Slashdot Mirror
China Now Halting Shipments of Rare Earth Minerals To US
blackraven14250 writes with news that China, after putting at least a temporary stop to rare earth exports to Japan, is now doing the same with exports to the US; according to the linked article, this is in response to recent US promises to investigate certain Chinese trade practices.
From TFA, emphasis mine:
Nothing gets the American economy going like a good challenge..
Foreign companies invest in China. Then, China creates a Chinese alternative.. state-run.. state-subsidized.. copying the foreign model. Only.. China manipulates their currency for an export advantage. China keeps their middle class underpaid (while the government hordes money). And safety? Safety costs money.. Harming an American worker is more expensive than keeping him safe.. In China, harm a Chinese worker.. and replace him with one of the horde.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-LLsODnuHI
As American consumers, we pay less for cheap plastic crap now.. at the expense of our jobs and quality..
And Walmart leads the way.. fastest from store shelves to landfills.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
How could this possibly be modded interesting? Do you really wish to flog yourself to death? You know all those reasons why you couldn't just stop buying chinese goods for the last 5 years? Well, every single one of them still applies. The damage you would wreck upon yourself, especially in the short term would be orders of magnitudes greater than the damage caused by a rare earth metal shortage.
Perhaps if you suggested a more limited or symbolic ban/tariff then it may work.
But seriously, everyone knows by now that China and American are stuck. Breaking out of the current relationship would fuck both of you up. And China has way more slack than the US does to fuck around and be an abusive boyfriend. And everyone saw that coming to.
Close our markets to all of China's exports.
You don't have to close our markets, just impose a 10% to 20% across the board import tariff on all manufactured goods.
Actually, we should take away their MFN (most favored nation) trading status. They never deserved it in the first place.
The US and the rest of the world can not be held hostage by economic terrorism from China.
Really, must everything the US doesn't like be called terrorism? China refusing to sell us every product we want may be many things, but terrorism it isn't.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
China's rare earth supply should be boycotted anyway, because of the massive pollution caused by their unregulated mining practice.
Am I way off here or should we not be keeping these rights?
Can anyone enlighten me if I am missing something since IANAG.
Yes. You are way off. The mineral rights reside with the Afghan people and their government.
It's OK. He's on a roll. This is the only fun he gets, so just let him be. He'll go to sleep tonight thinking "Boy, I straightened out that liberal Slashdot today". We've already taken away all his free speech and liberty, don't take that away from him too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When they are a sole supplier, it is terrorism.
Sigh....
terrorism-noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
By your reasoning, if Apple decided they didn't want to sell me an iPhone, Apple would be engaging in terrorism.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Joke's on you, China!
We don't manufacture anything anymore!
Hey now... no need to be sexist. (north) American men have large, pendulous breasts too, although I can't speak for the Chinese or Japanese, but I'm sure the same holds true.
Do you have ANY idea what this would mean? It's not just the Walmarts of the world that deal with China.
I run a very small company - just a couple of geeks in a little office/warehouse. We do enough business for both of us to pay the rent and put food on the table, with the occasional mention in Make or hackaday as a side benefit. We take pride in doing as much of our work domestically as we can and sourcing locally whenever possible, but I can tell you we wouldn't last 3 months without trade with China.
Global supply chains are far too interconnected for something so drastic. When the economy tanked in 2008, despite the fact that we still had plenty of orders coming in we almost went under when we couldn't get the parts we needed. Even when *our* suppliers were OK, if one of *their* suppliers was in trouble we felt it.
People seem to have this weird idea that there's some sort of China, Inc. that just sits over there on the other side of the Pacific building plastic widgets to cram down our throats via Walmart. That's not how it works. China's far from blameless, but "close our markets to Chinese exports" is right up there with "nuke Baghdad" for brilliant foreign policy.
War between America and China? It must be cool to grow up in an isolated wood cabin reading dusty tomes about world history from the 1950s then suddenly the satellite dish arrives and you can post on the internet.
Sorry, I missed which country is invading the other.
China could stamp out a billion machetes in just a few weeks. Rwanda was barely an hours worth of China's productive capacity. 18,000 Japanese soldiers cut off from their supply chain defended Iwo Jima for 35 days. You'd face 18 million Chinese just landing on the beach. Some would have weapons.
Or how about the Chinese invading Los Angeles. I don't think they'd survive the first commute. By the first number that came up, there are 65 million handguns in America. Imagine that these were not all pointed at fellow Americans for a few hours. It would make Mogadishu look like a mild celebration of Chinese new year. The bullets would be flying thicker than rice at a Mafia wedding.
Or maybe the Americans could hatch a plot to pump sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere and reverse global warming while secretly stock-piling a million M1A1 tanks to cross the newly exposed land bridge to China. Hey, it almost worked for the Germans.
A final possibility is that both sides would follow "A Taste of Armageddon" and China agrees to manufacture a few million suicide booths at an unbeatable low, low price with Walmart branding. This would be good for Texas, but might strain the agreement as the Chinese complain "do we really have to make them so large?" Meanwhile the Japanese embargo the entire deal in an effort to collect royalties on the bundled BluRay player and the Cell chips sourced from IBM overheat running the provably-fair thermonuclear simulation. It would be a fiasco all around.
Rare earths, despite the name, aren't. Go look it up, there are plenty of them, and the US has plenty to be had. They aren't mined much in the US because China is cheaper since they don't care about safety. Ok fine, but that doesn't mean they can't or won't be mined again in the US if there's a reason. China refuses to trade, the US just starts up production. Prices may rise some but that is ok, believe it or not a market can absorb that just fine (just look to the increase in gas, it wasn't without problems but it near tripled in the period of a few years and life goes on).
Now China could wind up in a much worse situation, if they keep the game up and people aren't willing to trade. Their economy is heavily based on foreign trade and lacking that it could have a nasty downturn, which could cause massive unrest. The government's problems/abuses are largely overlooked because of the massive quality of life improvements going on. If those stop, could go bad for them.
Also there's the fact that despite the hype you see on /. the US DOES in fact build things, it turns out more manufactured goods than any other nation (though China is on track to surpass it in 2020 or so). More to the point, America builds a lot of high tech and important shit. Computer processors, heavy machinery, airplanes, etc. In the event of a trade freeze, China would probably find itself on the worse end of it. Cheap consumer goods are nice, but hardly necessary and that is a large amount of what China builds (and many of those goods are simply assembled of foreign parts to foreign specs). Heavy equipment and computer chips are a little more important to continued progress.
Now in the case of war, the US could unquestionably wage war against China if they felt dumb enough. However China cannot against the US. There is a massive ocean in the way and China has no blue water navy. They cannot project the force necessary, and cannot deal with the US intelligence abilities (like recon satellites and IUSS). They could load up container ships with massive amounts of soldiers and tanks, which they have in abundance, all of which would rest at the bottom of the ocean shortly after sailing.
So I don't find war over this a very realistic scenario. Not a good idea still, but not likely to result in war.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt,
China doesn't have to buy US debt. Especially if commodities start trading in something other than US dollars. After all, why the hell would you support the dollar today? The interest rate sucks, the US government is spending more than ever before, and the US economy (which has been in the tank for a while now) continues to struggle. Plus add this to the fact that US banks have no idea who they have loaned money to - no, there are far wiser places to put your money today than US treasury notes. In fact, almost anywhere BUT US T-bills will get you a better return.
The US is in for a very, very rude awakening in my opinion. Gross incompetence has been demonstrated on both a government, military and economic level. I'm just glad I don't live there.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Exactly. Limiting free trade does absolutely nothing to help a country but harms both countries.
China has had phenomenal success by limiting free trade.
first models predicted peak oil between 1965 and 1970 http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
...in the US. And that's when it peaked.
I like to think that the parent was not referring to people who work for the gov't, but rather people who let employers direct most or all of their professional lives. A self-employed person is a rarity these days, and I think that's behind many/most U.S. problems (WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS)
An example: Let's say you're a senior computer programmer at a Fortune 500 corp. You get interesting work, reasonable vacation time, your co-workers and boss are friendly, and the pay is great. The problem here is that you're still working for someone else's (the owner's, the board of directors', whatever) dream, not your own. That means someone else is profiting more from your work than you, that someone else is deciding what projects to begin and what projects to cancel, and that someone else is free to delegate whatever duties they don't find enjoyable. I think that the employee's role as a stone in a corporate pyramid is to be avoided, unless servile habits can somehow be considered virtuous. I've noticed a couple tendencies among employee friends of mine, tendencies that become more noticeable the more heavily said employee invests in his career. They're unhappy, and their personal lives are fixed in humdrum routine. They spend so much time ignoring their own instincts and goals in lieu of company orders that they become listless and unable to motivate themselves to do anything new or bold in their personal lives.
Back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most Americans had their own livelihoods, often organized as family businesses where each worker was involved or at least consulted in most every other aspect of the business. People generally did what they wanted and found a way to monetize it enough to get by. Massive, rigid corporate hierarchies only really emerged after the mid-19th century, when sweatshops and compulsory schooling started to indoctrinate everyone into obediently following the commands of the elite "experts".
Nowhere is this more evident than the way most people participate in elections. They are astoundingly passive, focusing almost entirely on voting, the least important step in the electoral cycle. On average, they don't work for political campaigns, they don't participate in primaries, and they tend to vote for whatever football team ^W^W party they've always voted for (if they vote at all; voter turnout sucks). The really politically active ones usually don't do much more wait until the candidates are narrowed down before voting against someone. Every November, people brag about how they did their civic duty by voting, content to ignore the much larger difference they could have made earlier in the process. With a population as politically apathetic as ours, it's no wonder that those in power treat our wishes with such contempt. They are sure in their ivy-league belief that the electorate is composed of adult-age children who need to be closely managed as wards of the state ("liberals") and/or rallied to the cause of our fearless leader's foreign adventures ("conservatives").
In short, a reluctance or outright refusal to think for onesself is the root cause of many of the U.S.'s failings. This problem could probably stop within a single generation if we got our children out of state schools and into countless work apprenticeships and charities with people of different social classes instead. Just think of the kind of well-rounded, genuinely worthwhile people such a liberal education would produce.
To make a nailgun, we need neodymium magnets!!
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Well, the US should, as a response, stop shipments of garbage abroad.
Start processing electric junk at home to recycle rare earth and precious metals.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Neither should the US.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
China doesn't have to buy US debt.
Actually they do have to buy US debt. China manages their currency and the only way to maintain their currency at a weak exchange rate to the dollar is to buy US Treasuries. China cannot stop buying dollars in the short term even if they want to.
Especially if commodities start trading in something other than US dollars.
Won't happen any time soon. The dollar is the world's de-facto reserve currency. Many commodities (including oil) trade in US dollars. This is not likely to change.
After all, why the hell would you support the dollar today? The interest rate sucks,
Which interest rate, out of curiosity, are you referring to? Currencies don't have interest rates. Treasury bills do, but yields on government debt are low everywhere except on governments in risk of default (like Greece). Furthermore, the coupon on US treasuries is almost always lower than for most other debt because it is considered safer than any other debt. US treasuries are backed by the ability of the US government (which has never defaulted) to raise taxes on the biggest single economy in the world. Nothing is perfectly safe but that's about as good as it gets.
the US government is spending more than ever before, and the US economy (which has been in the tank for a while now) continues to struggle.
It's a global recession. Every major economy is struggling, not just the US.
Plus add this to the fact that US banks have no idea who they have loaned money to -
I have no idea where you got this idea or what you are referring to. I'm pretty sure the US banks have a very good idea who they have loaned to. They have other problems but knowing who their debtors are is not one of them.
no, there are far wiser places to put your money today than US treasury notes. In fact, almost anywhere BUT US T-bills will get you a better return.
No one invests in T-bills to get a big return. The return on Tbills has been very low for most of the last century when compared with alternatives. Hell, the calculations for cost of investments is usually found starting with the so called risk-free rate (normally US Treasuries which are considered the world around to be the closest thing to a risk free investment) plus some additional interest to compensate for additional risk. The reason people buy them is because they are safe or because (like China) they are trying to manage their exchange rates. If you are looking for a big return, government debt is rarely the best option out there.
Hear, hear! In the long term, I think it will be a good thing that China's regime is finally showing its true colors as a childish mannequin of a government, too brittle to accept even the mildest criticism due to having no legitimacy. They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.
The US does exactly the same thing in the agriculture sector.
So I entirely agree, so long the US gets kicked out as well.
Looks like someone needs to update their dictionary. The OPs statement is contemporarily correct
terrorism-noun (tu'ur'ism)
1. the use of violence to to kill, maim, or upset fine Americans or people fine Americans like.
2. the property of being muslim.
3. the act of doing something I don't approve of.
3. the act of being something I don't approve of.
May the Maths Be with you!