alt Hacker NewsThis Mine Predicts Major Wars. It's Opening Again
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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.
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.
> ...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.
Dolphin tungsten mine in Australia.
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.
If you look at antiwar.com, we seem to be in the throes of World War.
Major W for Australia.
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?
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.
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...