28 articles · writing since 2026
The Variables is an independent publication of data-driven analysis. Pieces signed The Variables are written and edited by the publication's own desk.
The dollar holds about 57% of reported reserves, down from over 70% at the century's start; central banks bought over 1,000 tonnes of gold for three straight years, and gold crossed $4,000 in 2025. Nothing here says collapse. Everything says erosion, and the pace is the variable.
Sep 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Four companies plan roughly $725 billion of AI infrastructure spending in 2026, up 77% in a year. The largest pure AI vendor books tens of billions and loses money doing it. The ratio between those numbers is the most consequential open variable in markets, and this page will track it.
Sep 20, 2026 · 8 min read
The world's largest emitter has been flat or falling since March 2024, and 2025 closed 0.3% down, the first decline driven by clean energy rather than economic weakness. If it holds, the world's most important emissions curve turned five years early.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
2024 finished at 1.60C above pre-industrial, the first calendar year beyond the Paris marker; 2025 came in at 1.47C, and the last three years together averaged above 1.5C, another first. In treaty terms the threshold is intact. On current warming rates, it will not stay that way for long.
Sep 20, 2026 · 8 min read
SIPRI's 2025 numbers: an eleventh straight record year, Europe up 14%, Germany up 24%, Ukraine at 40% of its own GDP, and NATO signed up to 5% targets by 2035. The one major spender that fell: the United States, down 7.5%. The rearmament is real, and it is changing hands.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Two billion people voted in the biggest election year in history, and for the first time in about 120 years of records, every governing party facing a developed-world electorate lost vote share. The pattern had one overwhelming correlate, and 2025's elections began testing whether it fades with it.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Remittances reached $685 billion in 2024, more than foreign investment and aid to developing countries combined. India received $129 billion; Morocco's diaspora sent home 8% of GDP. The world's most reliable development finance is transferred $200 at a time, minus a 6.5% toll.
Sep 20, 2026 · 8 min read
The UN counts 131 countries, home to 68% of the world's people, with fertility below 2.1. The global rate is 2.25 and falling; South Korea touched 0.72 before its first uptick in nine years. The largest quiet variable in every economic forecast, read from the birth registers.
Sep 20, 2026 · 7 min read
The island imports its crude, its gas, and at times its sand and fresh water. In 2025 it sold a record 56.77 million tonnes of marine fuel, more than the next five ports combined, from a position built on a strait, two refinery complexes, and a meter no other port required first.
Aug 15, 2026 · 9 min read
El Nino cut daily transits from 36 to 18 and sent slot auctions to records. The rains came back, revenue hit $5.7 billion, and the canal is buying itself a second watershed. What the 2023-24 drought proved about infrastructure that drinks.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
Vietnam set records on both sides of its ledger in 2025: the largest surplus any country but China runs with America, and record imports from China of $186 billion. A 20% tariff, a 40% transshipment clause, and one Korean company worth 13% of GDP later, the balancing act is the economy.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Three years in: $30.7 billion awarded, nearly $450 billion of private projects announced, 4-nanometre production running in Arizona, and the law's biggest single bet converted into a 9.9% government stake in Intel. An audit of what the CHIPS Act has actually built, and what has slipped.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
The country with the world's largest phosphate reserves now earns more from vehicles than from the mineral its economy was named for. A production record, a port that leads the Mediterranean, and a battery factory that brings the phosphate back in a different form.
Aug 15, 2026 · 9 min read
The National Ignition Facility has now ignited eight times, once at four times energy gain. Private funding passed $14 billion, ITER slipped to the 2030s, and the first private machine aiming at net energy switches on next. A status report on the oldest promise in energy.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
In 2022, gas prices shut 70% of Europe's ammonia capacity in a season. The crisis passed; the closures kept coming, and now a carbon border tax meets an industry that already moved offshore. How bread became a derivative of the gas market, and what Europe eats instead of making.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
The 2018-19 trade war produced a rare thing in economics: an unusually clear answer. Import prices did not fall; the tariff landed on US firms and households. Now the effective rate is 16.8%, the highest since 1935, the average household is out about $1,700 a year, and the same measurements are being made again.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
TSMC held about 70% of the world's foundry market in 2025, and at the leading edge the share is closer to all of it. The 2-nanometre generation is sold out through 2028, the $165 billion Arizona hedge is real but partial, and the concentration is not an accident. It is the business model.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
78 gigawatts of reactors are under construction worldwide, the most in decades, and half the capacity is Chinese, approved at a metronomic ten reactors a year. The West, meanwhile, finished two projects a decade late and started selling reactors to data centres. An audit of the revival.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
The world added a record 647 GW of solar in 2025, and the argument moved to the hours the sun misses. Then batteries fell 45% in a year and deployment hit 250 GWh. An update on the firming problem, which is quietly being solved by the same cost curve that created it.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Two smelters in 2014, fifty-nine by 2025. Processed-nickel exports up from under $1 billion a year to about $14 billion. Sixty percent of world production. The most cited industrial policy of the decade also crashed the price it depends on, and now the same state is cutting quotas to fix that.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
The Salar de Atacama holds 9.2 million tonnes of lithium in brine, the biggest such reserve on earth. In December 2025, a Codelco-SQM joint venture handed the Chilean state majority control of it through 2060, in the middle of the worst lithium price crash on record. Most resource nationalism is announced at the top of the cycle; this deal was signed at the bottom.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
Washington restricts what China can buy; Beijing restricts what America can make it from. Gallium, 98% Chinese, and germanium, majority Chinese, went from licensing in 2023 to an outright US ban in December 2024. Germanium has quintupled since 2023. The tonnages are tiny, but the precedent reaches much further.
Aug 15, 2026 · 8 min read
The US Geological Survey counts 50 of the world's 73 billion tonnes of phosphate reserves in Morocco, and 36 of the 250 million tonnes mined in 2025. The gap between owning the element food depends on and monetising it is the whole strategy of the Moroccan state's largest company.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Groningen closed by law on 19 April 2024 with hundreds of billions of cubic metres still underground, because the ground above it would not stop shaking. A democracy chose earthquakes over energy in the middle of an energy crisis. The bill, the lawsuits, and the lesson.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read