Recent Posts

End-of-days metals rout overstates trade risks

Commodity investors are acting like it’s the last days of Rome. News that the Trump administration was planning to increase the tariff rate on $200 billion of Chinese imports to 25 percent from 10 percent sent markets into a tailspin, with a Bloomberg Intelligence index of mining companies falling 1.7 percent and every major industrial metal slumping in synchrony. Rio ...

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How Europe could help the UK to cancel Brexit

UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s meeting on Friday with President Emmanuel Macron of France is part of a wider effort to sell her Chequers plan for Brexit to European Union heads of government – and to loosen the grip of Michel Barnier, the unyielding civil servant who’s conducting the negotiations on their behalf. Her campaign is failing. Europe doesn’t like ...

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Free trade is rare and certainly no utopia

President Donald Trump recently suggested the removal of all tariffs and non-tariff barriers to global trade. Sounds intriguing, but free trade is rare and it’s certainly no utopia. Historically, it’s been largely confined to periods when a major global power promoted the free exchange of products in its own enlightened self-interest. That was true of Great Britain in the 19th ...

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