Vietnam is trying to “re-bank” its LNG-to-power pipeline by shifting more commercial risk away from developers and lenders and onto the offtaker. Under a draft decree being prepared by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the government would lift the guaranteed offtake for LNG-fired plants to at least 75% (from at least 65%) and extend the guaranteed period to 15 years (from 10).

The intent is straightforward: restore project bankability after a prolonged stall in financial close and construction starts.

Market volatility picked up across multiple asset classes on Tuesday as investors repriced U.S. political and trade risk following President Donald Trump’s threat to revive tariff pressure on Europe. The key feature was the breadth of the move: U.S. equities fell, long-dated Treasuries sold off, and the dollar weakened, an unusual combination that signals investors are not simply rotating between “risk-on” and “risk-off,” but reassessing the attractiveness of U.S. assets themselves.

The dynamic is a reprise of last year’s “Sell America” episode after the April “Liberation Day” tariff shock, when markets briefly treated U.S. policy as the primary source of volatility rather than the anchor of stability. This time, the trigger was renewed tariff threats against European allies, which raised the probability of retaliation and renewed trade uncertainty.

China’s lithium carbonate futures have become so erratic that the Guangzhou Futures Exchange is again adjusting market rules to damp risk, highlighting how speculative pressure and uncertainty around battery-metal fundamentals are colliding in a relatively young derivatives market.

On Tuesday, the exchange’s flagship lithium carbonate contract hit its limit-up move, the latest in a string of sessions this month in which prices have repeatedly slammed into daily trading limits in both directions. Rather than tightening immediately, the bourse is now widening the permissible daily trading range to 11% from 9% starting after Wednesday’s settlement, an effort to accommodate larger price moves while still keeping the market orderly.

China’s 2025 growth model became more export-led than at any point since the late-1990s, underscoring how Beijing managed to hit its headline target even as domestic momentum stayed soft and U.S. trade pressure intensified.

At a Monday briefing, China’s statistics chief Kang Yi said net exports of goods and services accounted for almost a third of last year’s GDP growth contribution. That share rose by more than two percentage points versus 2024 and reached its highest level since 1997, when net exports played an even larger role in the economy’s expansion.

Congo has handed U.S. officials a concrete “shopping list” of state-owned mining and processing assets of manganese, copper-cobalt, gold, lithium and associated projects for American investors to evaluate under a growing U.S.-DRC critical-minerals partnership.

The move is being portrayed in Kinshasa as the most tangible step yet in turning recent U.S.-backed diplomacy in the country’s mineral-rich east into commercial influence over a supply chain that Washington views as strategically exposed to China’s dominance in midstream processing.

Global markets are being rattled again by President Donald Trump’s latest foreign policy and trade threats, but the central question remains the same one investors grappled with for much of last year: is this the start of a sustained escalation, or another burst of volatility that ultimately dissipates as capital returns to the same concentrated set of “winning” assets?

The argument for a fade is familiar and, on recent precedent, plausible. Investors have been conditioned by the last 12 months to treat many dramatic Trump pronouncements as negotiating tactics, temporary dislocations, or noise that is later neutralized by deals, exemptions, or simple non-implementation.

China is preparing a new round of policies to encourage households to spend more on services, especially elderly care, healthcare, and leisure, in an effort to shift the economy away from its longstanding reliance on investment-heavy growth and export-led manufacturing.

The logic is straightforward: demand for big-ticket goods is increasingly saturated, while services remain under-supplied after years of policy and capital bias toward factories. Beijing is effectively betting that “catch-up growth” in services can become the next engine of consumption.

The European Commission’s draft revisions to the EU Cybersecurity Act are designed to convert what has largely been a voluntary “risk mitigation” approach into a binding phase-out regime for “high-risk” suppliers across critical infrastructure.

While the Commission avoids naming firms or countries, the proposal is widely understood to capture Chinese vendors that European governments and allies have long treated as higher-risk, most notably Huawei and ZTE, because the logic and enforcement structure mirrors earlier 5G restrictions, but now extends well beyond telecom networks.