Venezuela is preparing to award additional exploration and production acreage to Chevron and Spain’s Repsol, with the new blocks potentially granted as soon as this week.

If it goes ahead, it would be one of the clearest signs yet that Caracas intends to translate Washington’s recent pro-investment messaging into tangible operating room for a small set of foreign majors that already have the technical capacity, and political standing, to move quickly in a difficult upstream environment.

Europe’s shrinking goods-trade surplus is turning into a stress test for the EU’s post-Cold War economic model: an industrial base geared toward exporting high-value manufactures, financed and stabilized by persistent external surpluses.

The latest data show the surplus narrowing again in December, with traditional surplus engines, like machinery, vehicles and chemicals, still under pressure. Lower energy import costs offer some relief on the import side, but they are no longer enough to compensate for weaker export performance and a deteriorating bilateral balance with China.

Washington and Taipei have now put hard legal language around the “reciprocal” trade framework they first sketched in January, locking in a 15% U.S. tariff rate on imports from Taiwan while committing Taiwan to a timetable to eliminate or reduce tariffs on nearly all U.S. goods and to expand purchases of major U.S. exports over 2025-2029.

The final text is not just a tariff adjustment; it is a managed-trade package that blends market access, sector-specific purchasing pledges (notably energy and aviation), and supply-chain commitments aimed at reducing strategic vulnerability in high-technology industries.

The Commission and the European Investment Bank are moving toward a more explicitly “industrial-policy” role for European public finance in energy, by designing new facilities meant to pull private banks and capital markets deeper into the grid buildout.

The trigger is straightforward: Europe’s high power costs have become a competitiveness problem, and leaders are now treating electricity networks and efficiency upgrades less as climate-adjacent infrastructure and more as core economic security assets.

Europe’s carbon market has become the latest battleground in the EU’s competitiveness debate, and the speed of the price reaction shows how politically “priced” the system has become.

On Thursday, benchmark EU carbon permits fell hard, down to roughly the low-€70s per ton, after several leaders, led by Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz and backed by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš, openly floated revising or delaying parts of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).

Two railway corridors now symbolize how the critical-minerals race is being operationalized on the African continent: one route oriented west to the Atlantic and increasingly associated with U.S.-European strategic finance, and another oriented east to the Indian Ocean and aligned with China’s infrastructure-and-operator model.

The immediate objective in both cases is straightforward: move more copper and cobalt from the Central African Copperbelt to deepwater ports at lower cost and higher reliability, but the strategic meaning is broader. Rail is becoming the physical “spine” of rival supply-chain architectures, not just a development project.

A major Chinese metals trade body is convening a closed-door style policy and compliance briefing in Beijing on March 25 that, in practical terms, looks like an effort to operationalize Beijing’s tightening export-control regime for rare earths and a wider set of “strategic” metals.

The China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Imports & Exports will bring in officials from the Commerce Ministry and the customs authority to walk companies through export-control rules, customs clearance procedures, and compliance expectations, while also providing an official readout on China-U.S. trade dynamics and the direction of foreign-trade policy as China enters its next five-year planning cycle.

The Trump administration’s decision to revoke the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” and simultaneously wipe away federal tailpipe greenhouse-gas standards is designed to pull out the keystone of U.S. climate regulation rather than merely loosen a handful of rules.

The endangerment finding is the formal determination, grounded in climate science and administrative law, that greenhouse gases “endanger” public health and welfare; once that determination exists, it becomes the legal trigger that obliges (and authorizes) EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act.