The answer to that question is yes.
That's according to Jim Rickards, who has advised the CIA, Treasury, and Pentagon on strategic threats and economic policy.
We need only to look beneath our feet, says Rickards, to find the solution to global supply chain pressures over critical supplies.
The issue of critical materials and rare earths came to a head recently as China stopped shipments to seven rare earths last week.
“We don’t need to look to China. We don’t need to invent some miracle technology,” Rickards says, in a release. “We already have what we need — we’ve just been blocking ourselves from using it.”
According to Rickards, the materials stored in these reserves — lithium, copper, silver, rare earth elements — form the backbone of nearly every future-facing industry: electric grids, artificial intelligence, defense systems, robotics, and semiconductors.
“These aren’t luxury metals. These are strategic,” he says.
In a recently released interview, Rickards reveals what he calls “America’s domestic supply chain” — a vast reserve of essential materials locked beneath federally controlled land, protected by legal code, and never activated.
So What's the Roadblock?
The problem? Rickards says decades of unchecked federal agency control shut off access to this land, effectively cutting off the United States from its own supply chain.
But the good news is that Rickards believes that the 2024 reversal of the Chevron Doctrine by the U.S. Supreme Court will remove the obstacle to allowing these reserves to be used.
“This is not about theory. This is about access,” Rickards explains. “And for the first time in a generation, that access is now legally possible.”
It's the underlying goal of what this means to the US that Rickards is after." We are the only nation that locks up its own strategic materials," he warns. “And if we don’t flip the switch now, we may not get another chance.”
