When EU leaders gather next week to confront China’s trade ascendancy, they will be responding to numbers that have moved from concerning to historic. China closed 2025 with a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus, a record achieved straight through Donald Trump’s tariff wall, and the EU’s own bilateral deficit has doubled in five years to run above a billion euros a day in the first quarter of 2026.

The fear animating the summit has a name borrowed from recent economic history: a second China Shock, sequel to the import wave that hollowed out swathes of American manufacturing after Beijing joined the WTO in 2001. The first shock caught the West intellectually unprepared, with economists insisting for a decade that trade adjustment was smooth and localized before the research finally documented millions of displaced workers and the political earthquakes that followed.

France will open on Friday the tender the wind industry has been awaiting since 2024: ten gigawatts of offshore capacity, the largest single offshore procurement ever launched in the country and one of the largest in Europe’s history. Behind the headline number lies a triple wager.

The government is betting that an industry battered globally by cost inflation and political hostility can deliver at scale, that floating turbine technology is ready to leave its experimental phase, and, most precariously, that the contracts can be locked in before an April presidential election in which the leading party wants the whole program stopped.

While Europe spent the week fine-tuning the price of carbon, China’s biggest coal region announced plans to manufacture more of it. Inner Mongolia intends to build the country’s largest base for converting coal into oil, gas and chemicals, a project framed explicitly as a response to import dependence in wartime.

The announcement, delivered by the region’s second-ranked official Huang Zhiqiang with a promise to scale up coal-to-oil, coal-to-gas and coal-to-chemicals capacity in the name of self-sufficiency, is short on detail but unambiguous in direction. Four months of war in the Gulf and a strangled Strait of Hormuz have done what no five-year plan quite managed: they have made turning coal into petroleum products a strategic priority rather than a niche experiment.

Governments have sold 504 billion dollars of bonds through syndication in the first half of 2026, a record for the format and a sum exceeding even the first six months of 2020, when the world was borrowing its way through pandemic lockdowns. That comparison should give pause.

The Covid surge was an emergency response to a closed global economy. The current one is happening with economies open and functioning, which means it reflects something structural rather than cyclical: the arrival of an era in which rearmament, energy crisis support, aging societies and the bills of past emergencies all fall due simultaneously, and at interest rates the borrowers no longer control.

The latest survey from the US-China Business Council contains a contradiction that captures the entire post-trade-war relationship in two numbers. Ninety-two percent of American companies operating in China reported turning a profit last year, a ten-point jump and a remarkably healthy figure for any market.

Yet only 49 percent intend to put new money into the country this year, a reading just one percentage point above last year’s all-time low. American business in China is making money and refusing to reinvest it, and that gap between profitability and commitment is the most honest indicator available of where the world’s most important commercial relationship actually stands.

Nickel has started 2026 as one of the better performers in the base metals complex, and the trade behind the move is easy to articulate. After four straight years of crushing oversupply, the market is betting that Indonesia, the country that single-handedly created the glut, is finally easing off the accelerator.

Jakarta has tightened mining quotas, and its processing industry is wrestling with a sulfur squeeze that constrains the acid-leaching plants feeding battery-grade output. The thesis is coherent. The problem is sitting in plain sight in exchange warehouses on two continents: 468,600 tonnes of refined metal across the London Metal Exchange and the Shanghai Futures Exchange, the heaviest stock overhang since 2015 and roughly six weeks of global consumption.

Europe has spent two decades treating solar power as the answer to its energy insecurities. Last month Brussels concluded that part of the solar fleet might itself be an insecurity, and acted on it. The EU’s new ban on public funding for Chinese-made inverters, the devices that convert panel output into grid-ready electricity, is on paper a procurement restriction.

In practice it is the moment the bloc formally extended its China de-risking doctrine into the heart of its power system, and the collateral effects on its climate timetable will be substantial. The measure touches at least 14 gigawatts of new solar capacity, more than a fifth of what the EU installs in a typical year.

In the early hours of Thursday, after talks that stretched deep into the night, EU member states and the European Parliament agreed to defang the bloc’s most politically explosive climate instrument before it has charged a single euro. The deal strengthens the price-control machinery of ETS2, the new emissions trading system that from 2028 will put a carbon cost on the fuels Europeans use to heat their homes and drive their cars.

The headline change sounds technical: if permit prices climb above 45 euros per tonne of CO2, 40 million additional allowances will flow into the market from a stability reserve, double the previously planned 20 million, with the release available twice a year for a potential annual injection of 80 million permits.