Will China’s rare earth gambit bring down the US and EU?

Not in the short term. By this I mean critical industries will not be affected such as defense and high end chip manufacturing. The reason is because there already exist a rare earth stockpiling policy that has been around since February 2021. This is not publicly known. But both the US and EU have such stockpiles. Non strategic industries such as servo magnetics that go into everything from EV’s, powertrains for electrical generation, smartphones, headphones et am will be affected because these industries are essentially governed by just in time inventory controls. They will feel the crunch, but again I don’t see that the US and EU are protesting over those rare earth categories, because there is no embargo per se on those stuff. The folk who want that stuff just need to fill up the form. What China is essentially trying very hard to accomplish is to prevent both the US and EU from building a strategic stockpile of rare earths used specifically for the military industrial complex. So what the Chinese planners have come up with is a blockchain type ledger that effectively curbs covert trade on those categories of rare earth. Kompf, I think there is alot of misinformation in the mainstream press…even if an embargo exist. I don’t see it as affecting the average consumer.