A handful of Chinese rare earth suppliers have stopped shipping to American customers since early August. No export ban was announced and no licence was formally revoked. The suppliers simply declined the business, out of concern that filling those orders would put them on the wrong side of Beijing. The trigger was China’s decision in early August to sanction the Responsible Business Alliance, the American body behind a widely used supply chain auditing framework.

Chokepoint leverage looks permanent right up to the moment it isn’t. That’s the pattern across a century of resource coercion, and it applies to China’s position in rare earth processing exactly as it applied to everyone who held a similar position before. The mechanics are consistent. A state controls a stage of production that everyone needs and nobody can replace quickly. It uses that control, either openly or through licensing friction.

Nike’s removal from the S&P 100 on September 21 has put a number back in circulation that deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. The company has shed roughly 80% of its market capitalisation since November 2021, somewhere near $215 billion depending on whether you measure against the closing high of $169.74 or an intraday print. The interesting part is what did not happen alongside it. Fiscal 2022 revenue, the year containing the peak, was $46.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering another broad round of semiconductor tariffs, potentially extending beyond chips themselves to laptops, gaming consoles and, most importantly, servers used in AI data centers. The proposal could also tie tariff exemptions to companies’ commitments to invest in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Importantly, this is still a proposal rather than a finalized policy, but the direction is clear. The problem is that tariffs cannot manufacture chips. They can only make imported chips and the products built around them more expensive.

Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities totaling $9.2 trillion are routinely discussed as if they were primarily a debt management problem — a question of who holds U.S. paper and under what conditions they might sell it. That framing is incomplete. By the logic of national income accounting, foreign holdings of U.S. federal debt are inseparable from the U.S. trade deficit, and any serious discussion of the former has to grapple with the latter.