How economic sanctions are designed, and why they so often leak
Sanctions are meant to impose costs without firing a shot. Their effect depends less on the headline measures than on the plumbing of trade and finance beneath them.
Trade
Why advanced chipmaking is so hard to copy
Building a modern semiconductor plant requires far more than money. It depends on accumulated know-how, specialised suppliers and a production process that tolerates almost no error.
How companies are redrawing their supply chains
Efficiency once trumped everything. Now businesses are paying for resilience — and discovering how hard it is to buy.
Who really pays a tariff? How import duties pass through to prices
A tariff is collected at the border, but its cost is shared among foreign exporters, domestic importers, retailers and consumers. How it divides depends on market power and the time horizon.
What moves commodity prices: supply shocks, storage and the dollar
Fixed, floating or somewhere in between: how exchange-rate regimes differ
How player transfer markets work, and why prices can seem so detached from reality
Latest in Trade
Video
Video: how companies map their supply chains
Tracing every supplier behind a product is harder than it sounds. A visual guide to the process.
Podcast
The Briefing: the quiet work of trade negotiators
What happens in the rooms where trade agreements are drafted. This is a demonstration episode.
Explainer
Why the same medicine can cost very different amounts from one country to the next
Drug prices reflect not just production costs but bargaining power, regulation and the way companies recover the cost of research.
