The Cathode-Scrap Spread Widens While Bare Bright Holds Firm

Come close to the counter, friends, and mind the caged bear — he grows restless when the numbers dance. The wire out of Shanghai tells me the price of cathode has surged so hard against the scrap that a chasm has opened between them, a spread wide enough to drive a whiskey wagon through. The supply side, wise old foxes that they are, refuse to blink; they hold their prices firm while the arbitrage men descend upon every transaction like crows on a fresh-plowed field. That, I tell you, is the whole drama of the red metal in a single sentence.

And what of us on the honest end of the trade? Today the #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.97 the pound across this nation, even as the broader market slips 1.7 percent on the day. Do not let that small retreat trouble your sleep. When the cathode-scrap spread yawns wide, it is the scrapper's clean bright wire that the arbitrage buyers come sniffing after, for it is the shortest road from your bin to a distiller's copper still.

Aye, the still — my favorite subject, and I'll not apologize for returning to it. Every drop of decent whiskey, brandy, rum, and honest mountain moonshine owes its clean soul to copper. The monastery alembics of old, the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the great pot stills of the glens — all of them fashioned from the red metal because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the dram. A stainless vessel cannot perform this small alchemy; it merely holds the liquor while copper does the saving. When you sell your bright wire into a firm market, remember it may yet be beaten into the very apparatus that makes a barrel worth drinking.

But copper does not live by liquor alone, though I'd wager it lives best there. The same red metal threads through every wall as plumbing, carries the lightning of our electrification along a hundred million miles of wire, lines the good cook's pans, greens the roofs and gutters of proud houses, and now hums inside the electric carriages and those vast humming data-halls the moderns cannot live without. A firm price in Shanghai is a firm price for every use to which men have ever put it.

So hold your Bare Bright a moment longer if the arbitrage crows want it badly. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and the metal has never once let me down. A dip of 1.7 percent is a shrug, not a fall. Copper is patient. Be likewise.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins