I am delighted to announce that TMR will be hosting a live 60-minute conference call and Q & A session with Dr. Dambisa Moyo, an international economist and one of the world’s leading experts on macroeconomics and global affairs. She is the author of the recently published book Winner Take All: China’s Race For Resources And What It Means For The World.

The live call is scheduled for 9:15 AM EST on Monday, July 16, 2012.

In addition to her new book Winner Take All, Dr. Moyo is the New York Times bestselling author of How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years Of Economic Folly – And The Stark Choices Ahead, and Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There Is A Better Way For Africa. Her work regularly appears in economic and finance-related publications such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Moyo was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and was named to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum. She holds a doctorate in Economics from Oxford University and a masters degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Moyo completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and an MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington, DC.

You are welcome to join us on the free call. The focus of our discussion will be the important issues raised by Dr. Moyo in Winner Take All, which include:

• The key drivers behind China’s growing appetite for natural resources and their geopolitical implications;

• What recent events in the rare-earths market can tell us about China’s approach to mineral commodities and other hard assets;

• The rapidly evolving dynamics of the China – Africa relationship;

• What all of this means for the rest of world;

• …and more

In addition to listening in on the discussion, you’ll also have the opportunity to put questions to Dr. Moyo during the call.

If you’d like to participate, reserve your slot by registering here, and we’ll make sure that you get the call-in details. If you’re not sure that you’ll be able to call in, register anyway and we’ll let you know when an audio file of the call is available for listening.

Slots on the free call will be limited – so don’t delay – register today!

Update – July 21, 2012: you can now listen to the completed call by clicking the Play button below.

Earlier this week a conference was held in Washington D.C. on Technology and Rare Earth Metals, which I was unable to attend due to other commitments. I was, however, contacted during the meeting by a number of people asking for clarification on some comments made by Dudley Kingsnorth, the Australian rare earths specialist. Mr. Kingsnorth apparently took issue, while on the stage, with comments that I made in December 2009, in which I said that he had predicted that China would not be able to meet its internal demands for rare earths in the near future. I would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight on this matter, and to hopefully put this minor controversy to rest.

Readers of The Jack Lifton Report who have been with me since launching the site in the fall of 2009, will recall that I published an article on October 15, 2009, available for download to subscribers only, called “The Rare Earth Crisis of 2009”. In this article, on the subject of the alleged existence of a report in China on restricting exports of rare earths, I said the following:

“The problem that has been exposed by the “discovery” of the memorandum on rare earth export allocations is that it proves the conjecture highlighted by well-known Australian rare earth specialist, Dudley Kingsnorth, that Chinese domestic demand for rare earths is rapidly catching up to Chinese supply output. Mr. Kingsnorth has predicted that before the expiration of China’s next five year plan in 2015 Chinese domestic demand will exceed its domestic production.”

I made the statement in the last sentence based on a chart that Mr. Kingsnorth presented at the 2008 SME Annual Meeting, and which was widely circulating at the time that I wrote my October 2009 article. A version of it is reproduced below:

One can see that this chart indicates that by 2012, the supply in China for rare earths is forecasted to be equalled by the demand for these materials, and given the trends of both factors, it would be reasonable to suggest that past 2012, demand would exceed supply. This is even more clearly illustrated in the following chart from the 2007 Roskill report on Rare Earths, authored by Mr. Kingsnorth:

Yet another variation of these two charts appears in the presentation made by Molycorp Mineral’s Mark Smith at the China Magnetics 2009 conference at the end of October 2009 – AFTER the publication of my original article –  again indicating that Chinese demand would meet Chinese supply by 2012.

One week after the original publication date of the aforementioned article, Mr. Kingsnorth presented an updated set of data and forecasts for the rare earths space at the Critical & Strategic Metals meeting in Washington DC, during October 20-22, 2009, for which I was the conference Chairman and Mr. Kingsnorth was a featured presenter by my invitation. He also distributed hard copies of a comprehensive document titled “An Overview of the Rare Earths Market”, published in October 2009, which also contained the updated chart, which is reproduced below.

From this chart, we can see that, based on updated information and data, Mr. Kingsnorth is now forecasting that China will be self-sufficent in rare earths at least until 2014, and probably beyond. It is my understanding that an additional version of the Overview document was published in November 2009, though I am not sure if the chart was updated in this document or not.

We fast forward now to December of last year. In response to requests to publish my original article to a wider audience, I reproduced the October 15, 2009 article as a posting at the Seeking Alpha web site, specifically on December 15, 2009. What I did not do, was include the publication date of the original article here at The Jack Lifton Report, and no doubt this is a contributing factor to the confusion on this matter. What I was also not aware of at the time, was that Mr. Kingsnorth had updated the earliest charts above, presumably at some point in 2008, and presented new data at the PDAC meeting in Toronto in March 2009, which I did not attend.  A version of that chart is reproduced below:

We can see then from this chart, and the chart above it, that from at least some point in 2008 onwards, Mr. Kingsnorth has actually been forecasting a surplus of rare earth supplies in China in future years.

Very shortly after publishing the article at Seeking Alpha, I was contacted by Mr. Kingsnorth, asking me to withdraw the comments detailed above, in the Seeking Alpha article, claiming that they were “totally incorrect, without foundation and misleading.”

Based on the lack of an original publication date on the Seeking Alpha article, it would be reasonable for Mr. Kingsnorth to have thought that I had originally written my comments after the publication of not one but two revisions of his chart, and that on the basis of these latest charts alone, comments that Chinese demand was about to exceed supply would indeed be inaccurate. However, given that Mr. Kingsnorth did publish charts in the recent past, still in wide circulation at the time of my original article, indicating that future Chinese demand would meet or exceed supply in the relatively near future, I would have to disagree that the comments were without foundation, albeit based on information from Mr. Kingsnorth that, at the time of the original publication of the article, had been superseded by more up to date forecasts. There was certainly no intent to mislead. I would also point out that the 2008 and 2009 charts have had very little circulation and were difficult to obtain even for the purposes of the present article.

I regret not being aware of the 2008 chart, presented at the PDAC meeting in March 2009, and I regret not including the original publication date of my article when reproducing it at the Seeking Alpha site, as it might have alleviated the subsequent confusion as to the origin of my commentary. Whenever I  re-post articles via various channels I usually do so within a relatively short time period; that was not the case for the article being discussed here. Going forward, I will look to include the original publication date on any such articles.

I of course take no issue with Mr. Kingsnorth or anyone else revising their forecasts on a periodic basis; such actions are of course natural and expected, in the face of new data that individuals obtain, I do the same thing myself and it is sensible to publish such updates as soon as is practicably possible.

As it happens though, and separate from the issue above, I respectfully disagree with Mr. Kingsnorth’s current projections on this matter. The latest annual production target figures from China, seem to me to show a significant reduction in the targeted annual output of antimony, tungsten, and the rare earths – three resources for which China is the world’s principal supplier – compared to Western estimates (e.g. by the USGS) of what those numbers were and should be. Issues of environmental management and productivity may now be intervening to cause me to re-assert my original belief that Chinese demand and Chinese supply could cross even earlier than thought, so that Mr. Kingsnorth’s original prediction may now have more validity than it did even when it was first made. Other commentaters and analysts would seem to share this viewpoint.  I am looking to further validate my own predictions by investigating the situation in China itself, on my planned trips to China later this year.

Anyway – I hope that the above information provides sufficient information to resolve the issues raised by my comments in December, and those by Mr. Kingsnorth last week.

One of the mining media outlets that covered INDABA called me an “apocalyptic soothsayer” after hearing me talk about the global imbalance between rare metal production rates (supply) and growing Asian demand. I liken those journalists to the advisors to Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West. As Gibbon said in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (paraphrased by me) …at the end 200,000 barbarians which the legions of Caesar’s (Julius) would have swept aside brought to ruin and the end the “Roman” army of 200,000 mercenaries who were paid by the exhausted and effete Romans of the last days.

So, let’s be clear, I am saying that the clueless politicians of our age, elected by special interests, none of which care about the fate and standard of living of the mass of humanity, are bringing us to a critical point in history. If we don’t start setting goals for our economies (of the various nations) in terms of getting the necessary material goods for their health and safety and then the comfort of the most people possible then any hope of a peaceful stable world ends.

The airlines say that when the oxygen masks drop serve yourself first so you can then help others.

The USA must now re-industrialize to save ourselves and this means that we must produce domestically whatever we can to be self-sufficient. THIS IS THE ONLY PATH TO THE CREATION OF WEALTH. After we re-industrialize we can resume the path to helping keep ourselves and the world safe from self-immolation in resource wars.

Globalization to maximize profit was a mistake, because its negative economic consequences were overlooked.

We must now increase the production rate of those resources we know we have, or we have doomed ourselves to a progressively lower standard of living. We must stop frivolously wasting our increasingly expensive precious resources of rare metals on toys that dissipate them and prioritize closed loop recycling of rare metals as we begin to increase our production rate infrastructure, because without this increase there will be no additional supply. This may well be the most expensive re-industrialization in history. It is criminal stupidity for our politicians to assume, as they surely do, that the world of natural resources is of infinite dimension awaiting at the beck and call of our mining technology.

I do not believe that there is any long-term effect from so-called “anthropogenic ” global warming. I do however believe that global economic stupidity exists and can have dire consequences.

I’m going to soon be seventy and thanks to modern medicine, clean and cheap healthy food, and genetics I could live another generation or more. Please don’t make me watch America’s standard of living decline in that period. Americans, please wake up to the consequences of knee-jerk “environmentalism” before you reduce our standard of living to the point of no return. Money like rare metals is a precious resource; it must not be wasted any more.

I am an analyst of the market fundamentals, and the end uses, and the future trends of the end uses of the technology metals. I estimate the probability of success of a mining venture and report it as the likelihood that it will produce the metal(s) in its deposit(s) economically, and in a time frame that will allow it to be financed by those who expect a return on their investment in a reasonable time. I utilize a comprehensive set of metrics of my own design, which I am considering making available to a wider audience early in 2010.

I am not a stock picker, but I know that some investors will see my probability of success figure as a measure of the value of the venture being analyzed. I actually make my estimates of the probability of success for:

1. End users making long term strategic plans;
2. Procurement officers looking to issue off-takes and trying to quantify the risk of non-production;
3. Institutional investors doing long term mining finance; and
4. Governmental policy makers.

I am a paid consultant to institutional investors, private investors, and both public and private companies. In the interests of objectivity I do not own shares in any publicly or privately traded company at all, in any sector in which I provide analysis or commentary. I am paid only for my time. I gladly respond to inquiries from national and local governments for advice or help, and I am not always paid even my expenses for trips to Washington, D.C. I prefer to be paid for my travel expenses to conferences where I am only a speaker, but that is not always possible. I therefore chose my speaking engagements carefully.

Above all I want to continue to be a disinterested observer and I place my principles above all. I am trying to give informed advice about the rare metals sector to everyone whose life is impacted directly by what goes on in that sector. This may from time to time offend some who are dedicated to only making money and sometimes feel that they have to bend the truth to uphold their “shareholder value.”

So be it.