Emerging market equities were sold for four decades on a single proposition: they move differently from developed markets. Different economies, different cycles, different risks, and therefore a genuine diversification benefit for portfolios overexposed to American technology.

That proposition has quietly ceased to be true. The index that contains more than 1,175 companies across 24 countries is now, in any practical sense, a leveraged position in the artificial intelligence hardware cycle, and the past six weeks have demonstrated exactly what that means.

Japan’s decision to open an anti-dumping investigation into steel imports from China, South Korea and Taiwan is another sign that the global steel market is moving deeper into a protectionist phase. The probe will cover hot-rolled and cold-rolled coil, strip and sheet, a group of flat steel products used across major industrial sectors including automobiles, appliances, machinery, packaging, construction materials and equipment manufacturing.

The investigation was requested by Japan’s leading steelmakers, including Nippon Steel and JFE Steel, which argue that imported products are being sold at prices far below fair market value.

The rerouting of U.S. Gulf Coast crude to Asia through the Panama Canal is a vivid sign of how deeply the Iran war is reshaping oil trade flows. Asian refiners are now chartering medium-sized Aframax and partially loaded Suezmax tankers to move U.S. crude through Panama to South Korea and Japan, even though this is usually a more expensive option per barrel than the standard very large crude carrier route around the Cape of Good Hope.

The willingness to pay those higher transport costs and canal fees shows that speed and security of delivery have suddenly become more important than transport efficiency. The immediate background is the collapse of normal Middle East supply patterns. The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has severely disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz, the route for roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG.