January’s narrower U.S. budget deficit is best read as a revenue story, especially tariffs, rather than as evidence that Washington has structurally “fixed” its fiscal trajectory. The Treasury reported a $95 billion deficit for January, down 26% from a year earlier, because receipts rose much faster than spending.

Adjusted for calendar quirks that can shift benefit payments between months, Treasury said the deficit would have been only $30 billion, a much larger year-on-year improvement. On a fiscal-year-to-date basis through the first four months (starting October 1), the deficit fell to $697 billion, with revenues up strongly and outlays rising only modestly.

Platinum’s price spike is handing the sector a rare bout of financial breathing room, but executives are trying hard not to repeat the last boom’s mistakes. After a brutal multi-year squeeze that forced cost cutting, job losses, and the shelving of marginal shafts, spot platinum surged 127% in 2025 and briefly touched about $2,918/oz in January. Producers like Valterra Platinum and Impala are now guiding to sharply higher profits.

Yet the industry’s first instinct is not to flood the market with new supply; it is to rebuild credibility with investors through disciplined capital allocation and, above all, cash returns.

Zijin’s decision to bring Manono into production in June, and to ship immediately, matters less because it adds another lithium project in a depressed market and more because it demonstrates how Chinese capital is converting legal and political ambiguity in Africa into near-term supply.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is set to record its first lithium output from one of the world’s most significant undeveloped hard-rock deposits, even as the asset remains entangled in international arbitration after Kinshasa revoked AVZ Minerals’ permit and reassigned a portion of the project to Manono Lithium, a joint venture in which Zijin holds 61% alongside state miner Cominiere and the Congolese state.

Europe’s biggest industrial incumbents are trying to force a political reckoning: if the EU wants to keep heavy industry, it has to fix the energy cost base fast. The statement issued in Antwerp, deliberately timed ahead of the EU leaders’ informal retreat in Belgium, casts the next five years as an inflection point in which Europe either regains competitiveness against the United States and China or accelerates into deindustrialisation.

The CEOs’ core demand is emergency action to cut power costs and to create demand pull for “made in Europe” output, effectively asking Brussels to treat energy affordability and industrial market share as matters of economic security, not just market outcomes.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is signalling that batteries are graduating from “nice-to-have flexibility tech” to core grid infrastructure, and that the market is finally producing projects big enough for the fund’s industrial-scale cheque size.

The fund, now about $2.2 trillion and already a private-market investor in renewables since 2021, says it wants to make its first substantial investments in battery storage systems, with its energy and infrastructure chief Harald von Heyden describing large batteries as increasingly central to stabilising power systems dominated by wind and solar.

Brussels is moving toward a more explicitly interventionist use of the EU’s own spending power: Ursula von der Leyen says the Commission will propose public-procurement rules that steer government buyers toward goods that are both made in the EU and low-carbon, arguing that current tendering too often ends up selecting subsidised foreign products even when European alternatives exist.

She framed this as a competitiveness and value-capture problem, that is, public budgets are effectively underwriting industrial activity elsewhere, rather than purely an environmental tweak. The policy is set to be a central element of the Commission’s forthcoming Industrial Accelerator Act, due later this month.

Indonesia is now treating nickel the way classic commodity powers treat oil: as a market to be managed, not merely a resource to be maximized. The latest signal is unusually aggressive. PT Weda Bay Nickel, the giant Halmahera mining complex widely described as the world’s largest, has been told its 2026 ore quota will be just 12 million wet tonnes, down from the 42 million wet tonnes it was ultimately allowed to mine in 2025.

The immediate market reaction was predictable: nickel futures in London jumped, because the marginal supplier is openly throttling production in a market that had been drowning in Indonesian material.

The dispute around Chancay has jumped from a dry regulatory question in Peru into a sharper geopolitical argument about who ultimately governs strategic infrastructure when it is financed, built, and operated by a foreign state-linked champion.

What triggered the latest flare-up is a Peruvian court ruling that the national infrastructure regulator, Ositran, does not have supervisory authority over the port, because Chancay is structured as a privately owned facility rather than a concession on public land like Peru’s other major ports.