The European Commission’s decision to lift anti-dumping duties on Chinese ceramic tableware and kitchenware to a single, blanket 79% rate is a small-product, big-signal move: it shows how far the EU has shifted from narrow, firm-by-firm trade defense toward more systemic “China risk” management.

These products, including plates, cups, bowls and similar household items, have been under EU anti-dumping measures since 2013, but the latest review replaces the old tiered structure of duties (roughly 13% to 36%) with a uniform rate that effectively aims to shut down price-based Chinese competition across the category for the next five years.

The interim U.S.-India trade framework released Friday is best read as a strategic bargain dressed as a tariff deal: Washington is trading improved market access and a lower headline U.S. tariff rate for Indian goods for two things it values more than incremental commerce: energy realignment away from Russia and a tighter alignment with U.S. preferences on standards, sensitive technology controls, and China-related “non-market” concerns.

The agreement is a framework rather than a finished treaty, but it is detailed enough to show the direction of travel: India lowers barriers across a wide swath of U.S. industrial and selected farm inputs, the United States keeps a still-material 18% tariff on most Indian imports, and both sides tie the relationship to supply-chain restructuring and economic security.

China’s central bank is behaving like a buyer with a strategic mandate rather than a trader with a view on near-term price action. January marked a fifteenth consecutive month of net additions to the People’s Bank of China’s gold reserves, taking holdings to 74.19 million fine troy ounces from 74.15 million a month earlier.

The quantity change is small, but the message is not: Beijing is keeping the “gold accumulation” signal alive even as the market itself has become violently unstable.

The European Commission’s new sanctions proposal is an attempt to move from managing Russia’s seaborne oil exports to structurally impairing them. Instead of relying on the G7 price-cap model, which tried to keep Russian barrels flowing to third countries while limiting Moscow’s revenue by conditioning Western shipping services on compliance, the Commission is proposing a blanket prohibition on any services that support Russia’s seaborne crude exports.

If adopted, the measure would sever a core artery of Russia’s oil trade because a significant share of those exports still rely on Western-owned tankers and Western service ecosystems, particularly shipping capacity and related services linked to Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.

China’s EV export machine has reached a scale where it no longer looks like a “sectoral success story” and more like a structural lever of geopolitical influence and industrial lock-in.

With export receipts of roughly $70 billion in 2025 and shipments spanning well over 150 countries and territories, Chinese EV makers have turned what began as a domestic policy-and-subsidy project into a globally distributed commercial footprint that can pull entire downstream ecosystems, including charging, grid hardware, storage, and consumer electrification devices, into China-centered supply chains.

What looks like a “metals rally” is increasingly behaving like a liquidity event that has turned multiple commodity complexes into social-media-driven momentum trades.

The defining feature is not that investors have suddenly discovered copper’s role in electrification or silver’s dual identity as both precious and industrial, but that retail participation, organized through chatrooms and turbocharged by small-sized contracts and options, has become large enough to move prices, overwhelm risk controls, and force exchanges into near-constant intervention.

Years after COVID-19 first broke global manufacturing logistics, commercial aviation is discovering that the industry has not so much “recovered” as moved into a structurally constrained operating regime. The mismatch is now stark: passenger demand has returned to record territory, but the physical system that supplies new aircraft and keeps existing fleets serviceable is still running with chronic bottlenecks.

The result is an uncomfortable inversion of the normal cycle. Instead of airlines renewing fleets to capture fuel-efficiency gains and reduce maintenance burden, many carriers are being forced to sweat assets for longer because Airbus and Boeing deliveries are delayed and because the engine and component supply chain is stretched between building new aircraft and sustaining the installed base.

The U.S. connected-vehicle crackdown is turning into a stress test for the auto industry’s deepest, least visible dependency: not engines, not batteries, but software provenance and connectivity components that sit inside almost every modern vehicle. The new rules are aimed at keeping cameras, microphones, location data, and vehicle telemetry from becoming an intelligence vulnerability if code or systems can be influenced by “foreign adversaries.”

In practice, they force carmakers to do something the industry has never been required to do at this scale, prove where critical software was developed and who ultimately controls it, under an aggressive compliance clock that many suppliers were not built to support.