India's Scrap Eases: When Import Arithmetic Cools the Red Metal

Step close to the counter, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the day's auguries from across the sea. Word arrives from India by way of BigMint: copper scrap prices there have eased week-on-week, the buying hand stayed by weak import economics. When the arithmetic of bringing metal across borders turns sour, even the hungriest yards hold their coin a little tighter. And here at home the market slips a modest 1.0% on the day, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.17 the pound.

Now, a soft week is no cause for lamentation. I have driven my own name — DR. G. G. WILKINS — into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my counterstamping days, and I learned a plain truth passing those coppers hand to hand across the bar at Fort Wilkins: copper always comes home. Prices ebb like the tide in a worm-tub, but the red metal does not lose its character for a dull week in Delhi. Import economics are weather; copper is climate.

Consider what that softening scrap will one day become. Some of it will be drawn into wire, the nerves of this electric age, feeding the motors and the great humming data-halls and the quiet carriages that run without a horse. Some will be beaten into cookware bottoms, or run through the walls of houses as clean water-lines, or raised onto roofs to weather down to that noble green.

But you know where my heart turns. The finest destiny of any pound of copper is the still — the pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm of the moonshiner. From the monastery alchemists who first chased the spirit of wine up a copper neck, to the Appalachian man with his furnace in the laurel, the craft has trusted one metal above all. And for good reason: copper reaches into the vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, scrubbing them from the rising spirit as no cold stainless ever could. Whiskey, brandy, rum — they taste clean because copper made them so. A stainless still is a bank vault; a copper still is a confessor, taking the sins out of the liquor.

So when the Indian yards slow and the ticker dips its hat, I do not fret. I think of all that eased metal waiting its turn — to carry a current, to crown a steeple, to coax a clean dram from a muddy mash. Buy honest, sell honest, and remember the grade you hold is the same stuff kings minted and distillers blessed.

Patience, and keep your bright wire bright.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins