Rare Earth Company will be the winners of the year end rallye

The news cycle has been changing at a rapid pace over the past few months, so if you missed an important development last week that affected President Donald Trump, you are excused. And no, I'm not talking about this development. Last Wednesday the president signed an executive order addressing the threat posed by the United States' over-reliance on "critical minerals" by "foreign adversaries".

To be more precise, "critical minerals" here means "rare earth metals" and "foreign opponents" means "China". I've written about rare earths before. Although not as rare as gold, the group of 17 metals is used in the manufacture of advanced technologies, including electric vehicles, wind turbines and missile guidance systems. Your iPhone contains a number of them. Every F-35 fighter aircraft contains about half a ton of these strategic elements. The problem is that the US no longer makes barite (for fracking), gallium (semiconductors, 5G telecommunications), graphite (smartphone batteries) and a number of other materials.

"For 31 of the 35 critical minerals, the United States imports more than half of its annual consumption," the press release said. Today, depending on the mineral, China controls around 80 to 95 percent of the world market. This is of course a cause for concern, especially since the country's rare earths exports fell more than 25 percent year-on-year due to the January-August pandemic. President Trump has rightly declared this a national emergency and is calling for the US to develop a "commercially viable" supply chain for minerals that is not dependent on imports from China or other countries.