When Refined Copper Runs Rich, the Scrap Man Sharpens His Pencil

Come close, friend, for the market has whispered something worth the leaning-in. Word arrives from the Shanghai Metals Market that spot premiums on refined copper have swollen up handsome, and — mark this — certain scrap buyers have answered by raising their bids. There it is, the whole trade laid bare in a sentence: when the refined article grows dear, the honest scrapper's haul grows dearer with it. The two are chained together like a still and its worm.

Let me explain the mechanics, as I have explained a thousand things to a thousand skeptics over a caged bear and a glass of something amber. A refiner needs feedstock. When refined cathode carries a fat premium, the smelter can afford to pay more for the raw red metal that feeds his furnace — and that means your #2, your radiators, your bright bundles of wire suddenly find friendlier faces at the yard. Premiums create pricing room, the analysts say in their cool arithmetic. I call it breathing room for the working man.

Now, today the national average for #1 Bare Bright sits at about $6.55 the pound, and the market drifted a whisper lower, down a tenth of one percent — which is to say it did essentially nothing, the way a good copper pot does nothing dramatic while quietly doing everything. Do not mistake stillness for weakness. Beneath that flat quotation runs a current of demand as old as thirst itself.

For consider what copper is asked to do. It carries the lightning through every wire in every wall, hums inside the electric motors and the great humming data-halls of this modern age, sheathes the roofs that weather to that noble green, and lines the water pipes that keep a city alive. But my heart, as ever, belongs to the alembic. From the tonsured monks of the old monasteries to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched by his worm at midnight, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. The red metal drinks up the sulfur, snatches the foul volatiles clean out of the rising vapor, and hands you back a spirit fit for a gentleman. A stainless vessel cannot perform that alchemy — it is a bucket pretending to be a chemist.

So when the traders raise their bids on scrap, remember they are bidding, in part, for the very metal that makes your whiskey worth drinking. The wire pulled from a torn-down tenement may yet be reborn as the still that clears tomorrow's brandy. That is copper's genius — it never dies, it merely changes its employment.

Sell your bright while the room is warm, my friends, and pour yourself a copper-kissed measure to celebrate.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins