The Pentagon’s recent decision to freeze small grants to Australian rare-earth miner Lynas and its US rival MP Materials highlights the difficulty of breaking China’s stranglehold on the global supply of critical minerals. Despite years …
Articles by: "David Uren"
US President Donald Trump’s suggestion to reporters aboard Air Force One on the weekend that this year’s G7 meeting be expanded to include Russia, India, South Korea and Australia appears to be more than a …
The rules of global trade went out the window between February and April as nations fought like cats to secure supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE). It was each for themselves and the devil take …
The continued strength of the iron ore price is surprising, given the collapse of oil, which traders have recently been willing to pay buyers for if they’ll agree to offload full tankers. Oil and iron …
Covid-19 is a crisis of globalisation, propagated by around 800,000 international flights carrying over 100 million people across borders every week, along with the cruise liners carrying half a million or so tourists in any …
Horror videos posted on social media last week of residents of the Ecuadorian coastal metropolis of Guayaquil abandoning corpses in the streets while vultures circled overhead underline the extreme vulnerability of emerging nations to the …
The frenzy outside a local butcher’s shop was electric, as sharp-elbowed women forced their way through the door, where dozens were already packed to the counter thrusting their purses, seeking the butcher’s attention. One pushed …
Poker games get no bigger than this. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman has gambled that a threatened cut of almost US$1 trillion to global oil revenue will force Russia’s President Vladimir Putin back into …
The US and Australian share markets were touching record highs until 21 February, when they woke up to the possibility that the novel coronavirus—which had by that stage infected 78,000 people and killed nearly 2,400—would …
A scandal is brewing at the World Bank. The Economist recently suggested that the premature departure of its chief economist, Pinelopi Goldberg, is related to the bank’s suppression of a study showing that a material …
US President Donald Trump’s ‘phase one’ trade deal with China has set unrealistically high targets for Chinese purchases of US goods and services that can only be met by savage reductions in its imports from …
Iran’s economy minister, Farhad Dejpasand, has called on the multilateral Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to discipline the US over its use of budget funds to finance the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad …