Recently I paid over $10 for a simple Oscar Mayer 12-ounce package of bacon. Jerome Powell, help me! Well, the U.S. Federal Reserve doesn’t set bacon prices, or things that come from China like rare earth metals, most of which I’ve never heard of but are apparently in my phone and car’s dashboard. Geopolitical tensions and export restrictions in China sending the prices of crucial metal components in electronics way up. The price of dysprosium is up to $910 per kilogram, triple the pre-export restrictions price. The price of terbium hit $3,700 per kilogram, quadruple the previous rate. The benchmark price for gallium has reached $1,325 per kilogram, which is 2.3 times the price at the beginning of the year and the highest price on record. China produces 99 percent of the world’s gallium. Our Federal Reserve can only do so much when it comes to combatting inflation. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s are sponsored by Two Dots, whose conversational screening agent replaces manual underwriting with a streamlined, end-to-end process that reduces risk and fraud while securing safer borrowers, increasing profitable loan volume, and lowering underwriting overhead. Today’s has an interview with Creative Title’s Caleb Christopher on how lenders can adopt advanced AI and creative financing models while maintaining transparency, security, and consumer protection, and examining how private-capital “non-bank bank” structures, tightening credit, and the needs of underserved borrowers will shape the balance between innovation, risk, and trust.)