It's no secret that China wants to replace the United States as the world's superpower. Its next move is the most aggressive one yet against the US economy, and it's creating one of the best investment opportunities in a decade that most investors haven't noticed.
The old playbook was indirect. China has tried to get the world to stop trusting the dollar by strengthening its own currency, and it has raced to beat the US in artificial intelligence.
The new playbook hits from the inside. China is blocking the United States from getting rare earth metals, and the ban is expected to start on January 10, 2027.
For years America stopped producing these metals and started getting most of them from China. They go into iPhones, cars, and missiles, which means the US has been completely dependent on a rival for the ingredients of its economy.
The preview already happened. In May 2025, when China first restricted rare earths, Ford had to stop production of the Explorer because it couldn't get the materials.
The warning at the time was blunt: "We have had to shut down factories. It's hand to mouth right now."
Now the US needs another way to get rare earths, which means money is going to move. Briefs Finance CEO Jaspreet Singh's rule is to invest where the money is moving, not where it was, and Japan and Germany have already lived through this exact shift.
Jaspreet uses ChatGPT and Claude to research exactly this kind of shift, because the tools can help find opportunities and dig into them, as long as you know how to prompt them. He's showing how he and his analysts do it in a free livestream on November 17.
How America Went From 78% of Rare Earth Supply to Zero
Rare earth metals are a group of 17 metals used in pretty much every part of the economy, from phones to cars to dishwashers to missiles. They aren't actually rare in the ground.
They're hard to get out, and mining them creates a lot of climate waste. That's why the US essentially stopped producing them and leaned on China.
| Year | US share of world rare earth production |
|---|---|
| 1974 | About 78% |
| 1990 | About 43% |
| 2000 | About 2% |
| 2002 | 0% |
That zero is where the US sat until very recently.
The Negotiation That Pushed the Ban to January 2027
In 2025, President Trump put tariffs on countries around the world, including China, and they escalated until the US was tariffing China at 145% and China was tariffing the US at 125%.
Then China changed the game. Instead of raising tariffs again, it blocked rare earth exports to the US, and the effect on the economy was immediate because the US produces none of its own.
Those tariffs hurt the Chinese economy, so China is answering by hurting the US economy. The two sides started negotiating, and China agreed to give the US a year, until November 2026, to figure out rare earths.
It's now November 2026. The deadline moved to January 2027, and China says it will stop the exports.
Investors fall into two camps:
- It happens. A ban hurts the US economy and forces it to build a brand new rare earth supply chain.
- It never happens. China makes too much money from rare earths to cut off its biggest customer.
Jaspreet's view is that the argument misses the point, because China has blocked rare earths to other countries before, and President Trump wants the US to be rare earth independent regardless. So the US is shifting how it gets and processes these metals whether or not the ban holds.
Japan Rebuilt, Germany Paid Up: Two Playbooks for a Rare Earth Shutoff
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and China has done this twice before with very different results.
| Japan (2010) | Germany and the EU (2015 to today) | |
|---|---|---|
| What China did | A complete halt on rare earth exports for about two months | A licensing chokehold that made Chinese rare earths harder to access and more expensive |
| What happened to prices | Certain rare earths rose 18x | Certain rare earths rose 15x |
| Response | Spent heavily on a new supply chain, cutting reliance on China from 90% to about 60% | Accepted the licensing terms and paid China more |
The US is already acting more like Japan than Germany.
Three Things That Happen If the Rare Earth Ban Lands
If China slows or blocks rare earths, three things happen, in this order:
- Factories shut down. The US is still reliant on Chinese rare earths, and without them it can't produce iPhones, dishwashers, cars, or missiles, just like Ford in May 2025.
- Prices rise. Less supply with the same demand pushes rare earth prices up, though they're a small part of a car or a phone and probably won't drive prices much on their own. The real risk is a production bottleneck, because fewer products means higher prices.
- The economy gets hurt. Businesses that can't produce can't sell.
Washington Is Already Buying Rare Earth Stocks
The US response is running on two tracks. Congress is passing laws to get more rare earths out of the ground at home, and billions of tax dollars are going into rebuilding the supply chain that died after 2002:
- Roughly $400 million into MP Materials stock, a rare earth company.
- $1.6 billion into a second rare earth company.
- $670 million into Vulcan, another rare earth company.
- A loan of up to $10 billion for Project Vault, a US stockpile of rare earth metals meant to backfill shortages so factories don't have to stop.
Molycorp vs. Lynas: Why Not Every Rare Earth Stock Wins
The lazy assumption is that a China ban lifts every rare earth stock. The last time China blocked rare earths, in 2010, some investors got rich and others lost everything.
Molycorp raised money on the headlines that China was blocking rare earths. When China ended the blockade, Molycorp couldn't keep up, declared bankruptcy, and the investors who bet on the headline lost all of it.
Lynas had a government partner guaranteeing demand for its rare earths. Even after the halt ended, the stock kept climbing, and investors who held it between 2009 and 2011 made money.
The difference wasn't the headline. It was the demand underneath it, and that's the kind of thing you have to research before you buy, because investing is risky and sometimes you'll be wrong.
AI won't make you right every time, but it can carry a lot of that research. Jaspreet is showing how he and his analysts use ChatGPT and Claude to dig into companies like these in his free livestream on November 17, prompts included.
How Investors Get Exposure to Rare Earth Stocks
Jaspreet isn't a financial advisor and can't tell anyone what to buy. What he can do is show how the economy is changing so investors can decide whether an adjustment fits their portfolio.
Individual stocks are one route, including the companies the US government is backing, like MP Materials, and companies like Lynas that are avoiding China. They also carry the most risk, since a company that goes bankrupt takes your money with it.
ETFs are the other route. An ETF is a basket of stocks, so one bankruptcy gets balanced by the winners, and one big winner gets balanced by the losers, which means less risk for less potential return.
Two examples that give exposure to rare earths:
- VanEck's rare earth and strategic metals ETF, which invests in companies that produce, refine, and recycle rare earths.
- Sprott's critical materials ETF, which spreads across rare earths plus uranium, copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite.
Market Shifts Are the Riskiest of the Three Ways to Invest
Jaspreet runs three investing philosophies, and rare earths fall under the third:
- Always be buying, or ABB. Buy broad market indexes like the S&P 500 every week, two weeks, or month, through crashes and booms, and ignore the noise.
- POOP. Panic leads to overselling, which leads to opportunity, which leads to profit. There have been 25 market crashes in the last 100 years, and each was an opportunity for investors holding good assets, though nobody knows when the next one lands.
- Market shifts. Invest where money is moving. It works in any stage of the economy, and it carries the most risk.
The risk here is real. President Trump's negotiation with China could flip tomorrow and send the US back to Chinese rare earths, some companies could go bankrupt, and a more Democratic Congress could change the rules.
What doesn't change is the dependence. The US needs these 17 metals, it makes none of them, and the government is already spending to fix that, which is where the money is moving.
