As stated before, RE is not really rare in the sense of the word. It can be found all over the place. What is rare is the quantity that must be processed to get it. China is a great place to do it given their lack of environmental regulations when 10 tons must be mined and 1 ton must be processed to get a few ounces of a given rare earth worth a few thousand dollars. The US was smart to get out of the RE business and I hate to think of the environmental regulations they will face if they get back in and hope to mine in volume. Just flushing the mined material will raise serious environmental issues, let along cooking and processing it out.

If other countries want to destroy their environment mining RE the opportunity is always there. If China wants to hoard it, so be it. Hoarding it may make the price go up some for now, but those holding oil and riding it down will be better off than those holding onto "rare" earth materials.

By the way, Ukraine is a testament of how idiotic, daft, weak, and foolish the US and Europe's are right now. They have been, are, and will be lied to and manipulated until Ukraine is either theirs or is a broken fractured ember (more than they are already due to their disgustingly weak diplomacy). Sadly this will only Encourage Russia and Putin to engage in more behavior much like Hitler was appeased before World War II. Will we ever learn?

The US must at least be equally strong and firm as the aggressor. We are acting like timid rabbits to ISIS and Putin. One can not expect either one to behave any differently given out behavior.

Switzerland was fine doing what it did. In reality, and sane person would get out of the Euro before they implement QE. That will become all to apparent in the future. Likewise, no one ever expected Greece to abide by anything. Their economy makes less sense than the USSR before it collapsed. It is fiscally unsound in every way imaginable.

I agree with you on TBTF banks. Sadly TBTF means too big to have to abide by the laws.

Elon Musk will work on anything he gets loans, money, and/or incentives by taxpayers to start or run. Sadly he is the modern day entrepreneur. Your money, your risk, my glory. I don't doubt Tesla will drop much like Space X almost went bankrupt. Musk always looks to where government funding crosses his pocket. The public is dumb to think he will be there or fund these ventures when they hit the wall. No now he wants more government funding to make high speed transit across the US for even more government funding.

Half the people in the market don't even accept the idea of a business cycle and the inevitability of a cyclical downturn. Good luck getting them to look at an over-extrended economic cycle rationally. It's like trying to warn an overfed turkey that it's thanksgiving time and not to go feed at the trough anymore. And with zirp and QE, what a heaping high trough it is.

You just hit the nail on the head when you mentioned the $26 trillion dollar derivative market which is bigger than it was last downturn. Strangely, this is what the bankers don't say and what the bankers lobbied hard for keeping their positions secret from their shareholders and the public as they attached increasing amounts to themselves in order to make short term profits for their execs.

We can only hope this downturn won't ignite this tinder from going up in flames, although someday it will if nothing is done about it. These derivatives aren't the simple call put options of yesteryear.

A very interesting and insightful article. In the end, economics has a way of making unintended consequences. QE has know unintended consequences and we should have known it looking at Japan as a case in point. Sadly, we were already hitting a big wall before QE mainly because of the effects of prior bad Fed decisions and a replay of the same decisions going on but worse now. Zirpish interest rates are bad and extended ones are even worse. Any economist worth their salt knows this as well as the fact that an economy adjusts to its surroundings meaning the cost to go back to a normal state becomes increasingly hard and the problems with the current system, besides just the fear of a return, gets worse every day we stay in this pit and get closer to the end of the business cycle no matter how delayed we make it.

Thanks to the author for these facts. I don't blame the insiders. You have to be a retard to think there won't be another downturn after 6 years. The recent rally was a rather funny one. The market bounced until good job reports. Hmmm, I wonder what next week will bring. Shorts undoubtedly got squeezed, but is there any real new buying?

Good points. The biggest victims of QE are actually not workers but savers. Those with cash assets lose monetary value they otherwise would have had, get lower to no return on their assets since it's in conjunction with zirp policies.

I'm glad the author pointed out the fun game of stock buybacks to enrich executives. It does usually help shareholders value as well which is why it's not talked that much about. The financial games that can be played when the treasury supports QE and other artificial methods to keep rates low and funnel money to banker friends is almost limitless and does nothing but encourage an anti-capitalist, pro-corruption insider elite who want infinite zirp, infinite QE forever much like Japan. The only way to do that is to make sure the economy never fully recovers which is why QE is the ultimate growth killer.

The Swiss are only the first to give up the peg, not the last. It is less widely discussed, but Asia seems well endeared to the US dollar peg, however, they too seem to be moving away from this after the US's last massive deficit binge and QE implementation. China was the most vocal after being called a currency manipulator by the US for trying to devalue their currency in response to US devaluation.

In the end, I believe in free market theory and thus deride artificial things like pegging. Without pegs, then countries would be fully accountable for their own performance as it should be. The current global system allows both sides to play currency games to shirk their payment obligations, transfer the pain to others, or to gain trade advantages. It is no wonder there are currency wars.

Unless methodology and approach is constantly evaluated, corrected, and improved the accuracy of any overly broad given statistic measuring is liable to wane, especially when there is reason to alter it, is widely dispersed to the very people it measures, depends on self reporting, involves multiple statistics dependent on one another, involves parties that may have reason to lie, and accuracy is a problem for many components of those statistics.

Sadly, there needs to be constant vetting and review of government statistics, not fewer, and there needs to be resources applied to an agency separate from those doing the statistics to root out and find errors, lies, or misleading facts in all the data the government these days espouses as fact. Some statistical claims are clearly oversimplifications of the data even if the statistics themselves are correct. There seems to be a serious need for the market to trade on the news and don't even bother looking for the facts. Government statistics are a case in point.