Trade, prices, debt, labor, and growth, read through the data.
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
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
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