One ounce of gold, priced in pounds of copper. Gold is the metal the world saves; copper is the metal the world uses. Their ratio is a running vote on which matters more right now, and the supply machinery underneath it, mines, scrap yards, and vaults, is stranger than the price chart lets on.
High readings mean the market is paying up for money over work: recessions, crises, debasement scares. Low readings mean industry is outbidding fear. The 10-year Treasury yield rides below because copper/gold and yields normally move together; when they split, one of them is usually wrong.
You can tell a money-metal from a utility-metal without looking at a price chart. Money accumulates: nearly every ounce of gold ever mined is sitting in a vault, a bank, or a drawer, and yearly production barely dents the pile. Utility gets consumed: copper leaves the market and disappears into walls, motors and grids for decades.
Mine output moves slowly; permits and shafts take a decade. The fast supply response in both metals is scrap, and it works completely differently on each side of the ratio.
Gold rose 67% in 2025. Recycling rose 3%. In 2009 a far smaller rally pulled a record 1,728 t out of drawers and jewelry boxes. The old negative-feedback valve, price up, scrap floods out, price capped, barely opened this time. Either near-market scrap is exhausted, or holders expect higher prices. Both readings are hiding in a supply table, not on the chart.
Copper scrap comes from demolished buildings and retired machines, so today's scrap pool reflects what the world installed decades ago, when annual use was roughly half of today's. No price can conjure scrap that was never put in service. Copper's recycling valve is real but it opens on a delay measured in decades.
Gold "recycling" is not recovery, it is stock mobilization: the entire 219,891 t pile is potential supply at some price. Copper's above-ground stock mostly cannot come to market at any price this year. That asymmetry is why gold rallies used to self-limit and copper squeezes do not.
Drag the sliders to see how much the scrap valve could move each side of the ratio. This is arithmetic on the 2025 supply mix, not a forecast.