China’s Rare Earth Monopoly: The 90% Problem Explained

China’s rare earth monopoly is the problem that Matt McCall’s “Trump’s $16 Trillion Chess Move” presentation is built around, and the pitch states it in its opening minutes: “China controls 90% of worldwide production… Every F-35 stealth fighter contains 900 pounds of rare earth minerals.” The pitch’s phrase for the situation is blunt: “It’s a loaded gun pointing at the American economy.”

Here is what the 90% problem actually is, why it is real, and what the pitch builds on top of it.

What the 90% Figure Means

The number refers to refining and processing capacity, not geology. Rare earth elements are not actually rare in the ground; deposits exist on every continent, and the U.S. was the world’s dominant producer as recently as the early 1990s, anchored by the Mountain Pass mine in California. What China dominates is the messy middle of the industry: separating the seventeen elements from their ores and from each other, a chemically intensive process with real environmental costs that the West largely offshored as Chinese processing capacity scaled in the 1990s. Our “Mountain Pass Mine Stock: The California Rare Earth Story” article covers the details.

The pitch quotes the strategy that made it happen, attributed to Deng Xiaoping in 1992: “There is oil in the Middle East. There’s rare earth in China.” The USGS production chart McCall cites documents the result: U.S. production went from dominant to effectively zero while China’s refining share climbed to roughly 90%, where it sits today, a figure consistent with widely cited estimates.

The Export Controls Made It a Weapon

Geographic concentration would be merely economic if it stayed commercial, but China has demonstrated willingness to use the position as policy. Its export controls on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, and rare earth elements, all documented measures in recent years, turned the 90% share from a market fact into a strategic chokehold. When the controls bind, industries from semiconductors to defense manufacturing discover dependencies nobody had mapped on purpose. McCall’s pitch invokes the pandemic memory as the emotional frame: “Remember the empty shelves, the mask shortages, the hospital’s rationing supplies… When America needed China most, they slammed a door in our face.”

Why Refining, Not Mining, Is the Hard Part

The monopoly’s persistence is worth understanding mechanically, because it explains why the problem has outlasted two decades of warnings. Mining rare earths is geologically straightforward; the hard step is separation. The seventeen elements occur together in the ore, and pulling them apart requires dozens of sequential chemical processes, acids, and environmentally difficult waste streams. China built that capacity while the West shut it down, and capacity compounds: refineries beget expertise, which begets cost advantages, which beget more refineries. Rebuilding the West’s separation and magnet capacity is therefore a years-long, capital-intensive project, which is exactly why the government has shifted from cheerleading to equity. Mountain Pass restarting its concentrator was step one; the separation and magnet plants being built now are the real test.

The American Response, Documented

The pitch’s account of the response is accurate to the public record. Washington has responded with a series of measures the presentation catalogs: equity stakes in domestic mineral producers (the Lithium Americas Thacker Pass restructuring at “up 204%,” Trilogy Metals’ Ambler Access stake with “shares shot up 440 percent,” and USA Rare Earth’s Round Top stake, after which “shares went vertical”), and the executive order the pitch is named for. Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources” (April 2025), directs officials toward stockpile feasibility studies and offtake agreements for seabed minerals, with language the pitch quotes verbatim on “United States flagged vessels.” Defense supply-chain legislation pushing Chinese minerals out of the arsenal gives the policy its clock, which the pitch dramatizes as a January 1, 2027 cutoff. For the specifics, our “USA Rare Earth Stock: The Round Top Equity Stake” article is worth a read.

Where the Pitch Goes With It

From that foundation, McCall’s main pick follows: a roughly-$5 deep-sea mining company holding rights to polymetallic nodules, mineral-rich rocks that carpet parts of the Pacific seafloor, which the pitch calls “the largest single concentration of critical minerals ever discovered anywhere on Earth,” with the company said to own the only U.S.-flagged vessel capable of harvesting them. The identification evidence points toward The Metals Company, a fingerprint our dedicated piece covers, with the pitch itself never confirming the name. Our deep-sea mining explainer covers the deposit and the technology.

The honest caveats on the thesis: the 90% problem is real, but the pitch’s specific solution (seabed nodules harvested by one small company) is a bet on a particular corner of the response, on a timeline the pitch compresses (“weeks, not months”), and on a government backstop McCall himself concedes is not promised: “Nobody knows for sure if Trump will ultimately back this company. Nothing is final until that ink is dry.”

For the analyst making the case, see our profile of Matt McCall; for the sibling campaign, our XAI Boom review.

The full presentation is available through this link.

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