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Free, Capped and Contagious: Why a US Tariff Could Not Stop Pix Going Global

Brazil’s public payments rail has been named in a US Section 301 tariff action for the very design choices that made it ubiquitous. It has come through that first geopolitical stress test with its model untouched and dozens of central

Earning Through a War: UAE Lenders Bank Records in a Quarter of Conflict

UAE lenders posted record first-half profits through a quarter of regional war, Hormuz shipping disruption and rate uncertainty. At bank level, the numbers point to Gulf banking earnings decoupling from oil and conflict, and to capital beginning to flow out

The Two-Tier Tariff: Washington Prices Labour Standards into Trade

The Section 301 action that took effect on 24 July prices a social standard into trade policy for the first time: 10 per cent for economies that ban forced-labour imports, 12.5 per cent for those that do not, and a

The IMF’s Wartime Audit of the UAE: What Gulf Resilience Is Made Of

The Fund’s July health-check names the buffers and instruments that let a diversified Gulf economy absorb a regional war. The harder question, for every neighbouring treasury, is which parts of the kit can be copied. An International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Singapore: Where the AI Capex Boom Becomes GDP

Singapore’s advance estimate puts second-quarter growth at 5.7 per cent, with manufacturing up 12.2 per cent on what the trade ministry attributes to AI-related demand for chips and chip-making equipment. It is the cleanest primary-source evidence yet that the AI

The IMF’s Crosscurrents Update: Africa Is on the Wrong Side of Both Shocks, and Still Outgrowing the World

The July World Economic Outlook Update barely moves the Fund’s Africa forecasts, and its baseline has already been overtaken: the Strait of Hormuz was assumed to begin reopening in mid-July, and by 13 July fighting had resumed instead. Beneath the

AI and the US Workforce: The Beige Book Tells a Productivity Story

The Federal Reserve’s July Beige Book catches AI arriving in the American labour market as investment: firms buying the tools, reallocating the tasks and holding the headcount. Jamie Dimon’s 30 to 40 per cent is the counterweight that reading must

Heat on Contract: Industrial Storage Turns Cheap Hours into a Bankable Asset

Brick, carbon and molten-salt stores are moving industrial heat from the fuel bill to the balance sheet. The interesting part is not the hardware. It is the contracts now being written on it. In May, the American biofuels producer POET

JPMorgan Signals Caution: Tightening Private Credit Amid Software Loan Repricing

JPMorgan Chase’s decision to tighten lending to private credit funds marks a notable inflection point for one of the fastest-growing segments of global finance. As the world’s largest bank by assets reins in exposure, particularly to software-linked loans, the move

The Bioforge Prophecy: How Houston’s Enzyme Engineers are Decarbonising the Periodic Table

While the venture capital world remains captivated by the digital abstractions of generative artificial intelligence, a quieter revolution in carbon and enzymes is unfolding in the heart of Texas. Solugen is not merely building a business; it is challenging the