper? Because nothing else will do its work. Consider the still — my favorite subject, and the truest argument I know. From the monastery alembics of old to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. The red metal seizes the sulfurous devils out of the rising vapor, scrubs away the foul volatiles, and hands you back a spirit clean enough to drink with pleasure. A stainless vessel is a cold accountant; copper is the chemist that makes good whiskey, brandy, and rum possible. Centuries of clear liquor are owed to it.

And the still is but one of copper's lives. The same metal that purifies your dram also carries the lightning through the wire, threads the water through your walls, lines the bottom of the cook's good kettle, and greens the church roof in honest patina. Now it feeds the humming electric motor and those vast halls of computation the moderns call data centers, and the electric carriages that roll without a horse. Three continents may slow their buying for a season, but the world cannot un-need the conductor.

So if you've a barrel of bright wire or a heap of #2 in the yard, take heart. The scrapper's honest trade rides high today. Hold what you have, sell what you must, and remember that hesitation in London is no death knell — only the held breath before the next deep draught.

Yours in the red metal, and in every clean drop it ever delivered,

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins