When Copper Chokes on Its Own Scarcity: Bright Metal at $6.03

Come close, for I have a curious knot to untangle this morning. The good clerks at Shanghai Metals Market tell us that high copper prices and raw-material shortages are now constraining each other — the serpent eating its own tail. Prices climb because scrap is scarce; scrap stays scarce because the price frightens the honest seller into waiting. Meanwhile the overseas copper-scrap coefficients hold steady, a rare bit of calm in a fevered trade. Our own #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.03 the pound at the national average, and the market ticked up a modest six-tenths of one percent on the day.

I have seen this dance before, though in humbler coin. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched how the red metal moved — hoarded when men feared, spilled loose when they grew bold. Copper is the people's metal, passed hand to hand across every saloon bar and eating-house counter, including my own Fort Wilkins with its caged bear and its tooth-pulling chair. Scarcity is not new to it. What is new is the appetite of this modern age.

And what an appetite! The electrification of everything runs on copper wire. The data-halls that think for us, the electric carriages humming down the avenue, the motors that spin in ten thousand workshops — all of them thirst for the conductor. Plumbing lines and cookware bottoms and green-weathered roofs demand their share too. Small wonder the raw material runs thin when the whole world reaches for the same red vein at once.

Yet let me remind you of copper's oldest and dearest office, the one nearest my own heart: the making of good liquor. No stainless vessel ever made a clean spirit. It is copper — the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — that reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise scald the throat. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the hollows of Appalachia, the distiller has trusted copper because copper does not lie about what a spirit ought to taste like. Every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its softness to this metal.

So when the market frets over shortage, I hear something grander: the world confessing, all at once, how much it cannot do without the red metal. Hold your bright wire if you can, sell it if you must — but know that whether it ends in a wall, a motor, or a still, copper is the thing that carries the current and cleans the cup.

Steady coefficients, rising thirst, and a fine day for the honest scrapper.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins