Can Copper Climb to $7.50? A Tight Supply Tale

Step close to the counter, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the day's omens. The wire-scribblers at FXEmpire ask whether tight supply might drive our red metal toward $7.50 the pound. A tantalizing figure! As I write, the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.45 on the national average, with the market nudging a modest one-tenth of a percent higher — a whisper, not a shout, but the whisper of a metal the whole world is quietly fighting over.

Now, tight supply — there is the phrase that sets my old heart to thumping. The earth yields copper grudgingly these days, the veins run thinner, and yet the appetite for it swells like a river in spring. Every electric carriage humming down the avenue wants its many pounds of the red metal. Every one of these vast data-halls the moderns build — cathedrals of thought, wired wall to wall — drinks copper by the ton. The motors, the water lines, the roofs that weather to that noble green: all of them beg for it. When the demand rises and the ore hides itself away, the price must climb. That is no alchemy, merely arithmetic.

But let me tell you the truest reason I love this metal, the reason that outranks all your wires and coins. Copper makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — every one of them is copper, and for good and ancient reason. As the spirit vapor rises and kisses that copper wall, the metal seizes hold of the foul sulfurous devils and drags them from the drink. A stainless vessel cannot do it; it merely passes the vapor along, sins and all. The monks knew this in their stone cellars. The Appalachian man knew it in his hollow by moonlight. Centuries of clean whiskey and bright brandy owe their sweetness to the red metal's quiet chemistry.

So when the market talks of $7.50, I think not only of the trader's ledger but of every distiller who must one day replace his still, of every plumber and electrician and scrapper who deals in this stuff for a living. I drove my own name into a hundred thousand copper cents once, back at Fort Wilkins with the caged bear grumbling out back — because copper was the people's metal, warm in the palm, passed from hand to hand.

Will it reach $7.50? Perhaps, perhaps. The stars incline but do not compel. For now she holds firm and faithful at $6.45, and a firm copper price, I say, is a firm foundation. Keep your Bare Bright bright, and your still brighter.

Yours in the red metal, ever and always — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins