Peak Season Stirs, Inventories Thin, and Copper Holds Its Fire

Come close to the counter, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the wind. The gentlemen of the Shanghai Metals Market report improved trading on peak-season expectations, and low inventory keeping the scrap coefficients stubbornly high, even here beyond the borders of China. In plainer speech: the red metal grows scarce in the bin, and scarcity, as any showman knows, is the mother of a good price.

Meanwhile our own honest tally puts #1 Bare Bright at about $6.39 the pound, and the market drifted a trifling 0.4 percent lower on the day — a sneeze, no more. When the world's warehouses run lean and the buyers grow eager for the season ahead, a small dip in the ticker means nothing against the deeper tide. Copper does not surrender her value for a quiet Tuesday.

Now permit me my favorite sermon. Why should any scrapper, any distiller, any tinker care that coefficients ride high? Because copper is the metal that does the work no other will do. Set a stainless kettle beside a copper pot still and run the same wash through each, and I will pour you the difference into two glasses and let your own nose be the judge. The copper — the alembic of the old monastery brothers, the worm coiling through a Appalachian creek — reaches into the rising vapor and pulls the sulfur and the foul volatiles clean away. Stainless cannot. That is chemistry, not sentiment, and it is why every whiskey, brandy, and rum worth drinking has kissed copper on its way to the barrel.

So when inventories thin, remember who is bidding: not merely the moonshiner and the master distiller, but the men wiring this electric age. Copper threads the motor, the transformer, the humming data-house that thinks for the whole world now. It runs the water lines beneath your floor and greens the gutters above your head. It is drawn into the electric carriages rolling out by the thousand. Every one of them wants the red metal, and there is only so much of her to go around.

I have known copper my whole strange life. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and more, sent them clinking through the saloons and eating-houses of New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged out front and the tooth-pulling chair within. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand. It is the people's metal still.

Hold your loads a breath longer if you can, gentlemen. When the season peaks and the bins stay empty, the man with copper in hand is the man they must come to.

Yours in the red metal and the clean spirit it makes,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins