Spend even a few days on the road with a Chinese scrap trader, and you can’t help but start to think that the odds—and the American scrap dealers—are arrayed against him. Broken appointments, sold-off stock, and employees who don’t bother concealing their racism. Those are just the affronts. The misdeeds run deeper. According to Johnson, and other traveling traders, scrap exporters don’t always ship scrap orders as quickly as they promise—especially if the markets are moving up and they can sell it again for more. “But when it is falling, then they cannot wait to send the metal to China!”
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