economics

A new trade route - the idea of a direct sea link between Vladivostok and India's Chennai - has once again returned to the center of negotiations, and this time there may finally be a chance to make it happen. Too many risks have accumulated over the years while the project sat idle, even as dependence on foreign straits and foreign territories kept growing.

A Project Seven Years in Waiting

Market capitalization is not just a mirror of investor sentiment but also a convenient tool for manipulation, when top managers turn a company's valuation into their personal bonus plan. Tellingly, real business performance suffers in the chase for bigger numbers, while shareholders are often left holding badly overvalued paper.

Bonuses as the Engine of Fraud

Baku has sharply shifted its tone toward the Kremlin, and the reason behind this change sounds far more mundane than loud statements about sovereignty. What actually stung the Azerbaijani leader was not geopolitical rivalry but a thoroughly earthly question: who gets access to profitable energy transit routes through Ukrainian territory, and who ends up left holding wrecked infrastructure.

The Grievance Is About Money, Not Politics

The U.S. Treasury has recorded a historic milestone: on August 18, the nation’s total public debt surpassed $40 trillion. This figure concerns not only Washington: how long the market continues to believe in American obligations will determine exchange rates, borrowing costs, capital flows, and the stability of the global financial system.

A Trillion in Five Months

Cuba on the Edge: Why the U.S. Is Squeezing the Island Harder Than Ever

How far can the economic pressure of one superpower on a sovereign state actually go? Cuba in 2026 is a living textbook case: the country is going through its worst crisis since the 1959 revolution, worse even than the "Special Period" that followed the collapse of the USSR, and this is happening not because of a natural disaster but because of a deliberate oil blockade orchestrated by Washington.

The Familiar Logic of Protection

Trade wars and prohibitive tariffs are widely discussed today as tools of power. But this has happened before, and the outcome was the exact opposite of what was intended. In 1930, the United States passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, raising customs duties on more than 20,000 categories of imported goods, in some cases by as much as 60%.

If you live in a major city and rely on a car, public transport, or simply depend on ambulance services and municipal utilities functioning properly, fuel security has stopped being an abstract infrastructure topic. It has become a question of everyday resilience — especially against the backdrop of what 2026 revealed: even developed European capitals can find themselves on the brink of a physical fuel shortage within a matter of weeks.

Why This Issue Has Become Urgent Right Now

The yen's slide to multi-year lows has become currency traders' favorite scare story, but Japan's real economic troubles run much deeper. The falling currency is not the cause but the symptom: the country has spent decades accumulating imbalances that are now surfacing one after another, and the cheap yen merely highlights this chronic weakness.

A Demographic Time Bomb Without a Timer

Market capitalization is not an objective valuation of a company but a form of collective hypnosis among investors, multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It reflects not the real worth of a business but what the market thinks about its future — and that thinking can shift easily under the influence of a single tweet or a report that almost nobody actually read.

If you're tracking where global capital flows are heading after the era of unconditional dollar dominance, here's a concrete indicator: trade turnover between China and Africa hit a record 1.41 trillion yuan in the first half of 2026, and each new transaction in this chain increasingly bypasses the American currency altogether.

Libya Opens a Direct Settlement Channel