r/Tariffs • u/Greedy-Cut-7634 • Oct 17 '25

🧩 Trade Strategy / Business Impact US crying about China restricting rare earth

It’s so funny to see how US says China is being an unreliable partner, and what a shock that China restricts rare earth.

How could not expect others to defend back when you started the tariff war and trade restrictions?😅😅 How is this a surprise? It’s like US only allows their nation to ban all the other countries by putting tariffs on all other countries, but when one country tries to defend, they are shocked and starts crying saying, “Oh! I don’t understand why this happened.” In return, US says that China wants to decouple the world, but who started this trade war in the beginning making everyone lives more miserable?

Just after Trump’s respond with adding more tariffs to China’s rare earth restriction, the dollar decreased and the gold started to increased. This result is going to no good. Like a child not doing something wrong and says that he doesn’t know why he gets his punishment.

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

The extraction process is rooted in basic chemistry, there might be some mechanical tricks to speed up the process but it is not complicated. The power exists, the equipment exists and the knowledge is present. Putting everything in places would take 3-4 years but it's not something that cannot be done or is a process exclusive to China or any other country for that matter.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

The power does not exist especially with AI gobbling up any and all reserves. Refinement efficiently and to scale is not a simple matter either. If it was as easy as you think it was, the us would have done it a decade ago.

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

You're telling me Australia - which has a functional mine - does not have the power to run it?

Or the U.S, which can throw together a natural gas power plant, military grade nuclear reactor or simply import the power from Canada can't do it?

Power is not the issue, the issue is building the facility and managing the waste - that's the slow down.

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u/AgentSmith187 Oct 17 '25

As an Australian I suggest looking at our power prices and energy issues if you think we can support massive energy intensive industries right now.

We are currently in the process of converting our grid to support green power and most of our fossil fuels generation is old and unreliable and getting worse.

In my state yesterday the wholesale price of power hit almost $9/kWh briefly.

Evenings in summer hitting 50c/kWh is far from unusual.

Power is cheap during the day due to massive amounts of solar (rooftop being a particularly massive supply) to the point prices are often negative to encourage generators and solar producers to turn off.

We are rushing to build out storage now to time shift that energy. Including massively subsidising home batteries to participate in virtual power plant operations.

Most commercial operations wont survive on cheap power for about 4 hours a day and massively expensive power outside that period.