My Lifelong Copper Affair

There was a point in 1963 when I almost gave up on the copper market, but something told me to hold fast and look for the rainbow beyond the clouds.
   That was during a three-year period when the price of copper didn’t vary 1 cent. What is a journalist covering the market to do? How many times could I write about supply and demand without mentioning price? It was frustrating.
   That was a critical period for copper. The producers controlled the market, and they “stabilized” the price at 31 cents a pound. The LME, which had timidly come back into the picture, quoted a price of £236 per mt for more than two years but was in no position to battle the copper producers.
   When, in 1964, the producers bowed under extreme pressure and raised the price from 31 to 32 cents—1 measly cent—you would have thought the dam had burst or an earthquake had shaken the metal markets. When one of the influential leaders of world copper—Sir Ronald Prain, head of the Rhodesian Selection Trust (RST)—was to address the 1964 Copper Club dinner, NARI’s Metals Report said: “It was the action of RST (in conjunction with Anglo-American) that is credited with having blocked any sharp upward movement in copper prices on the London Metal 
Exchange.”
   Back then, a 1-cent rise in copper was headline news. There’s an apocryphal story, in fact, that a copper seller, seeking to increase the price of copper, developed a bizarre scheme to recruit someone to dynamite a bridge in Zambia over which copper had to move to exit the region. Unluckily for him, the FBI caught wind of this scheme and foiled it. But the very thought that someone would go to such lengths to boost copper 1 cent seems incredible today, yet the copper market is woven out of such weird stuff.
   The tug-of-war between the copper producers and the LME eventually ended with the LME triumphant and prices assuming a more realistic day-to-day and on-the-spot look. There was, of course, the emergency situation created by the Vietnam War when President Nixon imposed price controls, but those, too, eventually were phased out.
   The emergence of the LME as a dominant factor in the world copper market was vividly illustrated one day when I visited a small scrap dealer near Philadelphia. His office was in a rickety building, with wooden steps that shook under my feet as I climbed them. The office was old-fashioned and featured one of those rolltop desks stacked with papers. The owner, though, proudly showed me a new machine. “I get the morning copper prices directly from the London Metal Exchange,” he boasted. It was a strange anachronism but foretold the future.
   Looking back, how varied and interesting the copper market has been. Reviewing the newsletters I wrote in 1966, for example, I found that out of 51 editions, 21 (or 41 percent) were about copper. It was not only the metal market that sprang to life when you wrote about copper, but an entire geography because you were looking at developing and newly named nations like Zaire and Zambia in Africa as well as the tempest inside Chile, the largest copper producer in the world. 
   There was history and archeology as well. I recall how my friends Maury Schwartz of Pacific Smelting Co. (Torrance, Calif.) and Albert Haas of Sandoval Zinc. Co, (Chicago), both metals experts and semi-pro archaeologists, would send me information about copper in ancient times.
   When I first began covering the scrap industry, copper meetings outdrew every other metal. There were copper scrap dealers, brokers, traders, merchants, ingot makers, brass-mill buyers, fabricators—all interested in one form of copper or another. As a journalist in need of useful industry sources, I was fortunate to meet people who had remarkable knowledge of both scrap and primary copper. It was an education and a pleasure, for instance, to talk with experts such as Paul Fine, one of the bastions of Federated Metals Div., Asarco; Mel Kriegel, then a scrap buyer for Amax Inc.; Kurt Leburg of Schiavone-Bonomo Corp., who was one of the chief architects of the industry’s copper scrap specifications; and Hugo Simon or Otto Barth of Barth Smelting.
   Then there were battles over exports of copper scrap when consumers went to Washington to ask for quotas on shipments to foreign buyers. They were usually rebuffed. 
   There were also times—such as during the Vietnam War—when the government appropriated cartridge brass, allocating shells and cartridge cases to the military instead of selling them at auction. When the war ended and the shells were still being allocated, Mack Cottler went to Washington on behalf of NARI and ISIS to insist that the government return to its auction practices. He stubbornly insisted until the government gave in. 
   Over the years, there were also strikes in Chile and revolutions in Africa, all of which made for a boiling market.
   How could one even imagine a day when an aluminum meeting would easily outdraw a copper meeting? But time changes everything. The copper scrap industry has shrunk. There are more aluminum brokers and merchants than copper ones. The consumers of copper scrap have moved from the Northeast to the Southwest. The LME and Comex are the copper price centers rather than the producers. Prices on the exchanges move up and down in bigger numbers. Funds play a vital part in the copper market. Luckily, one can still find copper mavens in the scrap industry to call and get an incisive evaluation of the market.
   Reflecting on my years of writing about scrap metals—covering aluminum, nickel, iron and steel, lead, zinc, and so on—I realize that it was with copper that I truly had a lifelong affair. While today it all looks different—more static, more institutionalized, more statistical—in retrospect it was a long and exciting romance. •