Reply to post: Spot price doesnt answer the exam question

West's only rare earth mine closes. Yet Chinese monopoly fears are baseless

Gordon 10
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Spot price doesnt answer the exam question

Was China able to profit enough during its monopoly to have made its behaviour worthwhile?

So whilst I would tend to agree with Tim that the sky isn't falling in and we are going to have RE shortages and no shiny shiny, the last point about Monopolies not being good doesn't necessarily stack up.

Or to put it another way - what was the financial benefit to China (if any) from China's transitory monopoly, and can we extrapolate whether they are about to be rolling in the clover again?

We can also see that there are definitely localised impacts due to the monopolistic behaviour that have benefited the Chinese economy (more mining and manufacturing) to the detriment of the American and German ones (less mining and manufacturing) - assuming that Seimens plant was originally in Germany).

So from an economic PoV the world economy might be a net beneficiary - but the local economies outside of China certainly aren't.

Therefore in certain lights we can say a Chinese RE monopoly is bad M'Kay.

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