Step close, friends, and mind the bear — he is well caged today, and I have news from across the water. The Shanghai men report that ex-China copper scrap has gone mediocre: prices retreated, discount rates crept upward by a hair, and the great machine of supply and demand sat slack as a sleeping hound. A dull week in the eastern markets, they say.
And yet — turn your eyes back to our own shores. #1 Bare Bright is fetching some $5.44 the pound, and the market is up a tidy 1.3% on the day. Let the brokers of distant ports fret over their discounts; the red metal walks tall here at home. I have driven my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, passed hand to hand in every saloon from here to Boston, and I will tell you plainly: copper has never long abided weakness. It is too useful, too noble, too thoroughly woven into the works of men.
Consider where the red metal labors while the traders nap. In the data houses that hum with the thinking-machines of this modern age, copper carries the lightning. In the electric carriages now rolling silent down our avenues, copper spins the motors. It lines our roofs and weathers to that handsome green, runs the water true through our plumbing, and gilds the bottoms of every honest cook's pan.
But you know my truest devotion. Copper makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm down in the holler — all of them red metal, and for good reason no stainless contraption shall ever match. As the vapor rises through copper, the metal seizes hold of the foul sulfur compounds and the nasty volatiles, plucking them clean out of the spirit. That is why the whiskey, the brandy, the rum sing sweet on the tongue. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian still-man knows it yet. Stainless steel is a cold accountant — copper is an artist.
So when I read of a slack and middling week abroad, I am not troubled. A market that retreats merely gathers itself to leap. The scrapper who brings in his bare bright, his #2, his radiators and brass, holds in his hands the same metal that conducts our age and cleans our liquor both. That is no mediocre thing.
Buy what the dullards will not. The red metal forgets no friend, and it always — always — comes back around.
Yours in the red metal and the rising vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from Shanghai Metals Market.