USTR asked in February how a reference price for a critical mineral should be calculated, and on Friday Treasury welcomed a data company publishing five of them
Question B1 of the notice asked how it should be done.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative published a request for comments on 26 February on the design of a plurilateral agreement on trade in critical minerals. Section B put four questions about setting a price: how target or reference prices for various critical minerals should be calculated, how often they should be adjusted to reflect market dynamics, to what extent they should reflect the differing costs of extraction, processing and refining across markets, and how anyone could be sure such a price was high enough to support a reasonable risk-adjusted return. Section C then asked how minimum prices could be enforced on imports, and named the tools in the question itself: ad valorem, specific or compound tariffs, and quotas or tariff-rate quotas.
Comments closed on 19 March.
On Friday the Treasury welcomed prices. Its statement says S&P Global has introduced new reference prices covering gallium, germanium, tungsten, antimony, and neodymium and praseodymium, and calls that an important advancement in transparency that enables market-based price discovery. One caveat belongs high rather than at the foot. This desk could not read the S&P Global announcement itself, because the company's commodity news pages refuse automated requests, so every description of what was published here is Treasury's description of it.
Why the benchmark is the load-bearing part
A price floor needs a price.
Treasury's statement describes the Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals as seeking phased-in, mineral-specific price floors adjusted at the border, alongside common standards among like-minded trading partners. The February notice is blunter about the machinery. It says USTR anticipates that such an agreement will include a commitment by all parties to implement minimum prices or other price mechanisms, with appropriate border measures, and then asks respondents which tariffs and quotas would enforce them. Set the floor too low and it does nothing. Set it too high and it is a transfer from every buyer downstream, which is why the first thing the notice asked about was arithmetic.
"Transparent, market-based pricing is essential to attracting the private capital needed to build secure, resilient, and diversified critical mineral supply chains," Secretary Scott Bessent said in the statement.
Where it came from
The February notice sits on a section 232 finding. Proclamation 11001, signed on 14 January, recorded the President concurring with the Commerce Secretary's finding that processed critical minerals and their derivatives are being imported in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States, and directed Commerce and USTR jointly to pursue agreements with trading partners.
Treasury says the proposed framework reflects nearly 2,500 public comments on the February notice, and that negotiations build on discussions among G7 finance and trade ministers and on action plans developed with Japan, Mexico and the European Union. No agreement has been signed.
