The Rare Earth Element Crisis

It’s ironic that the biggest, most dangerous crises are those you don’t hear about until it’s too late.

We know about climate change. We know about the droughts in the American West. We know about national debt, and we know about Islamic extremism spreading through the Middle East and infiltrating Western society.

We know about all of these because the mainstream news gets most of its traction from eye-grabbing stories.

But the real trouble — and this is always the case — rears its head when we least expect it.

Oftentimes, we don’t even fully understand it.

And right now, we’re in the midst of one of modern history’s most dangerous crises… a crisis that’s threatening not just the economy and the environment but the very fabric of modern society.

Let me give you a little background.

There is a class of industrial metals that few people know about called Rare Earth Elements (REEs for short).

I won’t go into detail on the natural properties that make this family of metals so vital to the modern world, but I will say that no piece of modern technology — including the device you’re using to read this article — would function without them.

Boasting hard-to-pronounce names like cerium (Ce), dysprosium (Dy), erbium (Er), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), holmium (Ho), lanthanum (La), lutetium (Lu), and neodymium (Nd), few people know these elements exist, much less understand why modern society depends on them.

But in this case, what we don’t know definitely can hurt us.

REEs are as vital to modern electronics as steel and plastic are to the automotive industry or wood and glass are to residential construction.

Only REEs don’t have a specific industry that relies on them. Anything with complex circuitry or electric motors requires a certain amount of REEs.

You Need Them in More Ways Than You Know

Your smartphone contains a couple grams of them. Your laptop or tablet contains several dozen grams.

And modern high-tech military systems — like the U.S.’s brand-new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — require hundreds of kilograms.

Everything in the middle of the spectrum, from missile guidance systems to the traction control on your car, also needs these elements to function.

REEs are the lifeblood of modern technology. Without them, the society you see bustling outside your window would grind to a halt.

And yet our own government — which spends $800 billion per year on our national defense interests and is by far the single-biggest consumer of the metals in the world — failed miserably in protecting us against a shortage of these crucial elements.

Unfortunately, while our own government was asleep at the wheel, burning through our national reserves of REEs without doing much to replenish them, another national government saw the writing on the wall and did the unthinkable…

They bought up more than 95% of the REE reserves and producers on the planet.

Who would do such a thing? Somebody with almost as great a demand for the elements… and somebody with an even bigger interest in controlling our access to them.

The Chinese.

A New Cold War is Already Here

For 20 years, the Chinese have been buying up every source and deposit of Rare Earth Elements — and they’ve done a bang-up job.

Their monopoly today is almost complete, while our own reserves are depleted to the point of non-existence.

And it gets worse…

Just this week, one of the very few remaining REE miners still operating in North America, Molycorp, Inc. (NYSE: MCP), filed for bankruptcy protection.

Too much debt, poor management, difficulties in finding new deposits, and, of course, pressure from Chinese price fixing turned our last hope into a $1.7 billion hole in the ground.

That leaves us in the worst position imaginable at a time when REE demand continues to rise in the commercial, consumer, and military markets.

How could we let this happen? That’s anybody’s guess… But the fact that it’s a crisis is finally starting to become clear.

So much so that a few weeks ago, 60 Minutes actually went public with the story, causing panic among investors and casual observers alike.

Crisis and Opportunity Go Together Like Yin and Yang

Of course, whenever an imbalance of this magnitude arises, something else comes with it: an opportunity.

In this case, it’s not so much an opportunity as it is a last chance to pull ourselves out of what’s already being called a “resource war” by the financial press.

The opportunity isn’t big… it’s enormous. And for once, it’s something our government cannot screw up with its bureaucratic inefficiencies and incompetence.

There is a newly discovered deposit of REEs — so new that it hasn’t even been tapped yet.

It’s located in the Western Hemisphere, just a few hundred miles off the Eastern seaboard, in one of the most forbidding places on Earth.

Few people live on this chunk of frozen tundra, but just under the surface lies an REE deposit estimated to be the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world.

It’s so big, in fact, that it could contain as much as a quarter of the total known REEs on the planet.

Its dollar value: just shy of $300 billion.

Its value to our way of life and security: immeasurable.

I’m proud to be one of the first in the industry to have discovered the company that recently gained 100% ownership over these resources, and I accept it as my responsibility to share it with as many people as possible.

I recently published a detailed report on the property and the company about to start developing it.

If what I just told you about REE demand scares you, prepare to be shocked by what this recent discovery can bring.

Click here for instant access to this free presentation.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Wealth Daily. To learn more about Alex, click here.