Helberg: DoD off-take agreements and price floors can break China's rare earth monopoly
Jacob Helberg · No Priors Ep. 129 | With U.S. Under Secretary of State (E) Designate Jacob Helberg · Aug 28, 2025 · at 10:21
Jacob Helberg, Under Secretary of State Designate, outlines how the US government can protect domestic rare earth refineries from Chinese market manipulation.
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“The solution to help put the genie back in the bottle is, I think actually the DoD's deal with MP Materials offers a good template, which is you need an anchor buyer and an end customer, and you need a price floor. So you need to agree with the supplier, in this case MP Materials, on a floor for a price, because what happens when these big off-take agreements When a western refinery tries to compete with China, is China will artificially sink the price, the global price, depress it, in order to put western alternatives out of business, and then they raise the price again, which is classic monopolistic behavior. We can fix that with off-take agreements and a price floor, and I think the MP-DOD deal offers a good blueprint for that.”
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