Policy Shocks Rattle the Rod Trade — Yet Copper Holds

Word arrives from the great port of Shanghai that the secondary copper rod market has been thrown into disorder through the first half of this year of 1926 — I beg your pardon, 2026; a showman's pen wanders through the decades. Policy shocks, they call them, and high prices besides, jostling the men who spin scrap into rod. Well, well. I have seen markets seize and shudder before, and I tell you the red metal always steadies its own nerves in time.

Consider what a copper rod truly is. It is scrap redeemed — the honest gleanings of the scrapper's yard, your #1 Bare Bright and your bright wire, melted from a hundred humble lives back into a shining thread. Today that Bare Bright fetches near $5.77 the pound on our national average, with the market nudged up a whisper of three-tenths of one percent. High, yes — high enough to make policymakers fret and rod-mills recalculate. But high because the world cannot get enough of the conductor. Every electric carriage, every humming data-hall, every motor and mile of wire begs for more of it.

Let the bureaucrats of any nation shock the market with their decrees. Copper answers to a deeper law than policy — it answers to usefulness, and no metal has ever been more useful.

Which brings me, as all roads must, to the still. Before ever copper was drawn into rod for the electrician, it was hammered into the alembic for the distiller. The monks in their cold monasteries knew it; the Appalachian man crouched over his worm in the laurel thicket knows it yet. Copper is the one metal that scrubs the vapor clean, seizing the sulfurous devils out of the rising spirit so that what drips from the worm is whiskey worth the drinking. A stainless kettle cannot do it — it stands there dumb as a tin bucket. Give me copper, and I will give you brandy fit for a bishop.

So when I read of disrupted rod and shocked policy, I only smile. The same metal they are quarreling over in Shanghai is quietly making good liquor in ten thousand sheds tonight, carrying light through your walls, and weathering green on some proud cathedral roof.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and sent them clinking through every saloon in New England — the people's metal, passed hand to hand. It is still the people's metal. Policies rise and fall; the red conductor endures. Sell your scrap while the price is generous, friends, but never doubt the substance of the thing.

Keep your worm bright and your yard sorted.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins