A year ago, almost to the day, I did a premium post called simply Five Miners which, unsurprisingly, was a bullish post about five precious metals miners.
Triple-Digit Returns
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Palladium’s Continued Ascent
A Plausible U.S.-China Grand Bargain
That Escalated Fast
This week escalated fast: Beijing moved to tighten rare-earth export controls, and late Friday the U.S. answered with an additional 100% tariff headline. Markets read “decouple”—but the sequence matters.
(more…)So What Happened on Friday?
US stock markets fell hard on Friday after President Trump reacted to new export restrictions on rare earth metals from China with a threat to add a further 100% tariff on imports from China in addition to the 57% tariff currently in force. Trump walked back that threat over the weekend and at the time of writing futures have rallied about 50% of the decline from Friday’s lows before pulling back somewhat.
So what is the rare earths issue about? Well for those who don’t already know, rare earths are vital for a lot of manufacturing of complex machinery such as cars, jet engines, nuclear reactors & LEDs, are also important in oil refining, and are vital for a lot of high tech manufacturing such as computer components, smartphones, high performance batteries etc. There is a good page about rare earths on wikipedia here which is worth a read.
(more…)Xi Happens
TACO strikes again! As expected, Trump’s “tough guy” schitck didn’t mean dick, and the Friday “100% tariff on China!” nonsense was reversed swiftly. The market, wisely, is starting to completely distrust the guy, so instead of utterly reversing its losses, it has deigned to give up just half of them. The /ES, for instance, spiked higher on Sunday and has been marking time ever since. You will note that the initial tariff-scare plunge (left side of chart) is fully intact.
