Ambassador Greer Welcomes S&P Global's Critical Minerals Price Benchmarks, Citing Coming Trade Pact

The U.S. Trade Representative's office put its weight behind a new set of price benchmarks for critical minerals on August 7, when Ambassador Jamieson Greer issued a statement welcoming S&P Global's release of transparent pricing data for five minerals central to electronics, defense and clean-energy supply chains: gallium, germanium, tungsten, antimony, and the paired rare earths neodymium and praseodymium. The move itself doesn't change any tariff or trade rule — it's a statement of support for privately published price data — but it signals where U.S. trade policy is heading.

Greer tied the benchmarks directly to an Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals that USTR has been negotiating since launching talks in January 2026, which is designed to set phased-in, border-adjusted price floors across participating countries. The underlying complaint from Washington is that non-market pricing — largely a reference to Chinese state involvement in critical mineral markets — has left global prices too unstable for companies to plan long-term investments. Reliable, transparent benchmarks, in USTR's framing, give private investors a number they can trust when deciding whether to build new mines, refineries or processing plants outside that system.