China suspends all rare earth exports.
This seems like a big problem. The market seems to keep pretending that there isn‘t a trade war happening.
So, we saw MP (Mountain Pass REE) up +20% today, US Antimony +13% and Almonty (Tungsten) +16% today, all on news that Trump wants to stockpile critical metals. We should have been stockpiling them much sooner because this was coming, Trump or not.
But here we are. China controls so so so so so much of the world's refined metals that we need in (waves hands around wildly) EVERYTHING!
We may be able to produce a few metals here but not enough to satisfy our appetites for them. And here is where China can play hardball and has us by the short hairs.
Oh, and let's say we do start producing commercial grade metal ore, who is going to refine and process them? The guys working at Shake Shack? The people educated and trained to do this don't live here and we've made it harder for them to come here.
Make any of this make sense to me.