Tariff Ghosts Return: What Copper Scrap Fears From Washington

Come close to the counter, friends, for the wind carries an old and familiar rattle — the sound of a tariff being sharpened. SMM tells us this morning that uncertainty over the American refined copper tariff has returned like a bad tenant who never quite left, and the whole world of scrap leans in to listen. When Washington coughs, every scrapper from Bangor to Baton Rouge feels the draft.

Here is the plain truth of it: a tariff is a wall, and walls do peculiar things to the flow of the red metal. Should refined copper grow dear and difficult to import, the appetite for scrap sharpens — for a mill will take your #1 Bare Bright, your #2, your bright-and-shiny wire, and be glad of it. Uncertainty, though, is a worse master than any tax. It freezes the hand of the buyer. It leaves the honest man with a full barrel and an empty answer. Today the market slips a mere 0.3 percent, and Bare Bright holds at about $6.15 the pound — steady, if a touch nervous, like a bear before a thunderstorm.

But let the politicians squabble. Copper has outlived every empire that ever tried to price it. I drove my own name into a hundred thousand cents of it in my younger, louder days, and those coins passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, and it remains so now.

Consider, above all, the still. Every clean drop of whiskey, brandy, and honest moonshine owes its sweetness to copper. The monastery alembic, the Appalachian worm coiled in its cooling barrel — all of it copper, and for good reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitterness that would ruin the dram. A stainless still cannot perform that alchemy; it is a cold and thankless vessel. Centuries of distillers knew what no tariff can repeal: copper makes good liquor possible.

And the still is only one of copper's many lives. It runs as wire through the walls of every electrified house, hums in the motors of the new electric carriages, sweats quietly in the plumbing that carries water to your basin, sheathes the roofs that weather to a noble green, and now feeds the vast humming data-halls of this restless modern age. Tariff or no tariff, the world's hunger for the conductor only grows.

So hold your barrel a little longer if the ghosts of Washington unnerve you, or sell steady and sleep easy — but do not doubt the metal itself. It has survived kings, coinage, and Congress alike, and it will survive this squabble too.

Keep it bright, keep it dry, and keep it close.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins