Trump Lines Up Rock Hard $12B Mineral Stockpile (Drill Baby, Drill!)

Can you smell what the Rock Donnie Deals is cookin’? 

Trump has a fever and the medicine is definitely more rocks. According to Bloomberg, the administration is lining up a $12B critical minerals stockpile, internally dubbed Project Vault. Same idea as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve… except instead of oil, it’s gallium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths, and every other material that magically becomes “strategic” the second China controls it.

(Source: Giphy) 

Mechanically speaking, it’s pretty brain dead simple: $10B loan from the Export-Import Bank. $1.67B in private capital. Commodity traders handle procurement. Manufacturers get guaranteed supply when prices go vertical. Everyone’s happy. Which is why the markets immediately understood the assignment. U.S. rare-earth names popped premarket because nothing gets investors excited like a government-backed buyer with a long-term checkbook and no interest in price discovery. 

(Source: Yahoo Finance) 

Case in point: The participant list is exactly who you’d expect. We have GM, Stellantis, Boeing, Google, GE Vernova, Corning. Companies that don’t want to wake up one morning and learn a geopolitical press release just nuked their input costs… especially considering the volatility of rocks. If you recall, Nickel blew out after Ukraine. Rare earths trade like options contracts. One supply scare and suddenly margins disappear. Meaning, Project Vault is basically an insurance policy against waking up on the wrong side of a commodities chart.

That said, what’s actually notable about this entire shindig, is the structure of it. This isn’t necessarily a defense stockpile nor is it a subsidy. Instead, this is the government underwriting civilian supply chains without saying the quiet part out loud. The Ex-Im Bank is expected to vote on a 15-year loan that would be the largest in its history… more than double its previous record deal. Officials say the project was oversubscribed. Investors lined up because the buyers are creditworthy, the contracts are long, and the U.S. is implicitly standing behind the whole thing.

(Source: Giphy) 

Looking ahead, Trump is reportedly meeting with Mary Barra and mining billionaire Robert Friedland to kick it off… which tells you exactly who this is for: producers on one side, manufacturers on the other, and China nowhere near the room. Call it industrial police or supply-chain realism… regardless, the message is clean. The Don is done letting commodity markets freestyle the economy. 

Of course, we’ll see how this all shakes out, but considering how Trump single handedly mooned $USAR… we may be in for the commodity supercycle of the decade here. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Google as mentioned in the article.