The period around 1980 was pivotal to the fate of nations. In the West Thatcher and Reagan came to power and finished the destruction of the post-world War II order, setting the West on a new path. This process had been ongoing since 1968, but the form of the new consensus was not clear until […]
China
Jaysus on a popsicle, Mary and all the Saints do I have some egg on my face. Since January 27 silver has been on one seriously wicked ride. I’ve been banging my head to Metallica’s Whiplash for the last ten days. So, WTF happened? In short: from where I sit the paper markets are trying […]
~by Sean Paul Kelley Everyone is talking about gold topping $5k an ounce. The yellow metal is captivating and big moves by it tend to suck all the oxygen out of the media space regarding other metals. In 2025 gold rose a whopping 64% against all comers, i.e the dollar, the S&P 500, oil, Bitcoin […]
Marco Garofalo and Thomas Prayer The US administration raised US import tariffs in April, reigniting trade tensions. This sparked concerns about cheaper exports being diverted to other markets, potentially lowering global prices. Using detailed product-level data, we build a novel timely indicator to consistently track trade prices across countries. Chinese export prices have risen less … Continue reading Monitoring trade prices in the wake of trade tensions
Stumbled across this story about how a Chinese province quickly built a facility based on tech discovered in Europe: So a *European* startup called IB2 announced *in the US* the invention of an amazing new technology to upgrade low-grade bauxite – previously discarded as waste – into high-grade, which makes it usable to make aluminum […]
Roughly speaking there are two types of corporations in China. State owned (SOE) and private. During the policy driven real-estate bust, the countries biggest builder, Evergrande, went under. But there was an assumption that the government would bail out real-estate SOEs. Well the largest one, Vanke, is going under, and the central government is going […]
The misunderstandings packed into this little bit of writing are stupendous: Over the past few years, China has been in deflation, while the US has been in inflation. Yet despite this stark divergence, the CNH has still depreciated more than 10% against the US dollar. This combination — falling relative prices in China and a […]
Elevated from Comments. Piece by KT Chong China is now entering the next phase of its economic-growth engine — humanoid robots. And just like with EVs, the shift is happening fast, quietly, and with the same pattern: Chinese companies industrialize before Western analysts even realize it’s begun. UBTech, Unitree, XPeng — they’ve all started mass-producing […]