When 'the dollar falls' it falls relative to other currency. Also, if 'the fed prints mor fiat dollars' [sic], it creates economic force for price inflation. Those two sentances describe two sides of the same coin. The result should be inflation in everything, including raw material. When a steel/copper/aluminum refinery buys a commodity item like our scrap metal, they are actually bidding for the product against all other mills in the world (cumulative world supply and demand set the commodity prices). But U.S. mills need to buy with weak/fallen/inflated dollars so they need to pay more. All of this says prices should be rising, but they're going down.
So what are we seeing with this price decline? This is the beginning of another recession, or a deepening of the one that was muddling along. There is less demand for 'stuff' in a recession. The demand is less, so the price we get goes down (for our supply of raw material). To make it worse, in the last year or two there are lots of people who figured out one could make pretty good cash collecting scrap metals, so the supply was probably increasing.
But that's not all. With reduced demand for metal in the economy, the scrap yards and mills are right now sitting with WAY more raw material than they need. They don't want that inventory, so they drastically reduce how much they buy until they reduce their inventory levels. Say their sales volume went down 10%, they might reduce their scrap buying by 30% because their sitting on too much inventory and they want to use it up. When/if the scrap buyers rebalance their inventory, then they' will start buying again and prices will stabilize possibly with a little rally. Yet, the buying will be at a reduced volume - matching the reduced demand in a recession.
So where do I think prices are headed? Down and down, with a little rally after 9 to 15 months but they will still remain well below the 2011 summer highs. So hoard or not? hoard some but sell some too. Also, reduce what WE pay for scrap ourselves.
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