China is moving to turn battery storage from a policy-favoured add-on into a formally compensated reliability asset in the national power system, by widening a subsidy-style payment mechanism that was originally built to keep coal plants standing by for peak demand.

In practical terms, Beijing has now told provincial authorities to fold grid-scale batteries, alongside other storage such as pumped hydro, into a nationwide “capacity payment” framework intended to secure electricity supply and support the clean-energy transition.

Washington has chosen continuity over rupture on one of the most consequential pieces of U.S.-Africa economic architecture, but it is doing so in a way that telegraphs a harder bargain ahead. President Donald Trump signed legislation on Tuesday extending the African Growth and Opportunity Act, restoring duty-free access for eligible Sub-Saharan African exporters through December 31, 2026, and backdating the measure to cover the period from September 30, 2025, when the program lapsed.

The retroactive fix matters because AGOA is not a symbolic preference: it sits inside supply chains, payrolls, and investment decisions, and a gap in legal coverage can freeze shipments, scramble pricing, and undermine the credibility of long-term sourcing plans.

The copper market’s ascendance to analyst favorite for 2026 performance encapsulates the profound tension between speculative enthusiasm for commodities positioned at the intersection of multiple technological megatrends and the sobering physical realities of industrial supply-demand fundamentals.

This divergence between financial market exuberance and cautious expert consensus reveals deeper anxieties about whether investment narratives have detached from economic substance, creating vulnerabilities to sharp corrections when reality reasserts itself.

China’s plan to list domestic, yuan-denominated LNG futures on the Shanghai Futures Exchange is best understood as an attempt to shift the “control layer” of LNG pricing and risk management closer to home. For years, Chinese buyers have been the largest single source of incremental LNG demand, yet the core hedging benchmarks that shape contract formulas and price expectations sit outside China, anchored in Western or offshore hubs such as Europe’s TTF, U.S. Henry Hub, and Asia’s JKM.

A yuan contract on a major mainland exchange would give Chinese importers a way to manage price swings without defaulting to dollar-based instruments, and it is designed explicitly to create a reason for foreign counterparties with China exposure to trade on Chinese rails as well.

The convening of over fifty nations in Washington to coordinate responses to Chinese critical minerals dominance marks a watershed moment in the economic dimension of great power competition.

This multilateral gathering, combined with the launch of Project Vault and discussions of coordinated market interventions, represents the most comprehensive effort yet to challenge the structural dependencies that have granted Beijing extraordinary leverage over global industrial supply chains and advanced manufacturing ecosystems.

The European Union is moving from diagnosis to damage-control on critical minerals, and the emerging stockpiling plan is a sign that Brussels increasingly views raw materials the way it once viewed gas storage: as a strategic buffer that can’t be left solely to market timing.

The Commission is pressing ahead with a joint reserves concept and is informally assigning core operational functions to the bloc’s three biggest industrial powers, France to help arrange financing for purchases, Germany to organize sourcing, and Italy to manage storage capacity.

Mexico’s government is trying to re-anchor the country’s growth story around a large, state-steered investment pipeline without fully taking the fiscal burden onto the public balance sheet.

On Tuesday, officials presented a framework to mobilize about 5.6 trillion pesos (roughly $323 billion) of spending through 2030 via public-private partnerships that would cover a wide sweep of infrastructure and “strategic” sectors from energy systems and transport corridors to ports, airports, water projects, healthcare, and education.

The European Commission’s forthcoming initiative to privilege domestically manufactured maritime vessels and equipment represents a fundamental reorientation of European industrial policy toward economic nationalism that would have seemed politically impossible just a decade ago.

This shift from open market principles toward deliberate protectionism reflects deepening anxieties about strategic vulnerabilities, industrial hollowing, and geopolitical dependencies that now outweigh longstanding commitments to trade liberalization and market efficiency.