Posted by mooreds 15 hours ago
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xLxM-TzBPY
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/the-tungsten-market-is-warnin...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tungsten-market-is...
The graph that got me wondering as to why the price has spiked was the mined/produced tonnes of tungsten from what I can see.
I naturally assumed, like the article is hinting, that demand has risen significantly.
It appears that china has limited exports and the USA has demanded that military applications needs to be sourced for people they like, rather than china russia and north korea. Demand has apparently increased by about 4%, but that doesn't explain the 10x price jump.
All I know is my carbide tooling is going to cost a shitload more now.
The price is set at the margin. Mines in wealthy high regulation countries are incredibly inelastic.
The bigger thing here is china has restricted export to something like 14 companies. so a supply shock makes much more sense.
The natural question is what is china doing with that spare capacity? is it being used domestically? diverted to some other country? are they just stock piling it? after all they need a load of it for machine tooling.
At one event I was at I spoke with someone who was tied into the company and they said that when wars happen their business picks up because copper mining starts back up. War apparently needs a lot of copper too. I never looked into it to verify but it seemed like an interesting bit of data.
Fascinating to see how completely normalised this sort of thing has become in the US.
>First opened in 1917 to support munitions production in World War I, it shut down three years later when peace crashed the tungsten market. Starting up again in 1938 on the eve of World War II, it was saved twice more as conflict broke out first in Korea and then Vietnam. In 1990, exactly 12 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it closed, seemingly for good.
The title is clickbait.
Watch the markets for the metals most used in wartime. That tells you pretty quickly when conflict is near.