Where the math is defensible.
Long-form research on live enterprise decisions. Publication is selective. Every number traces to a named source. No takes without evidence.
Canada 2025 to 2026: The Trudeau Exit, the Carney Reset, and the Trump Tariff War
Justin Trudeau resigned the Liberal leadership on January 6, 2025 after a caucus revolt and a Chrystia Freeland resignation that closed the December 16, 2024 fiscal cycle. Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor, replaced him as Liberal leader on March 9, 2025, was sworn in as the 24th Prime Minister on March 14, and led the Liberals to a minority government in the April 28, 2025 federal election. The macro that follows is set by the Trump tariff war, the Bank of Canada easing path, the Trans Mountain expansion barrels, and the USMCA July 2026 review.
Canada closed the Trudeau decade with the lowest end of term Liberal polling since the 1984 collapse, a Section 232 reciprocal tariff war with the second Trump administration, and a Bank of Canada policy rate cut by 100 basis points from a 5.00 percent peak to 4.00 percent through the spring of 2025. Trudeau resigned on January 6, 2025 af...
China 2025 to 2026: The Fiscal-Monetary Pivot, the Tariff Shock, and the Five Percent Defense
Beijing has finally moved its fiscal stance, the People's Bank of China has rebuilt its rate corridor, and a 10 trillion yuan local debt swap is buying time for the provinces. The Trump tariff floor decides whether the package holds the 5 percent target or merely cushions a slower trajectory.
The March 2025 National People's Congress ratified a deficit target of 4 percent of GDP, the highest headline number in decades, alongside 1.3 trillion yuan of ultra-long Special Treasury issuance and a 10 trillion yuan local government refinancing program running through 2028. Premier Li Qiang's Two Sessions agenda paired this fiscal piv...
The Powell Succession: Fed Independence Under Stress in 2026
Jerome Powell's term as Chair ends on May 15, 2026. The succession contest, the legal architecture of removal, and a parallel Treasury debt management agenda will reset the price of U.S. duration, the dollar smile, and the global carry complex.
Powell's chairmanship expires on May 15, 2026, and the field of plausible successors clusters around Kevin Warsh, Kevin Hassett, Christopher Waller, Michelle Bowman, with outside cards for Marc Sumerlin, James Bullard, Larry Lindsey, and Jamie Dimon. The summer 2025 lawn tour confrontation, in which the President pressed Powell on the Ecc...
Gaza 2026: Ceasefire Phasing, Damage Accounting, and the Donor Architecture That Refuses to Form
The World Bank, UN, and EU interim damage assessment of February 2025 priced Gaza physical damage at 53 to 83 billion dollars across a ten to fifteen year reconstruction horizon, against pledges that have not crossed 6 billion in firm commitments. The January 2025 ceasefire collapsed in March 2025, the revised arrangement of Q1 2026 carries the same architecture, and the donor coordination structure remains stuck on a Palestinian governance question that no party has resolved.
The Gaza war ledger after eighteen months of combat is now legible. The Gaza Ministry of Health reported 50,021 Palestinian dead through March 2025, against 1,200 Israeli killed on 7 October 2023 and 405 IDF killed in Gaza ground operations through end 2024. UNOSAT satellite damage analysis identified roughly 70 percent of structures in t...
Greenland 2026: rare earths, US-EU competition, and the economics of self-determination
After the Demokraatit win in March 2025 and a year of explicit US acquisition rhetoric, Nuuk is renegotiating the price of every barrel of mineral rent. The question is no longer whether Greenland's critical minerals enter the Atlantic supply chain, but on whose terms, in whose currency, and against which sovereignty trade.
Greenland is a 56,865 person polity (Statistics Greenland, January 2024) sitting on roughly 1.5 million tonnes of identified rare earth oxide resources (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025), the second largest known accessible deposit outside China after Mountain Pass. Per capita GDP was DKK 480,000, total nominal GDP USD 3.4 billion in...
IRA phase-out in 2026: how OBBA, FEOC, and the tariff stack reprice US clean energy capex
The One Big Beautiful Act and the FEOC perimeter have not killed the energy transition, they have repriced it. Investors who modeled flat 30 percent credits through 2032 are now solving for a moving target where battery and solar economics still clear, wind and EV demand do not, and project finance is sorted by who can document a Chinese-free supply chain.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed August 16, 2022 with an initial Joint Committee on Taxation cost estimate of 369 billion US dollars over ten years, was rescored by the Congressional Budget Office in January 2025 at 1.4 to 1.7 trillion US dollars over the 2025 to 2034 window once uncapped credit uptake was modeled. That fiscal surface,...
Iran 2026: Pezeshkian, the Trump JCPOA-2 Track, and the Proliferation Fiscal Nexus
Tehran sits on roughly 280 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium, a collapsing rial, and a reformist president whose mandate from Khamenei is narrow. Witkoff's negotiating channel is open, snapback has fired, and the next deal will be priced as much by fiscal arithmetic as by centrifuge counts.
Iran enters the second quarter of 2026 inside three converging crises that any JCPOA-2 track must price together. The IAEA February 2026 verification report records roughly 280 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Maximum pressure sanctions reimposed in the first quarter of 2025 have cut crude exports from peaks near 1.6 million b...
USMCA Article 34.7: The July 2026 Review and the Renegotiation Already Underway
The first six-year joint review opens July 2026. Trump's tariff threats, Sheinbaum's Plan Mexico, automotive rules of origin, and a Mexico-now-largest US trade partner make this the most consequential trilateral negotiation since 1994.
USMCA Article 34.7 mandates a joint review six years after entry into force. The first review opens July 2026. Failure of all three parties to affirm continuation triggers a 16 year sunset window. The 2024 to 2025 backdrop has shifted the negotiation: US merchandise trade with Mexico reached USD 798 billion in 2024 per the US Census Burea...
Trump Second Term: Cabinet Stability and Policy Continuity Through 2026
Fifteen months in, the second Trump cabinet has cleared confirmation, executed roughly 150 executive orders by April 2025, and absorbed the Musk DOGE exit. The Q1 2026 turnover watch sits on Bessent, Hegseth, Patel, and Bondi.
Donald Trump began his second term on January 20, 2025 with the most ideologically aligned cabinet of any modern presidency, the narrowest House majority since 1931, and a policy supply chain pre-built by the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 mandate. Senate confirmations cleared in two waves: Marco Rubio (State) by 99 to 0, Pete Hegseth (...
Trump Second Term Economic Agenda: First Sixteen Months
A tariff stack rebuilt around Section 232, 301, 122, and 338, an OBBA reconciliation that locks TCJA permanence, a DOGE workforce purge, and a Fed independence stress test rewrite the macro baseline through 2029.
The first sixteen months of the second Trump administration have stacked tariff, fiscal, regulatory, and labor shocks at a pace and scale not seen since the early 1980s. Executive Orders issued between January and April 2025 imposed 25 percent duties on Mexico and Canada under IEEPA, restored 25 percent Section 232 steel and aluminum with...
Territorial Rhetoric and Treaty Reliability: Pricing the 2025 to 2026 Trump Doctrine
Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada, Mexico, the Gulf of America, and Gaza relocation talk are not isolated provocations. They are a coherent signal that the United States now treats sovereign borders, NATO commitments, and 1977-vintage treaties as renegotiable, and capital is starting to charge for it.
Between January 2025 and April 2026 the second Trump administration converted territorial rhetoric into operational pressure: a renewed sovereignty bid for Greenland, a public claim that the United States will take the Panama Canal back, a sustained 51st state framing of Canada, fentanyl-linked cartel designations against Mexico, the Gulf...
Trump's AI Action Plan: Compute Sovereignty, Export Control Reset, and the Frontier Regulatory Vacuum
Executive Order 14179, the rescinded AI Diffusion Framework, the Stargate USD 500B compute commitment, and a renamed AI Safety Institute together redraw US AI governance around speed, capital, and selective export pressure rather than precaution.
On January 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14179, Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, rescinding Biden's EO 14110 and ordering an AI Action Plan within 180 days. By July 2025 the plan launched with a 60 day Request for Information that drew submissions from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta,...
US Steel and Nippon, Closed at Last: The Golden Share, Mon Valley, and a New CFIUS Template
The USD 14.9 billion Nippon Steel acquisition of US Steel closed in August 2025 only after a Trump executive order conditioned approval on a Golden Share, USW guardrails, and roughly USD 14 billion of incremental US capex, rewriting CFIUS practice.
Nippon Steel announced its USD 14.9 billion all cash bid for US Steel on December 18, 2023, at USD 55 per share, a roughly 40 percent premium and well above the USD 7.3 billion Cleveland-Cliffs offer from Lourenco Goncalves that summer. CFIUS escalation, United Steelworkers opposition under David McCall, and a Pittsburgh coalition pushed ...