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There are large tungsten deposits outside of China. The issue is, China has such a monopoly it controls the price. I have been apart of at least three Tungsten
by rmm 9y ago
There are large tungsten deposits outside of China. The issue is, China has such a monopoly it controls the price.
I have been apart of at least three Tungsten Mine pre-feasibility studies. All they need to do is ramp up production, and the price falls to a point where NPV of your tungsten project falls to zero.
- im3w1l 9y agoWhat about futures?
- swalsh 9y agoPrices aside, you probably also don't want to introduce a dependency on china in your weapons supply chain. This I believe was also the primary reason for the GM bailout.
- maxerickson 9y agoWhat does GM make that is important to military readiness? I can think of the Hummer, but that wasn't GM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_General .
- rz2k 9y agoPossibly the idea that a large number of subcontractors and suppliers would also have gone out of business. I think it would be difficult to determine which rationales were sufficient to get enough votes for the bailout to pass, but the cost of creating a supply from scratch after a period of zero demand from GM might have been far more expensive to the aggregate economy than the bailout was. Therefore the cost was judged 'worth it' in spite of the implicit reward to GM for decades of mismanagement.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe bailout involved completely wiping out the equity of GM. The GM that exists now is a different company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motors_Liquidation_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motors_Liquidation_Company The bailout can still have been a sweetheart deal for the creditors of the company, but it didn't do the old GM any good. I tend to think the motivation of the bailout was to reduce disruption in the job market, I don't think there would have been much more than a short term disruption in the OEM business.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoThere's actually an entire non-big3 industry which manufacturers military hardware in the US. Your point about not wanting foreign dependencies is a good one though (see also strategic oil reserve). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97843617 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9784361...