China is strengthening Hong Kong as a global gold trading hub to expand its role in gold markets, reinforce Hong Kong’s financial position, and gradually increase renminbi usage in commodity transactions. The shift could contribute to a more multipolar gold market that coexists with established Western financial centers rather than displacing them.

The chaotic conditions created by the U.S./Israeli war against Iran are now in an escalatory phase. The reverberations will be severe worldwide.

China’s creation and evolution of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank illustrates a strategy of shaping, rather than overturning, the global financial order by working within multilateral norms while highlighting the limits of existing development institutions. The AIIB’s growth, governance practices, and partnerships show how China is advancing influence through institutional participation and reform by example, underscoring both the opportunities for engagement and the risks of exclusion for the United States in an increasingly multipolar financial system.

The Turnberry System is a way to replace the WTO-based postwar multilateral trading system with bilateral agreements. It marks a significant turning point in global trade rules and will profoundly impact the global trade landscape.

Another great transformation is underway in China. The world’s factory is fast becoming its first electro-state, with an economy increasingly built on clean energy, AI, advanced manufacturing, and control of key strategic materials. This new model is full of promise, though it faces major challenges.

A world order without the United States has been discussed widely. One example relates to reform of the World Trade Organization, whose dispute settlement mechanism has been paralyzed by the U.S. since 2019. Now there could be a solution.

The impact on the global economic and trade landscape is unmistakable. These tariffs will establish trade frictions a a new normal and drive global supply chains toward some form of decoupling. They may also provoke countermeasures from other economies, especially given the constrained role of the WTO.

The Trump administration is fundamentally transforming the relationship between the private sector and the U.S. government. As American capitalism evolves, the underlying logic of the global economy is quietly changing with it.

Donald Trump’s tariffs — the cornerstone of his economic agenda — are closely linked to inflation, revenues, spending and the reshoring of manufacturing. They are the key to assessing Trump’s economic impact, but they come with profound uncertainty.

John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains one of the most prescient critiques of postwar settlement in modern history. In it, Keynes warned that victory can hollow itself out when the victors lose their sense of humility. The punitive reparations imposed upon Germany after World War I, he argued, sowed the seeds for future instability by humiliating and impoverishing a nation that, once stripped of dignity and hope, would not long consent to the order imposed upon it. His insight was both economic as well as moral and political: sustainable peace requires magnanimity, not vengeance; it presupposes an architecture of inclusion, not one of exclusion. In today’s parlance, it rejects blocs aimed at those outside and seeks to ground relations in the idea of indivisible peace.