Fund flow data covering the week through June 10 across nearly 29,000 funds shows something remarkable for the fourth month of a Gulf war: a global investor base that treats geopolitical selloffs as shopping opportunities. Global equity funds absorbed a net 3.32 billion dollars, the third consecutive week of inflows.

The number is modest beside the prior week’s 21 billion, but the context gives it meaning. The MSCI World index had just dropped as much as 4.8 percent from its record high as the conflict entered a dangerous new phase, and rather than flee, money leaned in.

The G7 summit convening in France next week will feature a debate older than the institution itself, dressed in new numbers. The French chair has placed global imbalances on the agenda, a polite multilateral term for the collision between America’s 1.1 trillion dollar current-account deficit, the largest single imbalance on earth, and the surpluses of China above all, with the EU and Japan in supporting roles.

Donald Trump will arrive convinced he already knows the cause and the cure, unfair foreign trading practices and tariffs respectively. The economics profession, the IMF and the summit’s host believe he is wrong on both counts, and the gap between those two diagnoses is where the next financial crisis may quietly be incubating.

Diplomatic fashions can be dated with unusual precision. The “Dumpling Alliance” was born in the pandemic years, when Taiwan’s vaccine donations to Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic inspired a Taiwanese digital diplomacy group to christen the partnership with a name riffing on Asia’s pro-democracy Milk Tea Alliance and the happy coincidence that every member nation stuffs dough for a living.

For a moment it captured something real: a cluster of small Central and Eastern European democracies, schooled by Soviet occupation in what large authoritarian neighbors do, treating solidarity with a threatened island of 23 million as a matter of historical instinct.

The guest list for next week’s G7 summit in France contains a detail that would have seemed improbable a few years ago and now passes almost without comment: the heads of the world’s leading artificial intelligence laboratories will attend alongside the leaders of the world’s richest democracies.

Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic all feature on the roster released by the French presidency, with their companies confirming attendance while declining, in careful unison, to specify what they intend to say.

For decades, Europe’s automakers were the continent’s loudest evangelists for open trade, and for an obvious reason: they were winning. Volkswagen built its fortunes on China, Renault and the companies now folded into Stellantis exported across the world, and tariffs were something the industry lobbied against.

The joint letter that Volkswagen, Stellantis and Renault have now sent to members of the European Parliament marks the formal end of that era. The three groups, which between them produce roughly 60 percent of Europe’s car output, are asking Brussels to adopt a hard local content regime: 70 percent of vehicles sold in the EU should derive 70 percent of their value from within the bloc, measured across the entire chain from engineering to manufacturing.

When EU leaders gather next week to confront China’s trade ascendancy, they will be responding to numbers that have moved from concerning to historic. China closed 2025 with a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus, a record achieved straight through Donald Trump’s tariff wall, and the EU’s own bilateral deficit has doubled in five years to run above a billion euros a day in the first quarter of 2026.

The fear animating the summit has a name borrowed from recent economic history: a second China Shock, sequel to the import wave that hollowed out swathes of American manufacturing after Beijing joined the WTO in 2001. The first shock caught the West intellectually unprepared, with economists insisting for a decade that trade adjustment was smooth and localized before the research finally documented millions of displaced workers and the political earthquakes that followed.

France will open on Friday the tender the wind industry has been awaiting since 2024: ten gigawatts of offshore capacity, the largest single offshore procurement ever launched in the country and one of the largest in Europe’s history. Behind the headline number lies a triple wager.

The government is betting that an industry battered globally by cost inflation and political hostility can deliver at scale, that floating turbine technology is ready to leave its experimental phase, and, most precariously, that the contracts can be locked in before an April presidential election in which the leading party wants the whole program stopped.

While Europe spent the week fine-tuning the price of carbon, China’s biggest coal region announced plans to manufacture more of it. Inner Mongolia intends to build the country’s largest base for converting coal into oil, gas and chemicals, a project framed explicitly as a response to import dependence in wartime.

The announcement, delivered by the region’s second-ranked official Huang Zhiqiang with a promise to scale up coal-to-oil, coal-to-gas and coal-to-chemicals capacity in the name of self-sufficiency, is short on detail but unambiguous in direction. Four months of war in the Gulf and a strangled Strait of Hormuz have done what no five-year plan quite managed: they have made turning coal into petroleum products a strategic priority rather than a niche experiment.