Washington and Astana are turning a long-overlooked corner of Central Asia into a test case for allied critical-minerals strategy. Under a deal the Trump administration plans to unveil, Cove Capital will take a 70% stake alongside Kazakhstan’s state miner Tau-Ken Samruk to develop the Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty tungsten deposits, with project costs estimated at roughly $1.1 billion and a U.S. EXIM Bank letter of interest for up to $900 million in financing.

The joint venture will control sales and has pledged to prioritize U.S. government and American commercial needs, a notable line given that the United States hasn’t mined tungsten since 2015 and depends heavily on Chinese supply.

Aluminium is quietly stealing the show in base metals. Shanghai futures hovering around ¥21,675/ton (~$3,043) speak to a market where demand has held up while supply growth has faded, especially in China, the world’s swing producer.

What’s changed is not a sudden boom so much as a steady tightening in the parts of the supply chain that matter: constrained smelting capacity where power is scarce or expensive, patchier alumina availability at times, and greater discipline from provincial authorities who are keeping a lid on new electrolytic capacity even as downstream appetite from autos, packaging, grid hardware, and solar frames stays firm.

China just put a price tag on CATL’s route back into one of its most important raw-material assets. Jiangxi’s natural resources department disclosed that Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. must pay 247 million yuan (about $35 million) for the mining rights to the Jianxiawo deposit in Yichun, an administrative step required before regulators will reissue the license and allow operations to resume.

Jianxiawo has been idle since a permit lapsed on August 9, a pause that injected fresh uncertainty into lithium supply at a time when Beijing is tightening oversight of the entire battery-materials chain. The fee is a precondition for restarting; the province’s valuation report also reveals a curious wrinkle: the 2022 asset appraisal was pegged to kaolinite, not lithium, reflecting how quickly Yichun’s clay-hosted resources have leapt from industrial afterthought to strategic prize.

Vietnam is road-testing a new development model in real time: invite a handful of domestic conglomerates to deliver nation-scale infrastructure, then surround them with preferential policies so they can move faster than a traditional, state-led system.

Vingroup’s $70 billion pitch to build a north-south high-speed rail, and manufacture the rolling stock, has become the flagship of that approach and a litmus test for “Resolution 68,” the Communist Party’s blueprint that many in Hanoi shorthand as “Đổi Mới 2.0.”

Global monetary policy is drifting into a new, awkward equilibrium: most major central banks have taken their foot off the easing pedal, but only a few are ready to say the cycle is done. The result is a patchwork of stances shaped less by ideology than by each economy’s particular mix of inflation persistence, growth fatigue, fiscal settings, and currency risks.

The common thread is caution. After a flurry of rate cuts earlier in the year, policymakers from Ottawa to Stockholm to Sydney are signaling that further moves will be rare, small, and data-dependent. Even where the door is technically open, the bar to act looks higher than in the spring.

China’s October trade print was a cold dose of reality for a country trying to outrun tariffs and weak global demand. After months of hustling orders forward to beat new U.S. levies, exports slipped back into contraction, underscoring how deeply Chinese manufacturing still leans on American consumers even as Beijing courts Europe and Southeast Asia.

The customs data show the whiplash clearly: a sharp swing from September’s solid growth to a year-on-year decline, with shipments to the U.S. plunging and only tepid gains elsewhere. The front-loading window has closed; the pipeline is thinner; and the yuan softened as traders marked down the outlook.

Washington has redrawn the map of what counts as strategically indispensable, tacking ten more materials onto its critical minerals roster and, in the process, broadening the government’s industrial policy toolkit. Copper’s inclusion is the headline shift. Long treated as a ubiquitous industrial metal, it now joins a club that steers federal incentives, shapes permitting priorities, and guides stockpiling, an acknowledgement that the wiring of the future economy, from EV motors and transmission lines to data centers, rests on an increasingly tight supply foundation.

Metallurgical coal’s addition is equally telling. By elevating the feedstock for coke and thus blast-furnace steel alongside uranium, boron, lead, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, and silver, the Interior Department is signaling that the backbone materials of energy, defense, food security, and advanced manufacturing must be secured at home or from trusted partners.

U.S. liquefied natural gas is in the middle of a curious boom: developers are locking in long-term sales at a pace second only to the panic-buying wave of 2022, even as warnings grow about an eventual supply overhang and rising construction costs. Through October, American exporters secured roughly 29.5 million tonnes per year of binding offtake, more than quadruple last year’s tally, giving financiers the revenue certainty they crave for multibillion-dollar terminals.

The policy backdrop is tailor-made for momentum. Washington has reopened the approvals spigot, pitched LNG in trade diplomacy, and cheered on a cluster of final investment decisions that add more than 60 mtpa to an existing base already north of 120 mtpa. If the current build-out stays on track, the United States could supply about a third of the world’s LNG by decade’s end, rerouting the center of gravity for global gas.