Every piece where Trade is the variable that does the work.
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
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 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
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
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
In February 2025 the DRC suspended cobalt exports outright; since October it rations them by quota, at roughly half the old volume. The price of the metal rose 130% in a year. What the world's most concentrated mineral supply does when the supplier starts acting like one.
Aug 15, 2026 · 9 min read
BNEF's 2025 survey puts the average pack at a record-low $108 per kilowatt-hour, China at $84, and North America and Europe 44% and 56% above that. Two companies install a majority of the world's EV batteries. The cost gap is the industrial policy question of the decade, quantified.
Aug 15, 2026 · 7 min read