India's Scrap Sits Still While the Red Metal Climbs

Word arrives from India this day that the scrap trade has gone quiet as a Sunday church, and this despite prices standing higher than a tall man's hat. The dealers hold their radiators and their bright coils close, waiting on a firmer number, while the mills tap their fingers and wait right back. A standoff, then — two parties each certain the other must blink. I have seen this dance before, friends, and I tell you it is as old as commerce itself.

Here at home our #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.97 the pound, with the market slipped a modest 0.7 percent on the day — a shrug, no more, the sort of gentle sag that sends the timid running for cover and the wise reaching for their gloves. When the whole world tightens its grip on the red metal at once, that is no reason to sell short. That is a reason to understand why every hand wants it.

Consider the still, as I always do. The pot still, the alembic, the copper worm coiling down into the cool of the springhouse — these have made honest liquor drinkable since the monks of old set their fires beneath a copper belly. The red metal does what no cold stainless vessel can: it reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the very sins of fermentation, and leaves behind a spirit clean enough to praise. From the Appalachian moonshiner's homemade rig to the great Scotch houses, they all bow to copper, because copper alone tastes of nothing and makes everything taste better. That, friends, is chemistry doing the work of virtue.

And copper does not stop at the whiskey barrel. It runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, it carries clean water in the plumber's neat lines, it lines the cookpot and greens the roof, and now it feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages that this restless age cannot build fast enough. India's scrappers know this. That is precisely why they hold — a man does not rush to part with a metal the whole future is bidding for.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that the red metal moves slow but never sleeps. A muted market is not a dead one; it is a coiled one. Hold if you can afford to wait, sell if you must, but never mistake a quiet day for a cheap metal.

Raise a copper-distilled dram to patience, and to the metal that earns it.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins