Every piece where Minerals is the variable that does the work.
Two smelters in 2014, fifty-nine by 2025. Processed-nickel exports up from under $1 billion a year to about $14 billion. Sixty percent of world production. The most cited industrial policy of the decade also crashed the price it depends on, and now the same state is cutting quotas to fix that.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
The Salar de Atacama holds 9.2 million tonnes of lithium in brine, the biggest such reserve on earth. In December 2025, a Codelco-SQM joint venture handed the Chilean state majority control of it through 2060, in the middle of the worst lithium price crash on record. Most resource nationalism is announced at the top of the cycle; this deal was signed at the bottom.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
Washington restricts what China can buy; Beijing restricts what America can make it from. Gallium, 98% Chinese, and germanium, majority Chinese, went from licensing in 2023 to an outright US ban in December 2024. Germanium has quintupled since 2023. The tonnages are tiny, but the precedent reaches much further.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
The US Geological Survey counts 50 of the world's 73 billion tonnes of phosphate reserves in Morocco, and 36 of the 250 million tonnes mined in 2025. The gap between owning the element food depends on and monetising it is the whole strategy of the Moroccan state's largest company.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
In February 2025 the DRC suspended cobalt exports outright; since October it rations them by quota, at roughly half the old volume. The price of the metal rose 130% in a year. What the world's most concentrated mineral supply does when the supplier starts acting like one.
Aug 15, 2026 · 9 min read