Stock Market Fluctuations Won’t Stop ‘Strong Measures Against China’: Bessent

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Stock market volatility won’t influence the United States’ decision to respond with “strong measures” against Beijing’s aggressive move to restrict rare earth exports, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Oct. 15.

“President Trump, he likes a high stock market. But he, like me, believes a high stock market is a result of policy,” Bessent said.

Trump and officials have previewed various retaliatory measures if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) follows through with its plan to severely restrict rare earths trade globally.

During an Oct. 15 press conference, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Beijing’s Oct. 9 rare earths export control announcement was “not proportional retaliation” to anything the United States or other countries have proposed.

“It is an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world,” Greer said.

The new rare earths control regime would require Beijing’s approval for the trade of any item made anywhere if it contains at least 0.1 percent of rare earths sourced from or processed in China.

Trump had imposed tariffs on countries around the world to address the trade deficit. In China’s case, additional tariffs were imposed in response to the CCP’s refusal to cooperate on restricting the export of fentanyl precursors.

The tariffs were largely delayed in their implementation, giving countries time to negotiate favorable trade deals.

But Beijing responded with a round of rare earth magnet restrictions before coming to the table for talks, and continued to slow-walk the resumption of exports even after it agreed to do so.

U.S. and Chinese trade officials have met for in-person negotiations four times this year, and initial U.S. tariffs have been paused from taking effect to make room for negotiations.

Greer criticized the Chinese regime’s latest move.

“It’s a clear repudiation of everything we’ve been working towards for the last six months,” he said.

Greer added that the Chinese side seems unable to conduct reviews of this scale, given how poorly the first round of rare earth magnet restrictions went earlier this year.

“They didn’t have enough people to organize it; separate and apart from it being just wrong entirely, they actually couldn’t implement it,” he said.

“Take that program, which was trying to deal with thousands of license applications, and multiply it by a thousand. That’s what we’re talking about.”

Bessent said that while the United States and other countries do not want to decouple from China, this latest move is one that forces decoupling, “which we don’t believe China wants,” he added.

“Make no mistake, this is China versus the world. They have put these unacceptable export controls on the entire world,” he said.

Bessent clarified that the United States has maintained its desire to derisk, becoming less dependent on China for strategic resources, but that there are many nonstrategic areas where trade and investment can flourish, such as retail.

He also indicated that the CCP’s rhetoric in defending its latest move has been hypocritical.

“China says that these rare earths are used in military materials,” he said.

Bessent pointed out that “China buys 60 percent of Russian energy [and] 90 percent of Iranian energy.”

“So who is fueling the Russian war machine?” he stated.

“This individual was very disrespectful,” Bessent said. “We’ve had four rounds of talks: Geneva, London, Stockholm, and Madrid. And both sides approached them with great respect, and this individual did not.”

“He showed up uninvited in Washington and said, ‘China will cause global chaos if the port shipping fees go through,’” Bessent said at the press conference.

He said Li visited on Aug. 28 with “very incendiary language.”

Bessent had previously said that Trump believed the rare earths restrictions could have come from a lower-level official, not Xi, possibly a “hardliner” who wanted to compromise U.S.–China relations.