Moving wind permitting outside the planning act is the substantive change, and it is a considerable one for a country with strong traditions of local consent. It replaces an open-ended process, in which objections could surface repeatedly at multiple stages, with a single municipal decision point.

The advance payment mechanism is the sweetener: municipalities currently wait years between hosting the disruption and receiving the revenue, and bringing payments forward to the construction phase changes the political calculus for local councils weighing a project.

The Export-Import Bank announced three loans on Friday totalling 58 million dollars, timed to coincide with a White House roundtable at which the President met executives from some of the world’s largest mining companies. The framing was expansive.

EXIM chairman John Jovanovic said critical mineral security is national security, and described the funding as intended to fortify supply chains, restore crucial industries supporting well-paying American jobs, and safeguard everyday Americans from supply shocks. The sum involved would not cover the engineering studies for a single large copper mine.

The arithmetic is startlingly clean, and it is the single most important fact in the oil market. Asia’s crude imports have fallen roughly 4 million barrels per day from pre-war levels. China’s imports have fallen roughly 4.2 million barrels per day over the same period.

Those two numbers are not similar by coincidence. Every other importing economy in Asia, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and the rest, has been buying something close to normal volumes throughout the crisis, because one country decided to stop.

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.