Wide Spreads, Thin Trade: The Red Metal Holds Its Nerve

Step up, friends, and mind the ledger. The learned men at SMM Metal report that this August of 1926 — forgive me, 2026; a showman's pen forgets which century it inhabits — the copper scrap market suffers from high spreads, low transactions, and constraints upon the very invoices that bind buyer to seller. In plainer speech: the gap between what a man asks and what a man pays has grown wide as a saloon door, and few are walking through it.

I have seen such standoffs before. In my counterstamping days, when I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and more, I learned that copper is patient. It waits in the pocket, passes hand to hand across the bar at Fort Wilkins — past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair — and it never loses its worth for want of a buyer today. A thin market is not a poor one. It is merely a market holding its breath.

And what does it hold its breath for? For copper's endless work. Consider the still, dear trader — my favorite of all copper's employments. Since the monks bent their first alembics and the Appalachian moonshiner coiled his worm in the creek, the red metal has made good liquor possible. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the very stink that would ruin a whiskey. A stainless vessel cannot perform this alchemy; it is dead to the task. Every clean brandy, every bright rum, every honest jar of shine owes its sweetness to copper's quiet chemistry. No spread, however wide, changes that truth.

Nor does it change the wire humming through the walls, the plumbing that carries your water, the roofs weathering to that noble green, the motors and the great data-halls of this electric age that gulp copper by the ton. When invoices tangle and transactions thin, the metal simply piles a little higher on the buyer's side of the scale, awaiting its inevitable call.

Meanwhile the honest scrapper need not despair. Today's #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.45 the pound on the national average — a stout number, and no small reward for clean, bright, well-stripped wire. Sort your grades true: keep the Bare Bright from the #2, the brass from the radiators, and let no lazy handful of insulation drag down your pay. In a market of wide spreads, the man who brings the cleanest copper commands the best of it.

Let the traders squabble over their invoices. The red metal has outlasted empires, purified centuries of spirits, and wired a world in light. It will outlast August too.

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