The US stockmarket is being driven by a divided economy: tech and communications are robust whilst consumer discretionary and staples slump.

America’s data disaster is here!

Almost a quarter of light-duty vehicles sold in the US this spring were “new energy” in one form or another—read the full article by clicking the link in the comment to Chartbook Top Link.

The giant legacy of Fischer-Tropsch: China’s coal-to-chemicals industry is a huge consumer of coal and threat to environmental balance. Visit Chartbook Top Link to learn more. Link in comment.

The crisis of displacement in Haiti has escalated dramatically since the autumn of 2024. For more insight, visit this mornin Chartbook Top Link. Find the link in comment.

Today’s Chartbook Top Link featured how Turkish pistols conquered the US gun market. Click the link in the comment to read the full article.

Find out how private equity titan Apollo became something akin to a bank.

Saudi Arabia’s fiscal breakeven oil price has climbed to $96 per barrel—or $113 when including Public Investment Fund spending—well above current market prices.

The US housing market is stalling.

Economists are progressively downgrading their expectations for the South African economy.

Private equity is increasingly polarizing: Blackstone, the largest private equity group is sticking to a fee-based approach, while Apollo and KKR embrace insurance-powered models.

Hurvin Anderson’s artworks are featured in today’s Chartbook Top Link. Find more on the link in the comment.

Self-driving trucks come to China’s mines. For more insights, click the link in comment to visit Chartbook Top Link!

Politics of energy options in the US is featured in today’s Chartbook Top Link. Click the link in the comment to learn more!

1 of every 8 clothing items bought in America comes from... Amazon? For more insight, visit this morning’s Chartbook Top Link. Click the link in the comment.

The scale of the Venezuela refugee crisis - 7 million people since 2015 - is spectacular.

China is making large FDI plays in the Middle East.

In April 2025, for the first time, solar panels generated more electricity than nuclear reactors worldwide.

Trump’s dream of a U.S. factory boom via tariffs ignores a key issue: labor. His plan assumes China’s “nimble-fingered” workers can be replaced by U.S. robots and engineers—but by 2023, China already had over 50% more robots per manufacturing worker than the U.S. Read more in today’s Chartbook!

The politics of fiscal federalism in Nigeria.

Yes, Trump’s tariffs are bringing in revenue, but at what price?!

As the share of steel production that is traded has collapsed, the idea that vast overcapacity is swamping global markets has far more to do with politics than economics.

Nelson on the Mosquito Coast.

Is South Africa’s oil refinery capacity in terminal decline?

Publicly-funded R&D in the US is massively skewed towards military research.

How the US military-industrial complex was shrunk in the 1990s.

h/t @adamtooze.bsky.social (check out his full chartbook from 6/9). A story in two graphs. Losing Minds—and Money: How the U.S. Is Turning Away the World’s Top Students—And Sinking Its Own Future.

The Trump administration is deliberately targeting a $44 trillion export industry. Meanwhile…….

Why Chinese domestic consumption will struggle to replace export orders lost in the US.

Drone proliferation across Africa has been remarkable. Cheaper options from China and Turkey are preferred.

For all the alarmist talk and cherry-picked examples, China’s “manufacturing dominance” is actually a mixed bag.

The latest Chartbook just dropped!

For Brazil, Chile and Peru … and Uruguay, China is twice as significant as a trade partner as are the USA. Read more in today’s Chartbook!

China’s CO2 emissions reaching a turning point is a dramatic historical moment. The fall is driven by the greening of the power sector, which is meeting new demand with renewables. Read more in today’s Chartbook!

Since COVID it is not just China’s trade surplus with the USA that has surged! South Korea’s surplus has doubled. Read more in today’s Chartbook!

Since the pandemic, falling exports have actually dragged sluggish growth further down:

In the US prison system as a whole it is easy to exaggerate the importance of privately owned prisons, but for ICE’s immigration crackdown, private detention facilities are key:

How UK trade volume growth has collapsed in the last five years.

When folks say that the US is slow to build much-needed transmission lines to take advantage of new sources of very cheap renewable electricity, they do not exaggerate. In 2024 the US was completing 30-50 miles per month! All of it low voltage.

How US College rate fee levels by household income.

So far, despite Trump’s protestations, there is little sign that firms importing goods to the US are “eating” the cost of the tariffs.

Since Liberation Day, the US has experienced an EM-like reversal of the normal correlation between Treasury yields and the exchange rate of the dollar.

On the pod, Cam and I did Europe and the Sound of Music this week and I found an essay on the film’s political vision titled, “An Unclaimed Country: The Austrian Image in American Film and the Sociopolitics of The Sound of Music.” Read Robert von Dassanowsky’s fascinating essay in today’s Chartbook!

With diamond prices under sustained pressure from shifting demand and lab-grown supply, the leading producers are under serious pressure. De Beers’ business especially struggling and the one-time global monopolist is now facing a permacrisis.

Today’s Chartbook looks at the incoming “tariff sensitive” inflation. Goods are one of the factors that have hitherto been keeping US inflation in check. Over the summer, that is likely to change.

If you had bought Germany’s DAX stock index at the trough in the autumn of 2022 you would now have doubled your money. Quite surprising given the general state of the German economy.

The non-drama of America’s slow energy transition.

Come up short every time I see the latest iteration of this graphic by The Crude Chronicles. Whatever else it is, ExxonMobil is not a rapidly expanding fossil fuel producer and has not been since the 1980s. It is steady state, sustained largely through acquisitions.

What still makes twitter unique: a free dose of historically interesting economics education delivered by someone named “captain gouda”.

Troll farms’ hierarchy: “iceberg” model.