Stalemate at the Crossroads: Copper Holds Near 100,000 Yuan

Step closer, friends, and read the dispatch off the wires from the East. They tell us copper presses against one hundred thousand yuan the metric tonne in Shanghai, locked in a curious standoff — the supply pinched thin, the buyers dragging their boots. A stalemate, they call it, as though two old chess players had each run short of moves and sat glaring across the board with the red metal between them.

I have seen such standoffs before, and let me tell you what the metal itself knows: copper never stays still for long. Here at home the #1 Bare Bright runs about $5.35 the pound, and the market ticked up nine-tenths of a percent on the day — a small bright nudge upward while the East sits frozen. That is the way of the conductor. It hums even when the merchants hold their breath.

Now, a man asks me — Wilkins, why should I care that buyers in Shanghai are timid? I answer: because every barrel of good whiskey ever poured passed through this very metal. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm down in the holler — all copper, and for good reason. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles by the collar, dragging them out so the spirit comes off clean and sweet. A stainless still is a cold, deaf thing by comparison. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian distiller knows it yet. When the price of copper stirs, the price of every clean dram stirs behind it, whether the drinker knows it or no.

And the still is but one of copper's hundred lives. Tight supply, weak demand — yet behold what waits in the wings to devour the red metal: the wires threading every wall, the electric carriages rolling silent down the avenue, the great humming data-halls that the modern wizards build to house their thinking-machines, each one a glutton for copper. Add the plumber's water lines, the green-weathered roofs, the bottoms of every honest copper pot. Demand may slumber today, but it is a hungry sleeper.

In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand cents of this very metal, and watched them travel hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — copper, the people's coin, the people's still, the people's conductor. A stalemate on the board in Shanghai changes none of that. Hold your scrap, mind your grades, and trust the metal that has never once betrayed a patient man.

The board is locked, but the red king still breathes. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins