U.S. automotive industry says Chinese automakers are dumping subsidised vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world, and sent a letter to the Congress underlining: “this hasn’t happened inside the US yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year.”

The candour is unusual and the logic is sound. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, whose members account for the overwhelming majority of American vehicle sales, is not asking Congress to remedy an existing injury. It is asking for a permanent statutory wall against a competitor that has been kept out by tariffs and a Commerce Department rule, before that competitor can arrive.

The origin story of a six billion euro theme park deal is not usually the most revealing detail in a diplomatic relationship, but this one is. Macron and Mohammed bin Salman discovered a shared enthusiasm for manga, and specifically Dragon Ball Z, during the French president’s Riyadh visit in December 2024.

Eighteen months later, Qiddiya, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has committed to building three parks at Cergy-Pontoise northwest of Paris, expected to create around 22,000 jobs in what Macron called a new global destination on the scale of Disneyland Paris.

Scott Bessent posted on Thursday evening that the European Union had joined Operation Economic Outcast, praising the bloc’s strong and early stance and declaring that the world was sending a clear message to Tehran. The European Commission statement he was referring to, published on August 31 as G20 finance ministers gathered in Asheville, does not say that.

It welcomes the American campaign, restates the bloc’s longstanding complaints about Iranian conduct, and expresses support for efforts to halt destabilising activities and resume peace talks. It does not formally commit the European Union to anything.

Global energy trade spent forty years being optimised. Routes were shortened, cargo sizes maximised, inventories minimised, and suppliers concentrated wherever volume was largest and voyages shortest. The result was a system of extraordinary efficiency that assumed one thing: that the waterways would stay open. Six months of war have demonstrated otherwise, and the response has been a deliberate de-optimisation of the entire map.

Japan illustrates it most starkly because it started from the most concentrated position. Until February the world’s fifth-largest oil buyer sourced over 90 percent of its crude from the Middle East, and by some measures 94 to 95 percent, delivered to coastal refineries on a straightforward 21-day voyage.

Chinese emissions have declined before. Every previous instance had the same cause: less coal. The second quarter of 2026 broke that pattern. Carbon dioxide emissions fell 1 percent year on year while coal-fired power generation rose, and the decline happened anyway because oil consumption dropped 9 percent overall and 16 percent in transport. This has been identified as the first time a fall in oil use alone has been sufficient to pull Chinese emissions down.

The mechanism is worth setting out carefully because it inverts the usual assumption about how a fuel shock affects emissions. Higher prices normally cut emissions by cutting activity: people drive less, factories run slower, the economy contracts. That is not what happened.

The investment announcements of the past two years have almost all pointed one way. TSMC has committed 265 billion dollars to Arizona, Taiwanese suppliers pledged a further 20 billion this week, and Korea agreed under its trade deal to invest 150 billion dollars in American shipbuilding and 200 billion in other industries.

Against that, four American companies announcing a combined 2 billion dollars for Korea looks like a rounding error. It is worth reading anyway, because of what the four are building and why they have to build it there.

The most arresting statistic behind India’s new draft regulations is not a target but a loss. More than 8,133 gigawatt-hours of solar electricity were curtailed in the first quarter of the current financial year, roughly 14 percent of solar output, equivalent to a day and a half of the entire country’s power consumption or enough to supply nearly 1.4 million homes for a year.

The sun shone, the panels worked, and the grid could not take the electricity. That is the problem the Central Electricity Authority is attempting to legislate away. The proposed mechanism is direct. Under draft second amendment regulations to the technical standards for constructing electric plants and lines, ground-mounted solar and onshore wind projects commissioned after July 1, 2027 would require co-located energy storage equivalent to at least 10 percent of installed capacity with a minimum two-hour duration.

The global bond sell-off is becoming one of the most important macroeconomic events of the year because it is forcing governments, companies and households to adjust to the possibility that high borrowing costs are not a temporary shock. Yields across major sovereign markets have climbed to levels not seen in years, and the rise is beginning to reshape assumptions about public finances, corporate investment, housing affordability and financial-market valuations.

The pressure is broad. German 10-year yields have reached their highest level since 2011, Japanese yields have held above 3 percent, U.S. 10-year Treasury yields have touched their highest level since late 2023, and UK gilt yields have risen to a post-2008 peak.