There is a particular configuration of capital flows that experienced allocators learn to distrust, and it appeared in the week to August 5. Equities took in 21 billion dollars. Bonds took in 12 billion. High-yield credit had its best week in five. Money market funds pulled in 57 billion, ending three weeks of withdrawals. Gold kept attracting money for a fourth consecutive week.

When investors simultaneously buy risk assets, safe assets, junk debt and cash, they are not expressing a coherent view about the world. They are buying everything because they cannot decide, and the volume is being supplied by an earnings season that has been extraordinary.

The timing is almost too neat. On Thursday the American president signed a proclamation imposing minimum import prices and a 15 percent tariff on polysilicon and everything made from it, on the grounds that a country pursuing semiconductor and solar leadership cannot import the base material from a strategic rival.

On Friday India’s clean energy secretary announced that New Delhi is preparing a production-linked incentive scheme to build polysilicon manufacturing at home, for essentially identical reasons. Two of the world’s largest economies reached the same conclusion about the same material within twenty-four hours, and the material in question is one that China makes over 93 percent of.

Copper has now risen for six consecutive weeks, its longest run since 2020, and is heading for a record close above the previous high set in mid-May. The three-month LME contract traded up to 0.9 percent higher at 14,201 dollars a tonne, and the metal has gained around 14 percent this year.

Zinc is on course for a weekly advance near 4 percent at a four-year peak, and aluminium sits at its highest since June. This is a market with genuine conviction behind it, and it is worth noting that the loudest warning about where it goes next came out the same week, which sees a surplus of half a million tonnes forming next year.

The copper market has spent this year being moved by governments rather than by geology, and on Thursday it happened again from an unexpected direction. Washington’s unresolved tariff has been pulling metal across oceans for eighteen months. Beijing’s invoicing crackdown has drained Shanghai inventories.

Now Kinshasa has banned the export of copper and cobalt concentrates outright, and the price responded immediately, with benchmark three-month LME copper rising as much as 1.8 percent to 14,369.50 dollars a tonne, the highest since January 29 when it set an all-time peak of 14,527.50, while Comex touched a record 6.73 dollars a pound.

A week ago the President signed a memorandum authorising restrictions on exports of scrap containing critical minerals. On Thursday the Commerce Department turned that authority into an operative rule, and the mechanism it chose is more revealing than the restriction itself. This is not an export ban in the conventional sense.

Under a temporary final rule from the Bureau of Industry and Security, American persons selling black mass or tungsten waste and scrap must allocate 100 percent of monthly sales to American persons from August 27, unless an adjustment or exception is obtained in advance.

Two days ago the polysilicon decision was a plan described by anonymous sources. Yesterday it became a presidential proclamation with figures attached, and those figures are the most consequential thing in American trade policy this year. Twenty-one dollars per kilogram for polysilicon. One hundred dollars per kilogram for ingots and wafers. Twenty-two cents per watt for solar cells. Thirty-eight cents per watt for modules.

Below those levels, imports cannot legally enter the United States, regardless of what any producer anywhere is willing to charge. A 15 percent tariff sits on top. Trump framed the action in explicitly restorative terms, stating in the proclamation that polysilicon is the base material underpinning the security of America’s semiconductor and solar power supply chains.

There is a version of energy dominance that no one in Washington wanted. American refiners are running flatter out than at any point since 2018, exporting record volumes of diesel, and posting the largest profits in their history. That is exactly what dominance looks like when the rest of the world’s fuel-making capacity has been bombed, droned or shut down.

It is also politically intolerable, because the same scarcity generating those profits has pushed the average American gallon to 4.06 dollars three months before the midterms. The President wanted energy dominance and low prices. He has the first, delivered by the second’s absence.

The tariff architecture built over the past eighteen months was designed around a picture of Chinese trade that has stopped being accurate. Duties target finished goods arriving at a border with a country-of-origin label attached: the phone, the appliance, the garment, the car. That picture describes China circa 2015.

What Dongguan makes now is increasingly the machine that makes the phone, the robotic arm that assembles the appliance, the precision tooling that stamps the car part. Those goods do not arrive at an American port with a Chinese label. They arrive at a Vietnamese, Mexican or Brazilian factory, and what leaves that factory is stamped somewhere else.