Niocorp Developments Ltd (NB)

[The_Gman]

My guess, and that's all it is...probably unlikely they would ever fully halt the exports unless we were at war, but that doesn't mean there won't be some other tit-for-tat as a result of the increased tariffs. I don't think they can be trusted one way or the other. The Western world is making concerted and coordinated efforts to find non-China sources and enforce ESG requirements. China will likely lose dominance as these new global sources and refining capabilities come online, which can't help their own economic issues, but can the West produce enough on its own to fill the coming demand? Who knows?!

Despite fevered rhetoric from nationalist hawks, the global economy’s interdependencies preclude a hard decoupling between China and the West. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called it “virtually impossible.” France’s finance minister has dismissed it as “an illusion.” The vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, Victor Gao, echoed this sentiment in September in an op-ed for China’s state-owned Global Times, which mostly channels the foreign policy views of the ruling CCP. “Decoupling between China and the US is similar to any attempt to decouple the earth and the moon,” Gao wrote. Trying to disentangle the world’s two largest economies, he cautioned, would invite “disaster both for China and the US, as well as for the rest of the world.”

Still, the theory is that China could throttle Western access to these materials in the event of a spiralling trade war with the United States or military confrontation over Taiwan. For evidence, many observers point to 2010, when China reportedly blocked rare earth exports to Japan for two months after the captain of a Chinese fishing vessel was detained by Japanese officials following an incident at sea.

A new study from the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research casts doubt on this version of events, calling it “folklore.” Nevertheless, the People’s Daily — a CCP mouthpiece — warned in 2019 that China could sever rare earth supplies to American companies in response to Chinese telecom giant Huawei being blacklisted by the Trump administration. “Waging a trade war against China, the United States risks losing the supply of materials that are vital to sustaining its technological strength,” an editorial said. The United States imports nearly three-quarters of its rare earth supply from China.

https://www.cigionline.org/articles/the-fight-over-critical-minerals-has-just-begun/