Owners of rhodium—a metal with a highly volatile market price—are periodically put in an extremely advantageous market position:
extracting more rhodium-containing ore from the ground will necessarily also extract other much more abundant precious metals—notably platinum and
palladium—which would oversupply the market with those other metals, lowering their prices. Since it is economically infeasible to simply extract
these other metals just to obtain rhodium, the market is often left hopelessly squeezed for rhodium supply, causing prices to spike.
Recovery from this supply-deficit position may be quite problematic in the future for many reasons, notably because it is not known how much rhodium
(and other precious metals) actually was placed in catalytic converters during the many years when manufacturers' emissions-cheating software was in
use. Much of the world supply of rhodium is obtained from recycled catalytic converters obtained from scrapped vehicles. As of early November 2020,
the spot price of rhodium was US$14,700 per troy ounce. In early March 2021, rhodium reached a price of US$29,400 per troy ounce on Metals Daily (a
precious metals commodity listing).
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