Meredith Schwartz

Meredith Schwartz is a critical minerals policy researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major Washington, D.C. think tank, where she is an adjunct fellow (non-resident) with the Critical Minerals Security Program. Her subject — how governments reshape rare earth and critical mineral supply chains — sits directly upstream of the prices resource investors watch. Rare earths are a group of 17 elements essential to magnets, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems, and most of the world's processing of them happens in China. When Beijing tightens export licensing or Washington answers with new financing and executive orders, the effects land quickly in mining equities, and Schwartz's job is to explain those moves as they happen.

As a frequent co-author with program director Gracelin Baskaran, she has written much of the program's most-cited work. She co-authored "The Consequences of China's New Rare Earths Export Restrictions" (April 2025), published within days of China requiring export licenses for seven rare earth elements, and documented the numbers behind the vulnerability: until 2023 China handled roughly 99 percent of the world's heavy rare earth processing, and a single F-35 fighter contains more than 900 pounds of rare earth elements. Her other analyses cover the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal, Washington's 2025 critical minerals executive order, deep-sea mining, the semiconductor minerals gallium and germanium, and U.S. uranium security. Her research is cited by the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, Deutsche Bank Research, and Defense One, and she has explained China's rare earth leverage to a public audience on TaiwanPlus.

Her method is policy analysis rather than stock picking. She tracks export controls, permitting, government financing, and minerals diplomacy — from Greenland to Ukraine to Pakistan — and asks which projects can actually clear the political and financing hurdles to reach production. The approach is grounded in experience: before CSIS she was a senior associate at the Vogel Group, a bipartisan government affairs firm, where she handled energy and trade policy for clients that included critical minerals companies. She graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University with a degree in quantitative economics and political science.

Investors can follow her directly: she appeared on Bloor Street Capital's "Investing in Critical Minerals and Rare Earths" and led a master class on rare earth investing for its Virtual Rare Earth Conference. Her value to a resource investor is context and timing — an early, sober reading of the export controls, subsidies, and diplomatic deals that increasingly set the ceiling and the floor for critical mineral and rare earth stocks. She is a policy analyst, not a fund manager, so her work explains the forces moving the sector rather than naming individual picks.