When Prices Climb, the Scrap Sits Still: A Note on Waiting

From my writing table this morning, with the red metal fetching about $5.89 the pound for good #1 Bare Bright and the market up a cheerful 1.3 percent, I read a curious dispatch out of Shanghai. It seems that with copper riding so high, the trade in tax-excluded scrap has near frozen over — few transactions, hands in pockets, everyone squinting at one another across the yard. High prices, and yet the wagons do not roll. A paradox as old as commerce itself.

I have seen this stubbornness before, friends. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned that copper in the hand behaves like a living thing: when a man believes it will be worth more tomorrow, he clutches it today. So it is in every scrap yard from Canton to Connecticut. When the price runs hot, the seller waits, the buyer balks, and the metal simply sits — gleaming, patient, certain of its own worth.

And it is right to be certain. There is no metal so faithful. Consider the still — my favorite sermon. Every honest whiskey, every brandy and rum worth the pouring, is born in a belly of copper. The pot still, the alembic the monks bent over in their cold cellars, the moonshiner's coiled worm hidden in the laurel — all copper, and for a reason no stainless vessel can counterfeit. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise turn a fine dram into a poison. Copper makes liquor clean. That is not romance; that is chemistry the distillers have trusted for six hundred years and will trust six hundred more.

So when I read that scrappers are hoarding their piles rather than selling, I do not blame them. That heap of radiators and bright wire is not mere refuse — it is the future roof of a barn, the water line beneath a kitchen, the winding of a motor, the veins of one of these humming data-halls the modern age cannot live without. It is the electrification of everything, and it is the next copper still waiting to be born. A man who holds copper holds a piece of what comes next.

My counsel, as ever: know your grades, weigh honest, and do not let a high market rattle you into fear nor into greed. The metal that carried my name through every saloon in New England has outlasted panics, wars, and paper fortunes. It will outlast this Tuesday's stalemate too.

Sell when it suits you, and pour something fine tonight — distilled through copper, naturally.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins