China’s thermal coal is back in the spotlight, with benchmark prices at Qinhuangdao pushing to their highest of the year as seasonal restocking collides with tighter near-term supply and a friendlier policy mood. Utilities are replenishing inventories ahead of winter, but this annual ritual has been magnified by extended safety inspections and checks on overproduction that have slowed mine throughput.

Sentiment has also perked up after a thaw in U.S.-China trade tensions and a subtle softening in Beijing’s language around coal use, which together suggest policymakers will tolerate a longer, flatter peak in consumption. Spot levels near 788 yuan per tonne, up a bit more than ten percent month-on-month, echo similar firmness in metallurgical coal, where Dalian futures are hovering around year highs. The result is a market that feels tighter than the macro headlines would imply.

Japan’s big three carmakers are redrawing their maps around India. Toyota, Honda and Suzuki are committing billions to plants, suppliers and model programs, treating the world’s third-largest auto market as both a growth engine and an export springboard. It’s a break from the old formula that centered China for scale and the West for profits.

Several forces are converging to make India the new fulcrum: a huge, still-formalizing consumer base; improving manufacturing quality; aggressive incentives from New Delhi; and, crucially, a policy wall that keeps Chinese EV champions at bay. In a landscape where a bruising price war has turned China into a low-margin slog and Southeast Asia is being pried open by BYD and its peers, India offers Japanese carmakers a rare combination of scale and shelter.

Japan is preparing to retool how it vets foreign money, shifting from a wide-net screen toward a sharper, risk-based filter that still protects core security interests. The planned overhaul of the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act would be the first major rethink since 2019, when Tokyo slashed the trigger for prior review in sensitive sectors from 10% to 1%.

That emergency brake succeeded in catching more deals but also flooded the system: filings quadrupled, with IT and software alone accounting for over half of cases. Five years on, the finance ministry is signaling a course correction to keep the guardrails, but aim them where they matter most and close the gaps that sophisticated acquirers can exploit.

Japan’s sōgō shōsha are running into a classic late-cycle squeeze: steel prices suppressed by a flood of Chinese exports, raw material prices for blast furnace inputs sliding, and portfolio earnings from metals slipping in tandem. With China’s property downturn starving its domestic mills of demand, producers have redirected output abroad at record pace, overwhelming regional markets from Southeast Asia to the Gulf and now Africa.

The result is a double bind for the trading houses’ metals divisions. On the one hand, cheaper iron ore and coking coal erode upstream equity income and trading margins; on the other, weak finished steel prices curb the profitability of downstream affiliates and customers. Executives across Mitsubishi, Itochu, Sumitomo, and Marubeni are telegraphing at least six more months of pressure, consistent with a supply overhang that will take time and policy to clear.

Twenty kilometers off Tianjin, a lattice of steel rises from the Bohai Sea and hums with compressors, separators, and valves. The Caofeidian 11-1 CEPJ platform is more than an offshore worksite; it is the emblem of a deliberate national project to shrink China’s exposure to energy shocks.

For years Beijing has fretted about the vulnerability that comes with being both the world’s largest energy consumer and its top importer. That concern has intensified as geopolitics turned rougher with tariffs and technology controls have expanded, Washington has sanctioned major Russian producers, and Chinese refiners have had to cancel shipments.

Tokyo and Washington are turning a cartographic speck in the western Pacific into a strategic test bed for supply chain resilience. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi says the two allies will jointly study whether Japan can lift rare earth-rich mud from around Minamitori Island, an isolated atoll 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo and well inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and do so at abyssal depths that push current technology.

The plan is staged: a feasibility campaign in January to verify whether mud can be raised reliably from roughly 6,000 meters, followed by a larger trial that, if the early engineering holds, would target pre-commercial operations later in the decade. The political scaffolding is already in place.

Asia’s LNG pullback in October extended a year-long pattern led by China, even as Europe kept vacuuming up cargoes to shore up winter supply. Ship tracking tallies put Asian receipts near 22.8 million tonnes, fractionally above September in headline terms but lower on a per-day basis and well below last October, while China, still the world’s largest buyer, took roughly 5.6 million tonnes, down sharply year on year.

The softness isn’t about access so much as price arithmetic. With North Asia spot assessments hovering a little above $11 per mmBtu and holding north of $10 since spring 2024, discretionary spot purchases have lost out in China to cheaper long-term LNG and lower-cost pipeline gas from Russia and Central Asia. India shows the same price sensitivity, with October intake slipping from a year earlier despite a slight month-on-month uptick.

Europe’s offshore wind heavyweights are effectively telling governments the bottleneck is political, not technological. Ørsted and Vestas see room for the sector to expand at a blistering pace, as Vestas pegs global offshore capacity growth at roughly 20%-25% a year into 2030, but only if permits move faster, auction terms share risk sensibly, and grids are reinforced to absorb what gets built.

That agenda reflects lessons from the last two years, when a perfect storm of higher interest rates, pricier steel and vessels, cable and substation shortages, and slow permitting collided with “winner’s-curse” auctions that left developers bearing full market price risk. Several marquee tenders in Europe underwhelmed or failed outright as bids dried up under those conditions.