The Trump administration’s reported plan to open a new wave of Section 232 national security tariff actions across additional industries shows how quickly U.S. trade policy is being reassembled after the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s emergency-based tariffs.

The central point is not just that the White House is seeking replacement tariffs, but that it is shifting more of the tariff architecture onto legal authorities that are slower to deploy but more durable once in place.

SQM and Codelco’s lithium venture slightly beating 2025 production guidance is a small headline on the surface, but strategically it matters because it reinforces a bigger story: low-cost brine producers are emerging from the lithium glut in a stronger position than many higher-cost rivals.

Nova Andino Litio (NovAndino) produced 233,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent in 2025, a little above SQM’s prior guidance of “close to 230,000 tons,” and up from 2024 levels. That result suggests operational execution at Atacama remained solid even as the market continued digesting oversupply and price weakness.

China’s steel output fell sharply in 2025 and therefore signaled a more decisive weakening in raw-material demand. The official figure from China’s National Bureau of Statistics put crude steel production at about 961 million tons in 2025, down 4.4% year-on-year and below 1 billion tons for the first time in several years. That data helped reinforce a narrative of managed output restraint, structural weakness in property-related demand, and a softer long-term outlook for iron ore.

The reason analysts are pushing back is that China’s import behavior and feedstock balances do not neatly match such a large drop in steel production. Underlying steel activity was stronger than the official data suggests, with some estimating roughly 60 million tons of unreported crude steel and others going further by suggesting output may actually have risen in 2025.

China’s latest export-control move against Japanese companies is best understood as a calibrated escalation in economic coercion rather than a blunt trade rupture. Beijing has now taken a two-track approach: it placed 20 Japanese entities on a full dual-use export control list while putting another 20 on a tighter “watch” or monitoring list that raises licensing scrutiny without imposing an outright ban.

The targets include major industrial and defense-linked names, with the stated Chinese rationale centered on curbing Japan’s “remilitarization.” What makes this politically significant is the timing. The measures come after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent election victory and after a period in which some in Tokyo may have hoped Beijing would soften its posture once her domestic mandate was secured.

A U.S.-Iran military escalation would not automatically become a 1970s-style oil shock, but it could still produce a severe supply crisis if disruption in the Gulf were large enough or prolonged enough, and the outcome would depend heavily on how the two biggest oil consumers, the United States and China, use their buffers.

That framing is persuasive because it moves the discussion beyond the usual “Hormuz panic” headline and focuses on the actual shock absorbers in the system: emergency stock releases, import behavior, and demand management by major consumers.

The EU’s final approval of watered-down corporate sustainability rules is a significant political and regulatory turning point, not just a technical amendment.

What Brussels has now done is formally narrow the reach of two flagship sustainability regimes, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), after a long period of lobbying pressure from industry, some member states, and external governments including the United States and Qatar.

Rather than relying mainly on direct subsidies or company-specific price guarantees, Washington is now reportedly considering a system in which a Pentagon-origin AI model would generate reference prices for key minerals, and those prices would then be reinforced through tariffs across a proposed allied trading bloc.

The administration plans to use the Defense Department’s OPEN program to help set those reference prices as part of a broader effort to build a multilateral metals trading zone aimed at reducing dependence on Chinese pricing and supply dominance.

The shift to very large crude carriers (VLCCs) for Venezuelan exports is a meaningful escalation in the operational scale of the U.S.-Venezuela oil supply arrangement, and it signals that the deal is moving from emergency restart mode into a more efficient, higher-volume export phase.

Traders and buyers have now chartered the first supertankers to load Venezuelan crude since the Caracas-Washington supply deal began, with exports expected to accelerate from March and a larger share of volumes heading to India.