Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? (2024)

Historically it's been the latter as a stabilization fund [0], but is increasingly moving to the former because due to political pressures Norway has had to push for ESG, which has begun to degrade some of the political power a fund like the GPFG has, because China, India, the UAE, KSA, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian and EMEA countries are spinning up SWFs and SDFs that do not really care about ethical concerns.

It's not like 20 or 30 years ago when the only pension funds with massive amounts of dry powder were the Ontario Teachers Fund, CalPERs, or the GPFG.

There are alternative capital markets now because it has become easier to raise capital outside the West. For example, look at the IPO boom happening in India todau - a number of Silicon Valley startups that would have listed on the NYSE decided to list on the NSE instead because it's easier for a company with $50-100M in revenue to IPO in India versus the US today, which is what Freshworks trailblazed in 2021. The same thing happened in China and HK in the 2010s, which helped build the domestic capital market needed to trickle down into VC funding that helped spawn companies like DeepSeek and Biren.

In Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the gold standard for SWFs and SDFs is Temasek in Singapore and what became the Master Trust in Japan - they are entirely focused on developing new industries by coordinating state capital and SoEs with private sector capital, and are driven by the primary goal of developing industry - not moral or ethical considerations. National security and sovereignity is the overarching goal.

Western funds have become heavily politicized due to the rise of activist investors along with the fact that the majority of capital at this point is a mix of private sector capital and very large (think billions of dollars of AUM) family offices where a heir or group of heirs wants to leverage their fortune for their pet project (eg. Actual Communism and extreme far left politics like Fergie Chambers [yes I recognize the irony] or extreme far right politics like Timothy Mellon)

[0] - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/sovereignwealth/files/...

Fair enough.

Neodymium and Dysprosium are REEs.

Molybdenum is not but it is a critical element that is also commonly brought up in the same conversations as REEs.

I think recentering the convo to "critical minerals" would solve the issue.