Portfolio manager and author of Mineral War: China’s Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction, Tomasz Nadrowski believes multiple flows of critical minerals are needed for supply to meet demand, and there simply aren’t enough.

“That mountain will eventually be finished. The buffer exists to reduce the volatility, but it cannot count on exactly the same inflow and outflow, especially given this lack of fungibility in the global market,” he told host Adrian Pocobelli on the Northern Miner podcast. 

“And for many of them there is no alternative. You’re either going to get them from China and you don’t,” he said.

Nadrowski commented on how mining investors have to think about where their investments will fit in a broader economic structure and how the demand will be affected by fast-approaching technological changes.

The China of it all 

He also touched on how China’s economic system, as he described as “the survival of the cheapest”,  has affected and influenced western economies. 

“To protect our industries, we have to raise tariffs in order to incentivize investment, put price floors and then generate sufficient revenue from those tariffs to incentivize downstream manufacturing so that they finally move towards buying our product instead of the very cheap Chinese product,” he said.

“Otherwise, we’ll be completely de-industrialized and completely responding to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s not a very healthy future.”

Nadrowski also commented on how historically, totalitarian regimes tend to focus a lot more on metals, as it gives them more control and independence of the global market.

“That independence was necessary because once you have a lot of metals then you can build a lot of factories making just about everything else and big armies,” he said.

Listen to the full episode here: