China’s descent into what officials euphemistically term “involution” represents the most significant macroeconomic crisis facing a major economy in the post-war era outside Japan’s lost decades. The systematic price erosion documented across consumer goods, industrial inputs, and labor markets signals not a temporary adjustment but a fundamental breakdown in the relationship between production capacity and consumption demand that threatens to entrench itself into a generational stagnation.

Deflation occupies a peculiar position in economic history precisely because of its infrequency among developed economies since the Second World War. The Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties demonstrated deflation’s devastating capacity to amplify economic distress, creating self-reinforcing spirals where falling prices incentivize delayed purchases, reducing demand further and forcing additional price cuts.

The United States has imposed steep new tariffs on solar panel imports from Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand, in a dramatic escalation of trade protections that will reshape global supply chains and have far-reaching consequences for the American solar industry.

The duties, which reach as high as 3,521%, are the outcome of a yearlong investigation by the U.S. Commerce Department that determined manufacturers in these Southeast Asian countries were benefiting from unfair subsidies and dumping products in the U.S. below production cost.

Israel has signed the largest natural gas export agreement in its history, a landmark deal valued at up to $35 billion to supply 130 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from the Leviathan field to Egypt through 2040. This deal not only strengthens Israel’s role as a regional energy provider but also offers critical relief to Egypt, which has faced mounting energy shortages and soaring LNG import bills since its domestic gas production began falling in 2022.

The agreement is a much-needed lifeline for Egypt. Once envisioned as a regional energy hub due to discoveries like Zohr in the Mediterranean, Egypt has been forced to abandon those ambitions amid a steep decline in output. From a peak of 6,133 million cubic meters (mcm) in March 2021, Egypt’s gas production plummeted to 3,545 mcm by May 2025, a drop of over 42% in less than five years.