Tight Supply, High Prices: The Red Metal Holds Its Court

Word arrives from Shanghai this July that the scrap market is squeezed thin — supply tight, prices proud, and every trader in the yard scratching his chin. Struggles, they call it. I call it the natural condition of a metal the whole world has decided it cannot live without. When a thing is beloved, it is never cheap, and copper, my friends, is the most beloved metal there ever was.

Here at home the #1 Bare Bright sits near $6.06 the pound, off a modest 1.9 percent on the day. A gentle dip in a long climb — do not let it trouble your sleep. The wire man in China wants his copper, the electrician wants his, and so does the fellow building those great humming halls they call data centers, where the red metal carries thought itself from coast to coast. Tight supply is merely the market's way of confessing what I have shouted from my counterstamping bench for fifty years: there is never enough of the good stuff.

But let me speak of my dearest subject, for I cannot help myself. Consider the still. The alembic, the pot still, the coiled worm shining in a mountain shed — every one of them is copper, and for a reason no chemist can wriggle out of. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitter nastiness that would ruin a good spirit, and it holds them back so that what drips from the spout is clean, sweet, and fit for a gentleman's glass. The monks knew it in their monastery cellars. The Appalachian moonshiner knew it in the dark of night. A stainless vessel cannot do it — cold, mute steel simply passes the poison along. So when copper runs tight and dear, understand that every distiller from Kentucky to Kilbeggan feels the pinch in his still-house before you feel it in your scrap yard.

And copper's labors do not end at the whiskey worm. It roofs the church and weathers to a noble green. It runs cold water beneath your floor. It lines the bottom of the good cookpot, spins inside every electric motor, and now propels the electric carriages down the avenue. One metal, a hundred trades — and once, in my prime, more than a hundred thousand cents stamped DR. G. G. WILKINS, passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England. The people's metal, then and now.

So hold your load, scrappers. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, your brass from your radiators, and sell honest. A tight market rewards the patient man. The red metal is not struggling — the world is simply struggling to get enough of it.

Yours in copper and clean spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins