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America’s Biggest Rare-Earth Producer Makes a Play to End China’s Dominance

Fresh Pentagon investment is turbocharging MP Materials’ goals, but the hurdles it has faced—and still faces—highlight the challenge of reviving the industry in the U.S.

FORT WORTH—At an industrial site in this Texas city, men dressed in head-to-toe protective gear dip giant ladles into a well of molten metal heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. They’re making something the U.S. has hardly, if ever, produced at commercial scale in recent decades: rare-earth metals.

The factory is the most visible mark of MP Materials’ MP 7.56%increase; green up pointing triangle high-stakes, billion-dollar bet that an American company can take on China’s dominance over the metals—and the magnets they power in everything from cars and smartphones to missile systems.

In recent months, China has used its chokehold over 90% of the world’s rare-earth magnets to cut off access to Western companies, rattling industrial giants such as Ford and Tesla and forcing the U.S. to the table for trade talks.

MP has invested more than $1 billion in new infrastructure and equipment. A mine it controls in California has become the largest source of rare-earth minerals in the Western Hemisphere. Now, with its expanding Texas facility and fresh investment from the Pentagon, the company is racing to complete the supply chain so it can start converting large quantities of its minerals into high-grade magnets.

General Motors is signed up to start taking deliveries later this year. The Defense Department last week committed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in MP and become its largest shareholder, in a deal that will allow MP to increase its planned magnet production to 10,000 metric tons from the previously planned 1,000. As of now, the name of the new factory is simply “10x.”

A White House spokesman said the deal “marks a major step in rebuilding America’s domestic rare earth industry.” The company’s stock jumped around 50% on the day of the announcement, and has tripled this year. Some rivals also gained.

After years of private and government investment under Trump and Biden, magnet-makers are expanding across the U.S. in an effort to build an industrial base that could meet soaring demand independently of China.

Substantially cutting America’s dependence on Chinese rare-earth magnets won’t be easy, or cheap. But some experts posit it could theoretically be achieved within three to five years, if the current slate of projects push ahead.

Vulcan Elements, a Durham, N.C.-based magnet maker founded by a former Navy officer, plans to supply the military starting next year. Noveon, in San Marcos, Texas, has signed a deal to supply U.S.-made rare-earth magnets to Japan’s Nidec, among the world’s biggest motor makers. German magnet specialist VAC is expected to begin operating a large, Pentagon-funded factory near Sumter, S.C., later this year.

The projects are expected to have a combined capacity to produce several thousand metric tons of the magnets by the end of the year, which adds up to around a third or more of current U.S. imports.

“As we start to build out our permanent magnet manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere, China starts to lose that leverage,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

MP, she added, is “essentially working at warp speed to address one of America’s greatest national and economic security challenges of our time.”

The company’s journey there highlights the hurdles American producers face as they look to reawaken the industry.

Chinese dominance

China still holds most of the rare-earth cards. It has some of the world’s best mines. It also has cheap chemicals for processing, a large technically trained workforce and a stomach for handling toxic rare-earth mining waste.

Western producers have long complained that the country uses its dominance to prevent competitors from emerging, sometimes by flooding the market with supplies, sometimes by adopting restrictive export policies. Beijing has banned the export of key rare-earth technologies and is compiling a list of China’s rare-earth scientists to ensure they don’t share their knowledge abroad.

For some companies, finding another source has become critical.

In April, China began requiring buyers of rare-earth magnets to submit elaborate export applications proving they don’t have military links. The slow processing of these applications forced a Ford SUV plant to temporarily close and sent the wider industry into a panic. One auto supplier paid more than $15 a piece for tiny magnets that usually sell for less than 40 cents, according to a trader familiar with the transaction.

“We cannot get any high-power magnets without China,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said at an event in late June.

Although U.S.-China trade negotiations have led to two separate truces that were supposed to make magnet supplies flow again, exports from China have remained lower than anticipated, especially to defense suppliers.

Some U.S. companies have said they are willing to pay a premium for supply-chain security. They may have to. MP and other emerging suppliers don’t disclose the price of their magnets, but people involved in the industry say they are likely to be, at a minimum, 50% more expensive to produce than China’s.

A rare opportunity

The U.S. has significant underground reserves of rare earths, 17 little-known minerals such as neodymium and samarium. Magnets made from the metals are especially strong, able to attract objects hundreds of times their own weight. But mining and processing the minerals is complex and expensive. The country’s once-thriving industry collapsed in the 1990s and 2000s, unable to compete with China.

A few companies tried at various points to revive it and push into magnet-making. Most failed, incurring big losses for investors. Some in the industry concluded that without government support it was too difficult to beat Chinese prices.

MP co-founders James Litinsky and Michael Rosenthal got into the business almost by accident.

Since the middle of the 20th century, rare earths had been dug from Mountain Pass, a rich deposit in California’s Mojave Desert that for decades dominated global production.

Molycorp, the previous company to run the mine, went bankrupt in 2015 after a surge in Chinese rare-earth exports tanked prices. Litinsky and Rosenthal, childhood friends with backgrounds in finance, had invested in Molycorp bonds, hoping to turn a profit. Few others wanted the mine, and the pair worried that a key strategic asset would be abandoned. In 2017 they gained control of Mountain Pass.

“There was a belief that it couldn’t be fixed,” said Litinsky, MP’s chief executive.

He had gotten rich as a young man, after founding a successful Chicago hedge fund at the age of 28, but was looking for a new challenge. “I certainly didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

MP needed to generate money, and fast, but Litinsky and Rosenthal encountered a bottleneck. Once the ore is mined, it has to undergo a complex process to separate the rare earths from the rock and then isolate the individual minerals. Almost no one outside of China knew how to do that at affordable prices.

Hiring was difficult; the mine had just eight workers—and a lot of wild donkeys—on a remote site that today sits near a billboard with an alien dressed in a cowboy hat advertising beef jerky.

“We’ve got no money, we’ve got eight people, the site was bankrupt, everyone says the U.S. can’t make rare earths,” said Rosenthal, the company’s operations chief. “We couldn’t go to an engineer and say ‘Want to leave Rio Tinto to join us?’”

MP struck an agreement with a Chinese rare-earth company, Shenghe Resources, to provide upfront financing, in exchange for a small stake in MP. Shenghe would then sell MP’s ore to buyers in China, who refined it and then created magnets

As MP got on firmer footing, it used the money it earned from the arrangement to start building its own processing operations. The Pentagon started chipping in grants that came to around $100 million.

Steep learning curve

Although MP’s initial processing operations removed rare earths from the rest of the ore, the company still had to separate out the individual elements, each of which is nearly chemically identical. Rosenthal likened the challenge to designing a chemical process to sort out blue M&Ms from the rest of the M&Ms, and then extracting the cocoa from those candies.

MP built up a plant in California filled with giant vats, called settler-mixers, that gradually winnow out the most valuable rare earths needed in magnets.

By 2023, it was the only U.S. company separating rare earths at commercial scale, allowing it to bypass Chinese refiners and start selling directly to buyers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea.

It is now expanding to separate another class of rare earths: strategically important heavy rare earths, which MP has been stockpiling at its mine.

Despite the progress, the company struggled to stay consistently profitable.

Starting in 2022, a surplus in Chinese rare earths tanked global prices, part of a pattern of Chinese overproduction of critical minerals including nickel, lithium and cobalt that has forced out Western miners around the globe. As prices kept dropping, investors lost patience. MP’s stock crumbled to a fifth of its previous highs.

“I don’t like to be betting behind losing horses,” CNBC analyst Jim Cramer said last year.

Litinsky believed the company’s strategic importance would at some point translate into financial results. But the company still needed to learn how to actually make magnets, as opposed to just processing the ore and sending the minerals to others.

First, they’d need to find the people who could help them.

Magnetic flux

Since rare-earth magnets are hardly made in the U.S. anymore, many of the people with commercial experience are in their 60s and 70s. MP scoured the world for technical talent, netting an executive with experience at a European magnet factory and others with backgrounds at magnet material companies outside of China.

To lead the project, the company hired Alan Lund, a metallurgist who had run a company developing high-performance metal alloys.

Lund was determined to find an anchor customer that would commit to a long-term sales contract. It turned out to be GM, which had analyzed its supply-chain vulnerabilities after Covid-induced shocks and wanted more options.

The next hurdle was finding production equipment for its Fort Worth factory. MP didn’t want to buy in China, the main producer of magnet-making machinery, afraid that Beijing could hold up shipments. That meant seeking out suppliers of tools such as jet mills and furnaces in North America and Europe.

The equipment was more expensive and sometimes required a nearly two-year lead time. But MP’s decisions looked prescient in 2023, when China began expanding export controls to include magnet-production equipment.

MP also had to master the arcane engineering skills needed to make top-quality magnets, including grain boundary diffusion. That process, often abbreviated as GBD, is a way to apply the most expensive materials in a targeted way on the magnet, dramatically lowering the cost.

China is good at it; few others are.

Long before breaking ground in Fort Worth, MP assembled a dedicated team at a small industrial space dubbed “the Garage”—and sometimes called “Bobcat”—to pore over scientific literature and crack the magnet code. Over several years, the company tested different formulations, eventually developing a heavy rare-earth composition that used GBD, and a customized method that gave magnets a consistent coating.

Now, the company is gearing up for commercial-scale magnet production. The front entrance of its Fort Worth plant has a giant American flag composed of red, white and blue hard hats. Compacted rare-earth powders are placed on heat-resistant racks and stuck into furnaces.

Its goal to become a national rare-earths “champion” that can go toe-to-toe with China was turbocharged last week.

Under the deal reached with the Pentagon on Thursday, the Texas plant’s magnet capacity will be tripled and MP will build a second, larger plant. To protect against price fluctuations, the government is setting a price floor for MP’s rare-earth minerals and guaranteeing the purchase of MP’s magnets, giving the company the confidence to plow ahead. Because the Defense Department will likely only require a portion of the magnets, the rest can be sold to commercial customers, like automakers.

But challenges remain. As MP scales up magnet production, it will need to acquire more heavy rare earths than are available at its California mine, which is no easy feat because there are few producers of those outside of China. Building and operating a massive new facility could also create new snags.

Some of its Western competitors say the government’s decision to invest so heavily in a single company could drive promising startups out of the business, hurting U.S. competitiveness over the long term.

“It’s the government picking winners and losers,” said an executive at one rare-earth business, “and they seem to have made a big bet on one company.”

Litinsky says a secure MP is good for the overall industry. “There’s going to be a lot of growth opportunities,” he said.

Measles cases soar in Europe as vaccine coverage falls short

The World Health Organization said infections more than doubled in Europe and Central Asia between 2023 and 2024

Measles cases in Europe and Central Asia have climbed to their highest level for more than a quarter of a century, according to the World Health Organization, more than doubling between 2023 and 2024 as vaccination rates failed to recover to pre-pandemic levels.

Outbreaks of the viral disease have killed children in the US and UK, stoking fears that vaccine hesitancy in high-income countries is threatening hard-won gains from mass immunisation programmes.

“In many ways, vaccination has been a victim of its own success,” said Regina De Dominicis, Europe and Central Asia director for the UN children's agency Unicef.

“Today’s generation has not witnessed the devastating impact of vaccine-preventable diseases — leading to complacency and making it easier for misinformation to take hold.”

Reported measles cases surged from 60,756 in 2023 to 148,974 last year in the WHO’s 53-country European region — which includes Central Asian countries — according to figures released by the UN’s global health body on Tuesday. Cases are now at their highest level since 1997, Unicef added.

A child in Liverpool in England died after contracting the illness, the BBC reported on Sunday. Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital said last week that a number of “seriously unwell” children had been admitted with measles and urged people to get vaccinated.

Even when not lethal, measles can cause blindness and damage organs.

Vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy’s installation as US health secretary has raised further concerns about inoculation rates. Kennedy has sought to cast doubt on the safety of the jab against whooping cough, another disease that is resurgent in Europe and Central Asia.

Whooping cough cases have soared to the highest level since records began in 1980 in the WHO European region, hitting almost 300,000 last year, up from 87,558 in 2023 and 6,345 in 2022.

The bacterial disease can be particularly dangerous for babies, increasing the risk of breathing difficulties, pneumonia and seizures.

The proportion of children fully vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and hepatitis B was at 91 per cent last year, down from 92 per cent in 2019, the WHO said. The coverage level generally considered to create so-called herd immunity for measles is 95 per cent.

Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) and polio jab coverage was at 93 per cent, two percentage points below the pre-pandemic level.

The rise in measles cases is seen as a leading indicator of wider problems with disease prevention. Since the pathogen is highly contagious, infections may reveal patients who are under-vaccinated for other diseases too.  

Kennedy caused widespread alarm last month by attacking the vaccine against whooping cough, which is also highly contagious, at a fundraising event for the Gavi international vaccine alliance.

Health experts criticised his remarks, noting he failed to mention the many studies backing its safety. 

Poor vaccine access, inadequate clinical infrastructure and patient concerns about safety were likely the main reasons for stagnating or falling rates, said Dr David Elliman, a child community health expert and honorary senior associate professor at University College London.

“Well trained healthcare professionals are fundamental to reassuring parents with solid evidence that the vaccines in use are effective — and where serious side effects do occur, they are heavily outweighed by the benefits,” Elliman said.

Swirling conspiracy theories around the convicted paedophile lead the president’s supporters to turn on his officials

Donald Trump is struggling to contain a spiralling crisis over his administration’s handling of files relating to late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein that has exposed a rare fissure in his Maga movement.

During his election campaign, the president promised to release the so-called Epstein files, which have been at the centre of a long-running conspiracy since the disgraced financier died by suicide in 2019.

But the Trump administration’s handling of the case has provoked an uproar in the president’s Maga base, with theories about Epstein’s death and so-called “client list” threatening to cast a long shadow over the White House.

“When people voted for President Trump, releasing the Epstein files was something that was promised to the base,” far-right activist and Maga influencer Laura Loomer told Politico on Monday. “The base is unhappy, and I think that this issue isn’t going to go away.”

Trump’s problems began when the justice department and the FBI last week published a two-page memo after what they described as an “exhaustive review” of material relating to the disgraced financier who in August 2019 was found hanging in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges involving dozens of underage girls.

The memo concluded there was no “client list” and no “credible evidence” that Epstein “blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions”. It also stated he had died by suicide.

The findings flew in the face of myriad conspiracy theories that have circulated in the years since Epstein’s death, often at the hands of Trump’s closest allies.

Prior to entering government, FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino publicly questioned whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered as part of a vast conspiracy to protect powerful people who had been associated with him.

When asked about the list of Epstein’s clients by Fox News in February, attorney-general Pam Bondi replied: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Bondi is now the focus of attack from Maga world, with Loomer and others calling on the president to fire her over the justice department memo.

So far, Trump has staunchly defended his longtime ally, who is seen as integral to the administration’s efforts to overhaul the judicial system.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” he said when a reporter last week tried to ask Bondi a question during a cabinet meeting.

“We have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,” the president said.

Trump went a step further this weekend, saying in a lengthy post on his Truth Social account late Saturday: “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!”

“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” he added.

But Bondi remains in the Maga crosshairs. Several of the loudest voices in the movement criticised the administration’s handling of the Epstein case at a conference organised by conservative activist group Turning Point USA this weekend.

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly called the attorney-general the “villain in this story” in a speech to the gathering.

“You either believe that Pam Bondi was telling the truth then, or that she’s telling the truth now, but both cannot be true,” Kelly said, adding that the saga could “actually cost Trump in the midterms”.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, told conference attendees that Epstein was a “key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments and who was working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government”.

Bannon and Loomer have been among the most vocal Maga figures calling for special prosecutors to investigate the government’s handling of the Epstein investigations.

It is unclear whether a fresh investigation will satisfy the base — or stop the infighting that has reportedly plagued the administration’s top brass in recent days.

Several US media outlets have reported that Patel and Bongino have complained about Bondi’s handling of Epstein, and Bongino has reportedly threatened to quit. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump brushed aside reports of Bongino’s possible departure, saying he had spoken to the deputy FBI director, whom he described as a “very good guy” and said Bongino “sounded terrific”.

Cashmere brand becomes fifth fashion house to be monitored in probe into labour rights violations in Italian supply chains

A Milan court placed Loro Piana under judicial administration for subcontracting production to suppliers that allegedly exploited workers, making the LVMH-owned cashmere brand the latest fashion house to be caught up in a series of investigations into labour rights violations.

The court said Loro Piana had handed the production of apparel, including jackets, to Evergreen Fashion Group, which is owned by a Chinese company.

“The production of such apparel had been carried out in a context of labour exploitation,” according to the ruling seen by the Financial Times.  

Loro Piana has been placed into a one-year court administration to address the shortfalls in its supply chain, the ruling shows. The sanction means a court-appointed administrator will oversee the brand’s operations.

The brand is not under criminal investigation and the order will be lifted if the company complies with legal requirements before the 12-month deadline given by the court. 

Loro Piana said on Monday evening: “In breach of its legal and contractual obligations, the supplier did not inform Loro Piana of the existence of these subcontractors. Loro Piana was made aware of this situation on May 20, and, as a result, the maison terminated all relations with the concerned supplier in less than 24 hours.

“Loro Piana firmly condemns any illegal practices and reaffirms its unwavering commitment to upholding human rights and compliance with all applicable regulations throughout its supply chain.”

Evergreen could not be reached for comment.

Loro Piana was bought by LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate, in 2013. Frédéric Arnault, son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault, was appointed chief executive of the Milan-based fashion house in March. 

It is the fifth fashion company to have been placed under court administration over labour issues in Italy in the past 18 months, in a scandal that has tarnished the image of the country’s luxury industry.

Milanese prosecutors have been investigating the industry’s supply chain for several years after media investigations uncovered multiple cases of labour malpractice across several companies that have Chinese owners based in Lombardy and Tuscany.

Luxury brands subcontracted production to meet heightened demand during the pandemic-era luxury boom.

LVMH’s Dior, Italy’s Armani and Alviero Martini have had the restrictions placed on them lifted before the 12-month deadline.

Valentino, part-owned by France’s other luxury conglomerate Kering, was also subjected to a similar order in May. It said it would co-operate with the authorities to better understand what prompted the measures.

China’s economy grows 5.2% in second quarter

World’s biggest exporter shrugs off impact of Trump’s trade war

The Chinese economy expanded 5.2 per cent year on year in the second quarter as the world’s biggest exporter shrugged off the impact of Donald Trump’s trade war.

The rate, which slightly exceeded the 5.1 per cent average estimate from analysts polled by Reuters, positions Beijing to hit its full-year target of about 5 per cent. It shows how China has been able to keep growth on track through exports and investment even as it struggles with weak demand at home.

Shuang Ding, chief economist for greater China and north Asia at Standard Chartered, said that, although real GDP growth was better than expected in the first half of the year, the second half could be challenging.

“There will be some headwinds,” Ding said, noting that first-half growth had been boosted by frontloading trade ahead of US tariffs and greater fiscal spending. “Higher tariffs will take a toll on China’s exports,” Ding said.

China’s markets were muted following the readout, with the benchmark CSI 300 share index and the currency, the renminbi, little changed during early trading. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index rose 0.9 per cent. 

China’s President Xi Jinping, who needs robust exports and manufacturing to offset a property slowdown, faces a crucial test in the coming weeks as Beijing hammers out a final trade deal with the US.

On Monday, China reported strong second-quarter trade figures after a truce in the trade war last month enabled producers to ship more goods abroad.

The US is seeking to throttle China’s exports by imposing high tariffs on the transshipment of goods through third countries such as Vietnam.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday that industrial output grew 6.8 per cent year on year in June, exceeding an average analyst forecast of 5.7 per cent.

Retail sales increased 4.8 per cent year on year in June compared with a 6.5 per cent rise the previous month.

Yuhan Zhang, principal economist at The Conference Board’s China Center, said the primary drivers of GDP growth in the second quarter were industrial value-added, accounting for about 45 per cent, followed by retail sales at about 31 per cent.

“Manufacturing and high-tech industries are leading industrial growth, with standout gains in, for example, robotics, new energy vehicles, and equipment manufacturing,” he said.

China’s real estate downturn continued to drag on growth. Average new home prices declined about 3.7 per cent last month from a year earlier while second-hand residential property prices fell about 6 per cent.

“Households and firms have a strong propensity to save,” Zhang said.

Sheng Laiyun, deputy commissioner of the NBS, said the “bottoming out” of the real estate market was “a normal phenomenon”.

Economists worry that overproduction in many sectors, combined with weak demand, is driving deflationary pressures. In recent weeks, Chinese Communist party media has criticised industrial overcapacity for driving a vicious price war in the domestic market.

“The Chinese economy’s performance is both encouraging and concerning, with decent GDP expansion in the first half of the year overshadowed by unbalanced growth driven by investment and exports,” said Eswar Prasad,

professor of economics at Cornell University.

“China is likely to need more policy stimulus as well as structural reform measures in the second half of 2025 to bolster the economy’s performance, make growth more balanced, and fend off deflationary pressures,” Prasad added.

What could Zohran Mamdani mean for NYC’s prime property market?

Some homeowners are worried by the prospect of a ‘radical socialist’ mayor — but they underestimate the resilience of this high-stakes, high-reward city

After an unexpected twist in New York City’s recent Democratic mayoral primary, questions are swirling about what the city might look like under Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani if he wins the election in November. As a realtor, the question I’m hearing most from buyers and sellers is: what will this mean for New York’s prime real estate market?

A socialist mayor potentially taking office makes for an easy knee-jerk narrative in certain circles: he’ll drive out businesses, tank the value of homes at the top end of the market; high-net-worth individuals will flee, the market will crater, and the city’s global standing will deteriorate. But when it comes to NYC real estate, fears like these regularly appear for one reason or another — and tend to be driven more by sentiment than substance.

To embrace the idea that a political newcomer could immediately enact sweeping changes in a city as complex and bureaucratically entrenched as New York overlooks how difficult meaningful reform can be. Take, for instance, the proposal for a “millionaires’ tax” floated in 2017 during a mayoral race. It generated similar headlines and narratives but ultimately stalled. Campaigning for ambitious policies is one thing; turning them into law is another. The idea that Mamdani could unilaterally upend the real estate market overnight reflects political anxieties more than the practical realities.

There are understandable questions about Mamdani’s policies, his experience, and how feasible some of his proposals — including raising property and corporate taxes — may prove in practice. But while a mayor can influence the city’s budget and policy direction, they cannot impose new taxes unilaterally; that authority rests with the state legislature.

Still, buyers and sellers are right to be paying close attention. The key is to distinguish between informed caution and premature conclusions. The more carefully buyers and sellers evaluate what a new administration could realistically implement, the more effectively they can prepare.

We’ve seen this kind of doomsaying before. Fear is a well-worn cycle in New York. In 2020, headlines predicted the city’s permanent decline, in countless iterations of the same message: “New York is dead”. But just a few years later, the picture looks very different. Restaurants are packed, home inventory is tight and the city feels as alive as ever. 

During Covid-19, buyers and sellers were faced with a simple decision: believe in New York’s long-term resilience and ride it out, or quit. Walk away from a contract deposit. Sell at a loss. I had many top-of-the-market buyers who considered walking away from deposits on signed deals in prime neighbourhoods such as Tribeca and the West Village. We advised them to hold steady, and they did. Today, those same properties are worth 25 per cent more.

Many who left, meanwhile, are now returning from their so-called “permanent” moves to South Florida.

More broadly, to assume that a potential tax adjustment would categorically deter wealthy individuals also oversimplifies how many assess value. Real estate in New York has never been easy, convenient or cheap. Buyers face bidding wars and title insurance as well as high attorney fees, complex financing approvals and — for those purchasing in co-ops — rigorous board interviews, financial scrutiny and, in some cases, the inability to finance altogether. Property taxes are layered with a mansion tax, mortgage recording tax and overlapping state and city income taxes. Simply put, it has always been easier to buy a home in the suburbs than within NYC’s roughly 300 square miles.

The city has always come with trade-offs: noise, traffic, bureaucracy and, yes, taxes. But it’s also a city that delivers. Little compares to a prewar Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park or a landmark SoHo loft with original cast-iron columns and 14ft ceilings — all within walking distance of some of the best dining, shopping and entertainment in the world.

As for the state of the market right now, there doesn’t appear to be significant jitters. Between March and June 2025, while Mamdani was actively campaigning, our team represented clients in more than $165mn worth of New York City real estate transactions, including the most expensive sale ever recorded in Downtown Manhattan. The Manhattan market as a whole finished June with contracts signed on 153 properties worth more than $4mn, according to the Olshan Luxury Market Report — marking the third-best June since 2006.

The coming months will tell if the primary has had any real impact. But otherwise, as is typical every summer, July is expected to be quieter, with buyers stepping back until after Labor Day. That seasonal dip often presents a compelling opportunity for buyers who stay local.

As for reports of deals falling through, real estate transactions collapse year-round, and for all kinds of reasons — mismatched expectations, bad timing, shifting buyer priorities or sellers holding out for a higher number. That’s New York: high stakes, high reward. Suggesting that a mayoral race is the sole culprit behind anecdotal failed deals is to conflate narrative with data.

Plan to boost returns from Russian assets ‘expropriation’, warns Euroclear

Clearing house chief executive warns against EU plan to raise more money for Ukraine by investing in riskier assets

EU plans to raise more money for Ukraine by putting frozen Russian state funds into riskier investments would amount to “expropriation”, the institution holding the bulk of the assets has warned.

Euroclear chief executive Valérie Urbain told the Financial Times that plans to reinvest cash generated by the assets to yield higher profits could risk further retaliation from Moscow, and undermine the central securities depository’s key position in the financial system.

“If you increase the revenues, you increase the risks. And so who is bearing that risk?” Urbain said in an interview.

The European Commission is considering how to extract more value from some €191bn in Russian central bank assets stuck at Euroclear because of western sanctions. Euroclear is reinvesting the cash arising from Russia’s maturing assets — such as coupon payments and redemptions — mainly through central banks. The G7 is using the returns to back a $50bn loan to Kyiv.

Profits from the assets have been declining as the European Central Bank lowered its interest rate. That has prompted the commission to propose

shifting the cash into riskier asset classes that might generate higher yields, but also carry a greater risk of losses.

Urbain warned that someone would have to cover such potential losses.

“The systemic risk would certainly dramatically increase if we would have to go beyond the risk profile that we have and which is authorised by our supervisors,” she said.

Last year, Euroclear paid €4bn to Ukraine, and has paid out €1.8bn this year, Urbain said.

She added that the EU’s plans to increase those amounts could involve creating a “special purpose vehicle” to which the Russian central bank assets would be transferred. The SPV would be able to channel the cash generated from the assets into riskier investments and “hopefully, by taking more risks, bring more revenues”.

But Urbain warned at the same time that such a scheme would create “a lot of risks for Euroclear and for the European markets globally”.

“Legally speaking, the creation of an SPV would mean an expropriation of the cash from Euroclear” without freeing it from the liability of restitution against the central bank of Russia, she said, adding that this would result “clearly [in] a position that we cannot bear”.

Discussions around the seizure of Russia’s central bank assets have ebbed and flowed since about €260bn were frozen in different jurisdictions in the wake of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the legal and financial risks of confiscation have always prevailed.

Euroclear faces more than 100 lawsuits over immobilised Russian assets, including those belonging to oligarchs and other sanctioned entities. According to sources close to Euroclear, Russia has confiscated €33bn in assets belonging to Euroclear clients that had been immobilised at Euroclear’s Russian counterpart, the central securities depository in Moscow.

Euroclear, with more than €40tn assets in custody, is Europe’s largest central securities depository — a key node of the financial market facilitating and settling trades by holding and transferring assets.

“We should also certainly expect more Russian retaliation in all sorts of forms,” Urbain said.

She warned that the only way such a scheme could be viable was that “in case of any call for restitution from the central bank of Russia, the assets are gone, somebody is covering for the amount”.

Separately, Urbain announced that Euroclear was keen to further the EU’s initiatives to integrate the bloc’s fragmented capital markets, something that Brussels has been pushing in order to tap into unused savings and improve financing for companies.

She said that Euroclear would offer a “single access point” for retail and institutional investors across the 27 member states.

Urbain also said she would be in favour of more centralised supervision of central securities depositories, another key element of the EU capital markets initiative.

Outgoing president Dame Julia Black calls on ministers to overhaul their ‘confused’ approach to higher education

England’s higher education system risks long-term decline unless ministers overhaul their “confused, if not incoherent” approach to universities, the outgoing head of the national body for the humanities and social sciences has warned. 

Dame Julia Black, president of the British Academy, told the Financial Times that the government must take higher education out of the “too difficult box” and “radically” reform the sector by axing its regulator and launching a cross-party commission into its future.

“The way universities are viewed by government is very confused, if not incoherent. There is nobody within government looking at the university system as a whole and thinking, ‘What do we want this to achieve, both for students but also for the country?’” she said.  

“We need a national conversation to protect our competitive advantage . . . But is it easier [for ministers] to just watch incrementally universities go to the wall on a slow burn basis? Probably.

“The Department for Education doesn’t really have much of a view of what it wants to do with higher education at all.”

The comments by Black, who will leave her post on Thursday after four years, come as universities take drastic cost-cutting measures to avert a wave of insolvencies amid a long-term funding squeeze and softening enrolment of international students. 

In May, ministers slashed capital funding for higher education.

They also reduced the length of the graduate visa from two years to 18 months to discourage abuse of the system and proposed a 6 per cent levy on universities’ fee income from overseas students to fund domestic skills programmes.

But Black, a specialist in law and regulation, said the levy, if enacted, would further squeeze universities’ finances and add to the impression that Britain was “not welcoming to international students”, stunting the government’s drive to boost the economy and soft power. 

“It’s hard to be a big export industry if we are not getting international students. You can’t be both . . . Do you want this or not?” she added, pointing to European countries’ “focus on research and universities as engines of their own industrial growth”.

Asked what reform would look like, Black called for the abolition of the Office for Students, set up by the previous Conservative government, which “just sees universities as a marketplace and students as consumers”.

It should make way for a new regulator with a wider remit to take account of higher education’s benefits for individual students as well as the public, she said.

Ministers should also establish a commission to explore “all the options” for the sector, including a new cap on student numbers, higher tuition fees and breaking with the traditional three-year undergraduate degree from the age of 18, she added. 

“Often this kind of quite radical rethink is prompted by a massive crisis . . . I don’t really want a massive crisis to make it happen, but I think universities have to be part of that conversation,” said Black, who is warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. 

The Department for Education said it was “determined to restore our world-class universities as engines of aspiration, opportunity and growth”.

“We will soon publish our plans for reform as part of the post-16 education and skills strategy white paper as we fix the foundations of higher education,” it added.

The Office for Students said it was “focused on ensuring the protection of students through challenging times for the sector . . . and that taxpayers’ investment in higher education is protected”.

“Students are much more than just consumers, but they spend a lot of time, money and effort to attend university and deserve protection when doing so,” it added.

Founded by royal charter in 1902, the British Academy has a 1,700-strong fellowship, which includes classicist Dame Mary Beard, historian David Olusoga and philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill. 

In 2023-24, the latest year for which data is available, the Academy recorded income of just under £75mn, including a grant of £51mn from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

In the same period, it distributed £55.5mn in research awards to academics in the UK and overseas. 

Black said that while research in social sciences and the humanities was “really strong” in the UK, the subject areas were “bearing the brunt” of university job cuts and course closures. 

This opened the door to a “potential vicious spiral”, she warned, where drops in undergraduate enrolment led fewer qualified specialists to become teachers, resulting in fewer school leavers opting for disciplines such as archaeology or modern languages and more course closures. 

“You can paint whichever picture you want [with the data]. But the decline will be felt slowly, and once you lose that capacity it’s incredibly hard to build back up again,” Black said, pointing to “cold spots” across the country where cutbacks meant young people already had to travel more than 200km from home to study some subjects. 

She rejected the view that humanities and social sciences were less useful to students and to the country than some other subjects, such as maths and science, describing them as “absolutely essential . . . both to living a full and prosperous life but also to addressing many of the challenges we face”. 

“You’ve got more languages students setting up successful start-ups than you do maths graduates, and the same number of history students setting up start-ups as engineers, so there’s a bit of myth busting that needs to go on.”

How BYD caught up with Tesla in the global EV race

The Chinese group is poised to outsell its US rival this year after it dramatically narrowed the technology gap between the two

In mid-2022, when BYD executive Lian Yubo was asked to compare Chinese manufacturing with Tesla’s technology, he remarked that Elon Musk was an example that all Chinese carmakers could learn from. 

“Tesla is a very successful company no matter what. BYD respects Tesla and we admire Tesla,” he said in an interview on Chinese state media. 

Yet just three years later, Tesla’s technological lead over its Chinese rivals has narrowed dramatically. It is fighting to stay ahead in the world’s largest car market, its sales are falling in many other countries and its efforts to develop fully self-driving vehicles are running into regulatory roadblocks.

Having once scoffed at the idea that BYD could ever be a competitor to Tesla, Musk returned from a visit to China last year with a sombre assessment for his senior management. “He had seen the BYD factories, the cost and their tech,” says one former Tesla executive, adding that Musk believed China was winning the electric vehicle race.

As Tesla’s sales decline following Musk’s forays into US politics and amid a lack of new models, BYD has overtaken it to become the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs. Its annual revenues surpassed $100bn for the first time in 2024.

Now, the industry’s shift towards autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence is writing a new chapter in what has become not just a rivalry between the world’s top two EV makers, but a central pillar of US-China technological competition. 

“In the west, Tesla still owns EVs, they still have a clear lead on software-defined vehicles and everyone is still trying to catch up to that,” says Barclays analyst Dan Levy. “China is a different situation. Tesla’s lead from a tech perspective is not nearly as clear, if there’s any lead at all.” 

Until recently, the main advantage Chinese EV manufacturers had over Tesla was that their products were significantly cheaper. But in February, BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu stood on stage in Shenzhen and unveiled “God’s Eye”, an advanced driver-assistance system that is a precursor to fully autonomous vehicles.

A month later, Lian, who now heads BYD’s automotive engineering research institute, was on stage with Wang to announce a new battery charging system capable of adding a driving range of about 470km in five minutes — a fraction of the time it would take a Tesla to charge to that level.

The startling technological advances made by BYD and others have sparked panic among legacy carmakers, who have responded by partnering with Chinese rivals to learn how to build vehicles faster and cheaper, and with better software.

Mark Greeven, professor of innovation and strategy at IMD in China, says Musk “took his eye off the ball” just as Wang progressed from battery technology to software and chip development.

“Tesla did fall back . . . BYD clearly used that time to catch up and say, ‘We’re going to invest in a set of capabilities that are going to make us competitive in the long term.’”

But the man who forced an entire global industry to take electric propulsion seriously is not about to give up. In May, Musk stepped down from his US government role to focus on advancing Tesla’s new growth areas: autonomous vehicles, AI, robotaxi services and a humanoid robot called Optimus.

He says the new products will spur Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalisation in the tens of trillions. 

“His reasoning is: will car companies exist in 10 years without autonomy?” says the former executive. “Probably not, like flip phones versus the iPhone.” With the race to commercialise EVs almost over, he adds that “Tesla has to win in AI and autonomy”.

Known within BYD simply as “the chairman”, the 59-year-old Wang used his obsession with batteries to enter car manufacturing in the early 2000s.

Having attracted investment from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2008, he oversaw a period of staggering growth for the Chinese group, which sold 4.27mn vehicles last year, nearly 10 times as many as in 2020. Of that total, 1.76mn were pure EVs.

Over the same four-year timeframe, Tesla’s sales went from just shy of 500,000 vehicles to 1.79mn — but BYD is in pole position to overtake Tesla in annual global EV sales for the first time in 2025 as it expands overseas.

In China it now commands a 21 per cent market share, according to Shanghai consultancy Automobility. Tesla, the company credited for sparking consumer interest in electric vehicles when it brought its first model to China in 2013, holds 8 per cent.

The success of BYD has come to symbolise the rise of Chinese auto manufacturing, an industry that was once heavily reliant on foreign partners such as Volkswagen, Toyota and General Motors for design and manufacturing knowhow.

While other western carmakers were compelled to form joint ventures with local groups, China changed its investment rules to allow Tesla to fully own and operate its Chinese subsidiary. The government reasoned that Tesla’s presence — via two massive plants to build its Model Y saloon and battery packs in Shanghai — would help its domestic infrastructure and supply chain learn and modernise.

Tesla accepted the risk of hardware and intellectual property being transferred, but concluded it was worth it in order to gain access to a huge new market, according to a person familiar with its negotiations.

Yet the speed with which Chinese carmakers learnt and innovated enabled them to leave some of their European and Japanese rivals behind in the EV transition, according to Mathew Vachaparampil, chief executive of Caresoft, a specialist in cost reduction engineering.

“While the legacy manufacturers in Europe, the US and Japan say [Tesla’s] technology will not work in their vehicles, the Chinese say Elon Musk is the leader,” Vachaparampil says. “They are now not only copying Tesla’s technology, but improving it very quickly.”

Gigacasting, a method of casting and pressing fully formed chassis parts instead of welding together smaller components, is a good example. The process, which reduces vehicle weight, cuts manufacturing times and reduces labour costs, relies on a specially formed aluminium alloy developed by engineers at SpaceX, another Musk company.

It was introduced for Chinese-made Model Y sports utility vehicles in 2021. But according to Caresoft analysis, by the time China’s Xpeng released its G6 SUV in 2023, it had already adopted a gigacasting system that was both lighter and more rigid than the one used by Tesla. 

Xpeng and many other Chinese brands have also improved on Tesla’s lightweight, aluminium-made cables for charging and coolant pumps inside EVs. During the Shanghai auto show in April, BYD showcased a premium Denza Z concept car featuring an advanced steer-by-wire system — first introduced by Tesla in the Cybertruck. 

Chinese manufacturers have made innovations of their own, too. According to Caresoft, BYD has introduced around 100 cost-saving methods for a range of car components and materials that, if Tesla adopted, would save between $350 and $885 per vehicle. Alternatively, BYD could also save up to $1,860 per vehicle if it applied some of Tesla’s ideas used in its brake system and heat-exchanger equipment. 

Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, notes that China’s manufacturing ecosystem, including years of investment in infrastructure, supply chain clustering and engineering talent, has “created the conditions” for BYD to succeed.

“That tightly knitted production chain allows it to iterate faster, cut costs more effectively, and maintain a resilient supply chain,” she says.

Tesla believes that it still has significant advantages over Chinese rivals in areas such as automation technology, AI infrastructure, access to the latest Nvidia chips and billions of hours of driving video to train its neural network. 

“It’s relatively easy to steal or mimic hardware IP,” says one person close to Tesla. “It’s almost impossible to reverse-engineer our software.”

Musk’s biggest ambition in the short term is to deliver Tesla’s self-driving robotaxis at scale following a limited launch in its home city of Austin. While analysts have cautioned that it will be a challenge for Tesla to catch up with frontrunners such as Google’s Waymo, Musk claims the pivot to robotaxis and AI alone could take the company’s valuation as high as $5tn.

“I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present,” he told investors in April. “As far as I’m aware, Tesla will have, I don’t know, 99 per cent market share or something ridiculous.” 

The company’s roughly $1tn market value suggests investors believe him. Meanwhile BYD, despite its success providing a wide range of affordable EVs, is not viewed as a software-focused group and, at around $140bn, is not valued like one either. Its core strength is still perceived as stemming mostly from Wang’s deep commitment to battery technology. 

The God’s Eye announcement marked a big shift from Wang, who had previously resisted following domestic rivals like Xpeng and Nio in self-driving technology amid questions over safety. Suddenly, BYD was in the game. 

Early versions of the technology are not as advanced as Tesla’s fully self-driving system, offering only basic functionality such as highway navigation and lane changing. But BYD plans to offer God’s Eye in most models at no additional cost, a move analysts say could jeopardise Tesla’s plans to seek a premium for its FSD-equipped vehicles.

Tu Le, a founder of Sino Auto Insights, a consultancy, says the key is not what BYD offers now but the volume of data being collected, which could put it in a position to “win” the race for driverless cars. Each one of the 4.3mn vehicles that BYD sells each year will soon be collecting data to train the company’s algorithms. 

Its size also allows BYD to secure competitive pricing for Nvidia chips that are used in its system, and enables it to provide semi-autonomous features often reserved for premium EVs in its Rmb70,000 ($9,600) budget hatchbacks. 

Tesla’s monthly sales in China are much lower than BYD’s, and fell by around 5 per cent in the first six months of 2025. But brand damage stemming from Musk’s political activism is not the cause, according to one current Tesla executive.

“Now if you show up with a Tesla and not BYD when there is a de facto ‘buy Chinese’ rule, you have to explain. People don’t want to do that,” the executive says. “Also, the Chinese cars are better.”

However, the bigger challenge for Tesla is China’s restrictions on data collection and transfer. FSD is based on a machine learning system that uses billions of hours of video to train an algorithm to make driving decisions in real time.

Musk has said China does not permit Tesla to transfer driving video generated from its Chinese fleet outside the country, while the US authorities also will not allow Tesla to do training in China. That has in effect resulted in a twin-track learning process, with the Chinese iteration of FSD inevitably having inferior performance because fewer vehicles feed data into it.

According to Duo Fu, a vice-president at Rystad Energy, a Norway-headquartered consultancy, FSD in China is much more reliant on simulations as opposed to real-life human driving experience. 

“Tesla has partnered with Baidu [a Chinese search and AI group] but Baidu can’t disclose all the data points to Tesla,” Duo adds. “The real-world data is definitely more valuable.”

While BYD might have home turf advantage when it comes to data collection and security, Wang’s late pivot to driverless functionality has created some risks for the group.

One is question marks over financial sustainability. Price wars among Chinese carmakers are putting margins and the industry’s balance sheet under strain as Beijing demands more action to protect suppliers in the world’s largest car market.

It has also opened up some rare chinks in BYD’s otherwise formidable vertical integration. Its market leadership has also enabled it to pressure suppliers for price cuts and extended payment terms, allowing it to rigorously control costs.

But according to Chris McNally, an analyst with US investment bank Evercore, the God’s Eye platform uses software and hardware partners, including Momenta, a Chinese group backed by General Motors in the US, and some chips from Nvidia. 

For years, the risks associated with reliance on US-made chips in particular have hovered over the Chinese car sector — plans for driverless systems could be held back at any moment by US export controls or sanctions. 

“Given the geopolitical environment, no one will invest in a technology with such a high risk that they’re still relying on foreign technology,” says Raymond Tsang, an automotive technology expert with Bain in Shanghai.

However, these vulnerabilities might not persist. Analysts believe BYD will soon develop most of its driverless systems in house and increasingly swap out Nvidia chips for those made by Beijing-based Horizon Robotics. “This is the BYD way to drive costs down,” McNally says. 

It would also be consistent with a broader shift towards self-reliance in key technologies, in response to Washington’s steadily increasing restrictions on technology exports to China. 

Yuqian Ding, a veteran Beijing-based auto analyst with HSBC, says that while BYD has not talked about developing a robotaxi service, executives have made “very clear” their plans to develop in-house all the important software and hardware needed for autonomous vehicles.

“With more than 5mn scale per annum, they can do everything,” Ding says, adding: “That’s the ultimate goal . . . Their target is much closer to Tesla.”

In an interview with the Financial Times this year, BYD’s executive vice-president Stella Li said competition with Tesla in EVs and autonomous technology would accelerate innovation, ultimately making BYD a “better” company. 

“In the future, if you are not producing an electric car, if you’re not introducing technology in intelligence and autonomous driving, you will be out,” she warned.