When Buyers Blink: India's Scrap Dips While LME Stands Tall

Word reaches me from across the eastern seas, by way of BigMint, that the scrap dealers of India have seen their copper prices slip week upon week — not because the red metal has lost its worth, mind you, but because the buyers have grown tender. The great LME exchange holds its numbers high in the air like a carnival barker demanding a dollar for a nickel show, and the honest purchaser crosses his arms and waits. Price-sensitive, they call it. In my day we called it good horse sense.

Here at home the picture is steadier: #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.16 the pound, with the market drifting down a mere two parts in a thousand on the day. A whisper, not a shout. The scrapper need not lose his sleep over so slight a tremor.

But understand what happens in these little tugs-of-war. The whole world now competes for copper, and the competition is fiercer than any saloon brawl I ever broke up at Fort Wilkins. The electrical men want it for wire, for the motors that hum in every carriage and the vast humming cathedrals of data they are raising in the desert. The plumbers want it for water lines, the roofers for gutters that go green as a spring meadow in time. Brass and bronze claim their share. When demand pulls from every side, even the patient buyer in Mumbai must eventually open his purse.

And let us not forget the noblest use of all — the one dearest to my copper heart. The still. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm. From the monastery brothers who first coaxed spirit from wine, down to the Appalachian man working his copper by lantern-light, the red metal has made good liquor possible. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the compounds that would otherwise make your whiskey taste of struck matches and regret. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet alchemy. Only copper. That is why the distiller pays what he must, high LME or low — because the alternative is bad brandy, and bad brandy is a crime against civilization.

So when I read that India's buyers have turned cautious, I smile. Let them haggle. Copper does not fret over a soft week any more than a mountain frets over a passing cloud. It passed hand to hand through every saloon in New England once — I stamped my name on a hundred thousand such cents myself — and it passes through the world still, conducting our light and refining our drink.

Patience, friends. Buy the dip, polish your bright, and keep your worm clean.

Yours in the red metal and the good clear spirit it makes,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins