Archives December 2025

Trade didn’t just wobble in 2025—it rebalanced around power, policy, and materials. We trace how sweeping U.S. tariffs set off global retaliation, why price shocks hit cars and chips harder than couture, and how rare earths turned from invisible ingredients into geopolitical leverage. Along the way, we unpack China’s end-to-end grip on mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing, and the precise export controls that rippled through defense, EVs, drones, and semiconductors. We also explore the…

Jobs aren’t vanishing—they’re evolving fast. We dig into why AI is changing tasks more than it’s replacing roles, which jobs feel the pressure first, and how smart upskilling can turn a threat into a career tailwind. From clerical and entry-level analyst work to creative and care professions, we map the real exposure and explain where human judgment, empathy, and critical thinking still anchor value. Beyond the workplace, we zoom out to the forces bending global trade. The Russia–Ukraine war…

Prices keep rising, lead times keep slipping, and yet global trade is still on track to break records. We dig into that paradox and make sense of a year where supply chains fought on multiple fronts: tariffs compounding at every border, inventories ballooning, and returns threatening to swallow margins. I walk through the latest data showing trade flows surpassing 35 trillion dollars in 2025 and why the Q4 slowdown signals a tougher landscape in 2026. From the shop floor to the boardroom, th…

Old ideas never really vanish; they take new shapes, get new champions, and quietly steer the rules we live by. We open the vault on Keynes, mercantilism, and the intellectual currents that still drive modern trade, monetary policy, and the supply chains that bind our lives together. Along the way, we revisit the Irish famine and the Scottish clearances as stark reminders of what happens when conviction outruns care, and why today’s policy theater can still shift costs onto those with the lea…