Washington Now Owns Pieces of Miners and Chipmakers
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19 OCTOBER 2026
By Mike Leesponsored Trump's New Dollar |
It was not voted on. It was not debated in the Senate.  Porter says President Trump is replacing the U.S. dollar, and he says he is doing it through executive order 14241 and a treaty signed by thirteen nations inside the State Department. Whether you support him or not, you will be using the result to buy groceries. This has happened to Americans once before. Most of them never understood it. Dear Reader, In July 1974, Henry Kissinger sent the Treasury Secretary to Jeddah with an offer for King Faisal. Price your oil in dollars. Put the proceeds back into American bonds. The United States guarantees your kingdom. Faisal agreed. On one condition. It was never to be announced. Within a year every major oil producer on earth priced oil in dollars, and every country on earth had to hold them to buy fuel. Nobody voted on that either. What followed is the part people remember. America minted a large number of new millionaires every day for decades. The other half never gets printed. The same arrangement quietly took everyone else apart. The dollar lost a substantial share of its purchasing power. The groceries that cost $100 the year Kissinger did the deal cost more than $600 today. The families who owned assets got carried upward. The families who saved carefully in cash - who did exactly what they were told was responsible - were stripped. Slowly. Legally. Without a single letter in the mail explaining why.  Today the top 10% of American households own the vast majority of all stock market wealth. That gap is not a story about who worked harder. It is a story about who understood what had happened to the money. It is happening again right now. Porter says this: In December, thirteen nations signed a declaration inside the State Department called Pax Silica. It commits every signatory to place the minerals, the refining, the energy and the semiconductors behind artificial intelligence under American and allied control. It is published. Almost nobody has read it. Once you have, the last two years stop being random. Greenland. The tariffs. The threats to annex Canada. The $1.4 trillion deal with the UAE. A $12 billion federal stockpile of metals most Americans cannot name. The government taking direct equity stakes in mining companies - MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals - for the first time in peacetime. Porter argues none of it is chaos — he sees it all as one plan. Ray Dalio, who built the largest hedge fund in the world by studying five hundred years of monetary history, calls what is happening the breakdown of the monetary order. Fortune calls it the biggest change to the world's relationship with the dollar in a generation. I have spent thirty years on exactly this. I publicly commented on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2006. I discussed buying gold and silver in 2008. I also wrote about the risks of COVID-era money printing. I have laid the whole thing out in a new briefing, including the five companies I believe sit at the chokepoints of what comes next, and one asset available through any brokerage account today. Good investing, Porter Stansberry |
Three Numbers to Start
$12B | the critical-minerals stockpile the White House announced in February, funded by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan and $2 billion of private money. |
91% | China’s share of global rare-earth processing, by the International Energy Agency’s estimate. Beijing’s pause on its widest export controls ends on 10 November. |
1.49B | options contracts cleared in the United States in September, 6.2% more than a year earlier. |
ad It was not voted on. It was not debated in the Senate. Watch Porter's Briefing |
Washington Now Owns Pieces of Miners and Chipmakers
On 20 March 2025 President Trump signed Executive Order 14241, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production.” It handed Defense Production Act powers to the Pentagon and the Development Finance Corporation and added uranium, copper, potash and gold to the minerals it covers.
Equity followed. In July 2025 the Pentagon agreed to put $400 million into MP Materials, which runs the only active rare-earth mine in the United States, for a stake of about 15%, and guaranteed a floor price of $110 a kilogram for its neodymium-praseodymium oxide. In August the Commerce Department took 9.9% of Intel for $8.87 billion. The Energy Department took 5% of Lithium Americas and 5% of its Thacker Pass project in Nevada, and the Pentagon paid $35.6 million for about 10% of Trilogy Metals in Alaska.
The deals came faster this year. In February the White House announced Project Vault, a $12 billion stockpile of critical minerals. On 8 October the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital offered Wolfspeed, a silicon-carbide chipmaker that left bankruptcy a year ago, a 30-year loan of up to $1.5 billion in return for warrants on up to 7.5% of its shares. On 14 October the administration doubled its stake in GlobalFoundries, which will run two new chip plants owned by a vehicle the American and Japanese governments share.
China Processes 91% of the World’s Rare Earths
Minerals come first because China controls the supply. It mines about 69% of the world’s rare earths, and the International Energy Agency puts its share of processing and separation at up to 91%. Chinese plants make about 94% of the sintered permanent magnets that go into electric motors and wind turbines.
Beijing has used that position. Its April 2025 controls on seven elements, including yttrium and dysprosium, are still in force, and outside China yttrium oxide rose about 140-fold to roughly $1,100 a kilogram by May. China paused a wider set of controls it announced in October 2025, and the pause expires on 10 November with no extension announced.
Washington is signing up allies as well. The State Department launched Pax Silica in Washington on 12 December 2025, a declaration covering mineral refining, energy, semiconductors and computing. Qatar, the UAE, India, Italy, the European Union and more than a dozen other governments have joined since.
Porter Stansberry reads the executive orders, the stakes and Pax Silica as one plan for the dollar. His briefing at the top names five companies he says sit at the chokepoints.
Tesla Has Logged More Than 1 Million Unsupervised Miles
Tesla runs its robotaxi service in seven metro areas: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and the San Francisco Bay Area. On 3 September it reported more than 1 million cumulative miles driven with no safety monitor on board.
California moves slowest. Tesla’s robotaxi unit there holds only a DMV permit to test autonomous cars with a safety driver, and its Bay Area rides carry a driver. Proposed DMV rules would require 50,000 autonomous miles on public roads with a safety driver before a company can test without one. Waymo runs more than 4,000 cars in 15 metro areas.
Investors get Tesla’s numbers on Wednesday. Analysts expect adjusted earnings of about 45 cents a share on revenue of $27.9 billion for the third quarter. The shares are down 19.4% this year, according to TipRanks, and they fell after each of the last three reports, by 14.5% after July’s.
The note below starts with a photo taken at a red light in California. It asks why Elon Musk keeps putting these cars on public roads, and says he is testing something other than the car.
sponsored The Red-Light Photo |
Look at this photo.  That intersection is in California. That traffic light is red. That Mazda on the right is completely ordinary. And sitting one lane over — looking like it landed from a different decade — is this. The person who took this shot was on their way home from work. They almost did not stop to take it. But something made them pull out their phone. Because even in California — where people have seen everything — this still makes people look twice. Now ask yourself why Elon keeps putting these on public roads. Not on test tracks. Not in controlled environments. On real streets. In real cities. Next to real people going about their day. Because he is not testing the vehicle anymore. He is testing something else entirely. And in just a few weeks that something else becomes a business move that could dwarf everything Tesla ever did. Ten times more American millionaires than Tesla ever created. One backdoor play most investors have not found yet. The window is short. |
Americans Traded 1.49 Billion Options Contracts in September
The Options Clearing Corporation cleared 1.49 billion options contracts in September, 6.2% more than a year earlier. The daily average this year stands at 70.6 million contracts, up 20.6%. Index options grew fastest, by 21.9% in September, while equity options fell 13.9%.
Cboe expects more than 18 billion contracts to trade this year, against about 4 billion a decade ago. In the first half Nvidia and Tesla each accounted for 9% of single-stock options volume.
An option gives you the right, with no obligation, to buy a stock (a call) or sell it (a put) at a set price before a set date. Traders build the swing they expect from earnings into the price. Before Wednesday’s report, Tesla options imply a move of about 7.5% either way, roughly $27 a share, against an average move of 6% after the past four reports.
Bill Poulos has written a free beginners’ book on options trading, and he says he plans to charge for it later. The volume is public. The basics are in his book.
sponsored Options for Beginners |
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What Is Scheduled
20 Oct | SpaceX reports third-quarter results after the close. |
21 Oct | Tesla reports third-quarter results after the close. |
28 Oct | the Fed’s rate decision, six days before the midterm elections. Last week futures put the odds of a hike at 29% to 34%. |
10 Nov | China’s pause on its wider rare-earth export controls ends, and the October consumer price index comes out. |
ad Whether you support him or not, you will be using the result to buy groceries. Watch Porter's Briefing |
The Dollar’s Share
56.7% | The dollar’s share of the world’s allocated foreign-exchange reserves at the end of June, out of $13.22 trillion. Porter Stansberry argues the next change to the dollar is already in writing. His briefing is at the top. |
Forget the hot picks — read the order before it reaches your grocery bill. Because the best trade you’ll ever make is the loss you never took. Mike LeeDeals CatchersThanks for reading. See you tomorrow. |
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