Why Trump Wants Greenland
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Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is January 8th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 and the Dow lost steam, ending the day in the red. The Nasdaq rose. Shares and homebuilders fell after President Trump said he'd ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes. Blackstone, a major investor in the asset, also fell as much as 9%. Trump had a busy day. He also said he won't allow defense companies to issue share buybacks and dividends. That sent defense stocks down with Lockheed Martin dropping 5%. And finally, the yield on 10-year treasuries fell after ADP private jobs data showed that hiring rose moderately in December. Okay, what else is happening? Fresh off the extraction of Venezuela's president, President Trump has turned to another target, Greenland.
The president first proposed buying the Denmark territory back in 2019, but now he says the U.S., quote, needs Greenland for national security. The White House said it's weighing a range of options to acquire the island and hasn't ruled out the use of military force. That triggered sharp pushback from European leaders who insisted that, quote, Greenland belongs to its people. So why is Trump fixated on this territory? And what does it mean for markets? Here to help us understand this, we're speaking with Gracelyn Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Gracelyn, thank you for joining us on Profiteer Markets.
Thanks so much for having me.
So President Trump wants to go in. He says he wants to consider using military force to acquire Greenland. Let's just start with your initial reactions to this news. And then let's get into what resources they have and why he's going after them.
President Trump's focus on Greenland is actually aligned with his broader approach to foreign policy. What we saw starting January last year was actually a realignment of our foreign policy very closely tied to critical minerals. In a way, it feels a bit like we're playing a real-life game of Settlers of Catan. So if you think about foreign policy announcements on Ukraine, Greenland, Democratic Republic of Congo, Argentina, minerals has featured in every one of those discussions. And a lot of this hinges on the fact that we are really contending with the fact that China has a dominance on the critical minerals that we need for our national economic and energy security. So, you know, we don't have all of those geological reserves here at home necessarily.
So we're looking to go out and secure those resources from other places. And Greenland has some really good deposits.
What is the sort of makeup of those deposits? Like, what do they have that we don't have? How much do they have? What does the resource richness look like in Greenland?
So the biggest mineral, I mean, you know, here in the U.S., we have a very long list of critical minerals. We have 60 of them. But the one that we are most vulnerable and that has kind of dominated political and market rhetoric over the last year are something that we call rare earths. And rare earths are a group of 17 minerals. And the funny thing, they're not actually rare. They're found everywhere. Right. But it's kind of hard to find them in commercially dense quantities. So we need rare earths. The number one thing we think about is we need them for every form of defense technology because they go into the permanent magnets that are used in our missiles, lasers, tanks, fighter jets, submarines.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–8:13
2
What makes Greenland's mineral resources valuable to the U.S.?
8:13–14:38
3
How does President Trump's focus on Greenland align with his foreign policy?
14:38–19:39
4
What critical minerals does Greenland possess that the U.S. needs?
19:39–20:20
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Prof G Markets
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