Guest Post by Nick Giambruno
The US and China are battling over who will be the world’s most dominant power.
It’s the ultimate geopolitical competition and a megatrend with enormous investment implications.
As tensions between the US and China continue to rise, I expect Washington and Beijing to focus on securing critical commodities and ensuring access to stable supplies.
That’s where rare earth elements (REEs) come in.
Continue reading “Profit From the Ultimate Geopolitical Competition”
International Man: What are Rare Earth Elements (REEs), and why are they so important?
Doug Casey: The REEs are a group of 17 elements that you may recall from your high school chemistry class. They take up two rows in the periodic table, sitting by themselves at the bottom of the chart. They’re chemically similar to each other.
REEs are widely dispersed on the Earth’s surface. They aren’t “rare” per se, but since they’re not generally concentrated, you only rarely find deposits that are rich enough to qualify as a mine for elements like germanium, gadolinium, ytterbium, yttrium, or 14 others with exotic and obscure names. They’re basically all minor byproducts of mines for other elements—largely aluminum or zinc. They’ve only recently found significant uses with the development of high-tech, especially electronics and magnets. Fifty years ago, they were basically just chemical curiosities.
International Man: Rare-earth elements (REEs) were in the news recently. What is the significance of these 17 obscure elements from the periodic table?
Doug Casey: Obscure elements seem to come into public view every few decades, typically during a commodity bull market. I remember the so-called “strategic metals” boom, back in the early 1980s, when everybody went wild about cobalt and tantalum, among other elements. I remember there was a well-known broker in New York who was actually selling 55-gallon drums full of cadmium to naïve clients. There are probably, even now, some poor people with the stuff stored in their garages.
This is a cyclical phenomenon, not unlike what’s happening with stocks like GameStop. It’s mostly a consequence of too much money being printed and lots of it looking for a place to hide.