Loading ...You can’t have severe physical shortages lasting for decades without something happening to prices. Paper might be used to manipulate prices short term, but you can’t use paper in solar panels, electrical circuits, jewellery, switches, batteries – something would have cracked long ago.
Rare earths are a similar thing that regularly crop up with shortages, critical minerals, Chinese domination, Greenland (which has only ever had one mine, for fluorspar, since 1920 or somedate), military importance, electrical revolution, magnets etc. etc. etc. usually to pump the shares of explorers in Greenland, Myanmar, Albania, Australia, bottom of the oceans and yet the price of neodymium (the main rare earth for permanent magnets, used in all electric vehicles), for example, is currently at a third of its 2022 peak, and below its 2011 and 2018 peaks. With no new supply.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/neodymium
And look below the chart at the movement in other rare metals. Now, if you can show me someone who, a year ago, said “Sell cobalt, buy germanium” then I would say I think you’ve found me an expert.
I dunno what’s going on. The older I get, the less I know. But the precious has performed ok over the last few years so I’ll stick with what is working.