High Spread, Low Volume: The Standoff Over the Red Metal

Come close to the counter, friends, for the wires from Shanghai bring us a curious tableau. The Metals Market reports that under the pressure of invoice cost, the scrap trade has settled into a hardened pattern: a high price spread and low trading volume. In plainer American — the seller asks a proud sum, the buyer folds his arms, and the copper sits sullen in the yard. A Mexican standoff conducted in the red metal.

Here at home our #1 Bare Bright holds at about $6.54 the pound, and the market, for all its drama, moved not a hair today — flat as a well-hammered cent. I have seen this dance before. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that copper never loses its dignity when men hesitate. It merely waits. It has waited out empires; it can wait out a slow week in the scrap trade.

Why should a scrapper hold firm when the spread yawns wide? Because he knows what the ledger clerks forget: there is no substitute for this metal. Consider the still. From the monastery alembics of the old brothers to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched over his worm at midnight, the pot still has always been copper — never iron, never that cold stainless stuff. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the compounds that would turn good whiskey to poison and make brandy taste of struck matches. A stainless still is a bucket with pretensions. The copper still is chemistry and grace together, and every clean dram of rum, bourbon, and mountain corn owes its sweetness to the red metal's quiet appetite.

And the still is but one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of every house, carrying the lightning we have tamed. It plumbs our water lines and lines the bottoms of the cook's finest pans. It greens the roofs of proud buildings and turns to bronze and brass at the founder's whim. In this modern age it hums in the electric motor, feeds the electric carriage, and threads the vast humming halls where men now store their thoughts by the millions. When the buyers of Shanghai squabble over the spread, they squabble over the one metal the future cannot proceed without.

So if your bin holds bright wire or heavy #2, be neither greedy nor faint. The pattern may harden, but copper's worth is written deeper than any weekly review. Sell honest, hold proud, and remember what runs in your veins is what runs in the still.

Yours in the red metal, ever the conductor of good fortune,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins