Asia’s two coal giants, China and India, nudged their thermal coal imports higher in November, but this small rebound is happening against a backdrop that makes a sustained surge in volumes far from guaranteed. The move is tightly linked to prices: seaborne coal became very cheap by mid-year, inviting buyers back in, and then rallied sharply into late autumn.

Now, with prices well off their lows but demand signals mixed, both countries are navigating a delicate balance between energy security, industrial conditions and the political realities of decarbonisation. In November, China imported just under 31 million tonnes of thermal coal, up from about 29 million tonnes in October and marking a third consecutive monthly increase.

Most of the companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence are racing to build systems that don’t just autocomplete text, but emulate something closer to human-style thinking: breaking problems into steps, checking intermediate results, and revising answers. Those “reasoning” models are becoming the new standard for hard tasks in science, coding and maths. But fresh research shows that this leap in capability comes with a steep hidden cost: energy.

When researchers put these models under the microscope, they found that reasoning systems burned, on average, around one hundred times more electricity to answer a thousand text prompts than simpler alternatives that either lack explicit reasoning features or have them switched off. 

Gold has launched into one of the most dramatic rallies in its modern history. In dollar terms it has climbed by more than 60% this year, the strongest performance in nearly half a century. Once you adjust for inflation, the metal has never been more expensive.

Whenever an asset price tears away from its long-term trend, the textbook expectation is that gravity eventually reasserts itself, as it did after gold’s blow-off top at the end of 1979, when prices fell by almost two-thirds over the following five years. The question now is whether we are simply replaying that script with a new generation of investors, or whether the current move reflects a deeper break in the way the global monetary and financial system works.

Copper is in the middle of a powerful price upswing, with benchmarks in both London and Shanghai touching record levels, even though the real economy is hardly booming. Market participants are talking nonstop about a looming shortage of copper, pointing to rising physical premiums and mounting pressure on smelters that are struggling to secure enough mined concentrate.

At the same time, visible inventories on the London Metal Exchange (LME) have just been aggressively drawn down, pushing available stocks below 100,000 tonnes for the first time since mid-year. On the surface it looks like a classic supply crunch story. But beneath that headline, the picture is more complicated: global manufacturing is weak, trade policy is distorting flows, and the “shortage” is highly uneven across regions.

Indian groups Adani and Hindalco are quietly positioning themselves for a long-term play in Latin America’s copper heartland, with both companies exploring ways to enter Peru’s mining sector. According to Peru’s ambassador in New Delhi, Javier Paulinich, the two conglomerates are studying options ranging from joint ventures with existing operators to buying into active copper mines.

Lima, which has made mining the backbone of its export economy, is actively encouraging this interest as part of a broader push to lock in a trade agreement with India that would give copper a central, legally binding place in the relationship. Peru produced around 2.7 million tonnes of copper in 2024 and drew close to $5 billion in mining investment, underscoring how central the metal is to its fiscal and external accounts.

India’s steel industry is bracing for a structural shock in its export model as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism moves from theory to impact on January 1. For more than a decade, Europe has been the premium destination for Indian steel exports; roughly two-thirds of India’s outbound steel tonnage has gone into the European Economic Area, often at better margins than regional markets.

CBAM now effectively inserts a carbon price at the EU border, turning emissions intensity into a hard trade variable rather than a soft ESG talking point. The immediate consequence, as Indian mills and analysts are already acknowledging, is that exports to Europe are likely to slow and trade flows will be redirected toward Africa and the Middle East, at least in the near term.

Xi Jinping’s decision to personally escort Emmanuel Macron to Chengdu is less about ceremony and more about signalling. Beijing is deliberately elevating France as its preferred political entry point into the European Union at a time when the bloc is hardening its economic security agenda and the U.S.-China confrontation is reshaping trade.

Xi rarely leaves Beijing for visiting leaders; that he did so for Macron, when he did not for Donald Trump even during the highly choreographed 2017 “Forbidden City” visit, is intended to convey that Paris matters uniquely in Beijing’s European calculus. For Macron, the optics are equally valuable: after a difficult period at home, he gets to appear on the global stage as the Western leader Beijing is willing to court most intensively in Europe.

Swiss business is quietly reorganising itself in response to Trump’s tariff shock, and the main adjustment is not to fight the U.S., but to move closer to it or diversify away from Switzerland altogether. A new survey by the main Swiss business federation shows that a significant slice of corporate Switzerland is already acting on the new trade reality.

More than 400 firms were polled around the time Bern struck a deal with Washington to cut U.S. tariffs on Swiss goods from a punishing 39% to 15%. Even with that relief, about a quarter of respondents said they had already agreed concrete steps to adapt.