by JL Yastine
The Sovereign Investor
I’ll never forget visiting a Miami scrap dealer’s compound a few years ago. The proprietor showed me around his carefully tended lot.
On one end of the yard were piles of huge aluminum road signs. In another corner stood a wall of crushed-and-baled soda cans. But the owner’s proudest possession was kept in a secure little warehouse all its own.
He switched on the lights. There it was, gleaming a bright reddish glow in the middle of the room: one ton of “bare bright copper” — thousands of strands of unalloyed copper wire, pressed into the shape of a massive cube. Per pound, it’s the most highly valued grade of scrap copper around.