This Mine Predicts Major Wars. It's Opening Again | Hacker News Reader

This Mine Predicts Major Wars. It's Opening Again

bloomberg.com

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Bloomberg's Odd Lots interivew on this with the author, "The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War":

* 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...

Ok so I idd some digging and bloomberg is light on analysis on this one.

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.

> Demand has apparently increased by about 4%, but that doesn't explain the 10x price jump.

The price is set at the margin. Mines in wealthy high regulation countries are incredibly inelastic.

I know that, but given that tungsten demand is ~80-90% civilian, ie depends on how well the economy is doing, a 4% demand increase is pretty within spec.

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.

A company local makes mining trucks [1].

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.

[1] https://gfworldwide.com/

Nickel mining also

Maybe there are other major uses in war, but the casings and jackets of firearms cartridges are mainly copper. A sibling comment mentions nickel which is the major component of the bullet jacket after copper.

> ...attracting the attention of many players, including the president of the United States. Donald Trump’s sons are collaborating with the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on a tungsten project in Kazakhstan, according to the New York Times. The US government is considering supporting the mining venture with federal loans.

Fascinating to see how completely normalised this sort of thing has become in the US.

At least in the good ol' days politicians had to set up fake charities and foundations to rake in the dough. Now we've got Biden bragging on air that he was withholding already approved funds for Ukraine back when he was VP unless they stopped investigating Hunter's company, and Trump's kids might be getting loans!

Biden wanted Shokin out because he failed to pursue the Burisma investigation, not because he was aggressive on it. https://www.rferl.org/a/why-was-ukraine-top-prosecutor-fired...

This is the entirety of their thesis on its war prediction powers, BTW:

>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.

Tungsten is mostly used in artillery, tank shells, it will take some time to ramp up which makes me think the timing is peculiar along with the happenings in Europe.

I see some people are saying it's a win for Australia but I'd say its a bit of a mixed bag given their dependence on China's liquidity. The major question here is are Australians willing to accept a return to the Hawke days for moral solidarity with a continent far away that barely acknowledges or trades at the level it does with Asian giants like China?

Why is it peculiar? Ukraine needs a lot of ammo and the EU is massively ramping up production

Dolphin tungsten mine in Australia.

Not only is it opening up but several other large scale projects are already being considered in the USA, including one in Atolia, California that I have been privileged enough to personally visit.

Watch the markets for the metals most used in wartime. That tells you pretty quickly when conflict is near.

I wonder if there’s path dependence there. It _seems_ like just because you build up lots of “defence” tech that doesn’t necessarily mean you _have_ to use it? Or does it? I wonder what happened with those markets during the Cold War.

Maybe it's also for USA to rebuild supply? That is, if you believe the "US spent too many missiles in Iran" stories.

Why would you not believe them? Our defense manufacturing base has withered just like all the other manufacturing sectors. They’re being used faster than they’re being made and no one really planned for this war. Same reason the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is so low.

"αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος." And the movie having just come out.

This isn't so much "conflict is near" as much as reaction to a defense-related policy. The entire US defense supply chain will be banned from >80% of tungsten supply at the end of the year, while also being demanded to up production to make up for depleted stockpiles from Iran and Ukraine.

The mine: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DnJgQUomD93x4fhi9

If you look at antiwar.com, we seem to be in the throes of World War.

https://antiwar.com/

Major W for Australia.

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