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.

The $55 billion wave of EV-related writedowns across global legacy automakers is not simply an accounting clean-up; it is the financial crystallization of a strategic misread about how quickly the demand, policy, and competitive landscape would converge on a single “all-battery” trajectory.

For much of the early 2020s, the dominant corporate narrative assumed a relatively smooth S-curve: regulation would tighten steadily, consumers would adopt EVs en masse, and incumbent manufacturers would amortize massive platform and battery investments over rapidly rising volumes.

RWE’s twin agreements with ADNOC and Masdar are a concise illustration of where Germany’s post-Russia energy strategy is heading: build a diversified “security layer” of long-term LNG options while accelerating flexibility assets at home so renewables can scale without destabilizing the system.

Signed in Abu Dhabi during Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Gulf tour, the deals are explicitly framed as part of Berlin’s effort to reduce residual dependency risk, first from Russia, and increasingly from a market structure in which the U.S. dominates marginal LNG supply and China dominates large parts of the clean-tech supply chain.

The Trump administration is using federal leasing as the lever to expand hydrocarbon supply, and it is doing so through a legally mandated timetable that limits the space for delay.

On Thursday, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management said it will auction oil and gas drilling rights across roughly 5.5 million acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A) on March 9, with sealed bids due March 5. It will offer more than 600 tracts, reopening leasing in a reserve where the federal government has not held a sale since 2019.

Argentina’s new “reciprocal” trade-and-investment pact with the United States is being positioned in Washington as something closer to a strategic alignment instrument than a conventional tariff deal.

According to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, Buenos Aires is granting preferential access for a wide slate of U.S. exports while simultaneously locking in rules that protect cross-border data flows, discourage digital taxation aimed at U.S. tech firms, and tighten cooperation on export controls and telecommunications security.

Thursday’s crypto selloff looked less like an isolated “bitcoin event” and more like a synchronized de-risking across the most crowded, most leveraged corners of global markets. Bitcoin slid to roughly $63,300, its lowest level since October 2024, and was down around 12% on the day, on pace for its steepest one-session drop since the 2022 cascade.

Liquidations did what they usually do in these moments: they turned a decline into an air pocket, with about $1 billion of bitcoin positions wiped out in 24 hours as forced selling accelerated the move. In parallel, the aggregate crypto market has shed about $2 trillion in value from an early-October peak, with an especially sharp drawdown concentrated in the past month.

The violent selloff now ripping through U.S. software is the market’s way of admitting that the “AI lifts everything” story has fractured. In 2025, investors could largely treat AI as a generalized tailwind: buy the big tech complex, buy the software platforms, buy the infrastructure suppliers, and assume the same narrative would compound across the stack.

The past week is a break from that regime. Roughly $800 billion of value has been erased from the S&P 500 software and services cohort in what traders have dubbed “software-mageddon,” and it has been described as the sector’s worst relative performance versus the broader S&P 500 in a quarter century.