The Jones Act waiver shows how quickly the Trump administration has moved from ideological preference to crisis pragmatism under the pressure of the Iran war. Washington has granted a 60-day waiver of the century-old law, temporarily allowing foreign-flagged ships to carry fuel, fertilizer and other goods between U.S. ports in response to higher prices and supply disruptions linked to the conflict.

The move is significant not because it will dramatically reduce costs on its own, but because it signals that the administration now sees domestic shipping constraints as one of the bottlenecks worsening the economic fallout from the war.

Britain has now made explicit what had been building for some time: steel is no longer being treated as an ordinary tradable product, but as a strategic industry that the state is prepared to defend through both protection and public financing. The government will cut the volume of tariff-free steel imports by 60% and raise the duty on steel entering above that quota from 25% to 50%, with the new regime taking effect on July 1.

At the same time, London said its National Wealth Fund could provide up to £2.5 billion to help finance investment in the sector, while the government raised its ambition for the domestic share of steel used in Britain to 50%, up from the previous 30% target.

China has started 2026 by importing iron ore aggressively, but the extra material is not feeding a rebound in steel production. Instead, it is swelling stockpiles to record levels, which says a great deal about both the weakness of domestic steel demand and Beijing’s instinct to build buffers while prices are still manageable.

China imported 210.02 million metric tons of iron ore in January and February, up 10% from a year earlier, while crude steel output in the same period fell 3.6% to 160.34 million tons. Port inventories tracked by SteelHome rose to 166.91 million tons in the week to March 13, the highest in that dataset going back to 2012.

Europe’s power-price divergence in 2026 is revealing a hard truth about the continent’s energy transition: the countries that remain most dependent on gas are once again the ones absorbing the worst of an external shock. Wholesale electricity prices in Hungary, Italy and Romania have all risen by at least 12% from last year’s average levels, while Spain and Portugal have recorded declines over the same period.

That gap is not accidental. It reflects the very different structures of national power systems and shows that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is hitting Europe unevenly, with the most gas-reliant economies suffering the largest cost increases.

The war with Iran is exposing just how vulnerable the global aluminium market has become outside China, and especially for Western manufacturers that depend on Gulf smelters for primary metal.

The Middle East accounts for about 9% of global aluminium output, but that share becomes much more significant once China is excluded because China’s industry is largely oriented toward its own system and toward semi-fabricated exports rather than acting as a flexible supplier of primary metal to Europe and the United States.

The war with Iran has broken one of the most important unwritten rules of the Gulf energy order: that even bitter regional rivals would generally avoid pushing the oil and gas system itself into prolonged chaos. Tehran has now directly targeted energy facilities across the Gulf and, most consequentially, blocked the Strait of Hormuz for the first time, disrupting the artery through which around a fifth of global oil and LNG normally moves.

That alone is enough to alter how producers, importers, shipowners and insurers think about the region. The immediate price shock matters, but the deeper significance is that the conflict has destroyed the old assumption that Gulf energy infrastructure would remain broadly insulated from sustained interstate warfare.

Japan is beginning to feel the Iran war not as an abstract geopolitical risk but as a real economy shock spreading from heavy industry into daily life. Reduced Middle East energy supplies are now affecting businesses from JFE Steel and Mitsubishi Chemical to public baths and food manufacturers, even as Tokyo has launched a record oil-stock release to cushion the blow.

Because Japan still relies on the Middle East for around 90% of its oil and most of that normally moves through the Strait of Hormuz, the current disruption goes straight to the core of the country’s energy system.

China’s latest fertilizer export clampdown is worsening one of the most dangerous side effects of the Iran war: the conversion of an energy and shipping crisis into a potential food-security crisis. Beijing has quietly broadened restrictions on fertilizer exports, including mid-March curbs on nitrogen-potassium blends and certain phosphate products, on top of existing controls on urea and other products.

The result is that only a limited range of fertilizers, notably ammonium sulphate, can still move out freely, with Reuters estimating that between half and three-quarters of China’s fertilizer exports last year are now restricted, potentially up to 40 million metric tons. That is a major intervention from one of the world’s largest fertilizer exporters at precisely the moment when global markets were hoping China might help fill the supply gap created by the war.