Japanese boardrooms are heading into 2026 with geopolitics, not economics, at the top of their worry list. A new survey shows that the single biggest concern for Japanese companies is the sharp deterioration in relations with China, followed closely by uncertainty over U.S. trade policy. That ordering is striking in itself: for corporate Japan, the two countries that matter most commercially are also now seen as the main sources of strategic risk.

Relations with Beijing have been sliding since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response. That statement effectively made explicit what had previously been left deliberately vague, and it has fed into a series of tense incidents at sea and in the air. The latest flashpoint came when Tokyo accused Chinese fighter jets of locking radar onto Japanese military aircraft, an allegation Beijing disputes.

Major global carmakers are now openly asking Washington to keep Chinese auto and battery companies physically out of the U.S. market, arguing that their own long-term survival is on the line.

In a submission to a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and most other major manufacturers, urged both Congress and the Trump administration to block Chinese state-backed firms from building factories in the United States.

Silver has moved from the sidelines of the commodities complex to center stage this year, delivering a rally that has left even the much-hyped gold bull market in the shade. Since January, the metal’s price has more than doubled, repeatedly breaking all-time highs and forcing investors to rethink where silver sits in both the precious-metals and industrial-metals universes.

By late this week, spot silver was trading just under $62 an ounce, having briefly pushed to a record above $62.80 after slicing through the $60 threshold for the first time in history. Futures prices have traced the same arc, gaining more than 110% year-to-date and holding above $61.

Lithium is getting a second wind, and this time, it is not primarily about cars. Investors and producers are increasingly pinning their hopes on grid-scale energy storage as the next major leg of demand growth, in the belief that big batteries hooked up to power systems and data centers can pull the lithium market out of a bruising, multi-year glut and push it back toward tightness in 2026–27.

For the past three years, lithium has been a classic boom-and-bust commodity. On the back of early EV euphoria, miners and brine producers in Australia, South America, China and parts of Africa rushed new capacity into the market. EV sales did grow, but not at the hyperbolic rates implicit in the most bullish scenarios, especially as China’s EV market matured and policy uncertainty in the U.S. undercut some Western plans.

Europe and China are sliding into an overt trade confrontation, and this time the flashpoint is not cheap toys or textiles but the core of Europe’s industrial base.

A record Chinese surplus with the EU approaching $300 billion in 2025, combined with a four-to-one container imbalance and an increasingly undervalued renminbi, has pushed leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen to declare that relations with Beijing have reached an “inflection point” and that what is now at stake is nothing less than the survival of European industry.

China is about to put the world’s first commercial land-based small modular reactor into operation, and it is doing so on its own terms technologically, industrially, and geopolitically.

The Linglong One, also known as the ACP100, is a 125 MWe integrated pressurised water SMR developed by China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). It was the first SMR design to pass an International Atomic Energy Agency safety review back in 2016, and its first-of-a-kind unit is being built at the Changjiang nuclear power site on Hainan island.

China is putting a formal gatekeeper in front of its steel exports, and that is less about paperwork in 2026 than about giving Beijing a strategic lever over a sector that has become both an economic shock absorber at home and a political lightning rod abroad.

From 1 January 2026, exporters of around 300 categories of steel products will have to obtain export licences tied to specific contracts and backed by manufacturers’ quality inspection certificates, the Ministry of Commerce has announced. The measure plugs steel into a broader export-licensing regime that already covers 43 sensitive goods, including wheat, corn, coal and crude oil, and signals that steel is now being treated alongside energy and food as a commodity of strategic concern.

The European Union is quietly defusing one of the more explosive flashpoints in transatlantic energy policy: how to apply its tough new methane rules to imported oil and gas without choking off supplies from the United States.

From this year, the EU’s methane regulation obliges importers of oil and gas to monitor and report the methane emissions associated with what they bring into Europe. Over time, that escalates: from 2027, new gas supply contracts will have to comply with standards equivalent to the EU’s own methane rules, or they will not be acceptable.