Video: how companies map their supply chains
Tracing every supplier behind a product is harder than it sounds. A visual guide to the process.
Global trade
Tariffs, supply chains and the rules of international commerce.
Analysis
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.
Explainer
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.
Analysis
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.
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
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.
Explainer
What moves commodity prices: supply shocks, storage and the dollar
Oil, metals and grains trade in markets where small imbalances can produce large price swings. Understanding why requires looking at inventories, futures curves and the currency in which they are priced.
Explainer
Fixed, floating or somewhere in between: how exchange-rate regimes differ
Every country must choose how its currency relates to others. The choice is a trade-off between stability, monetary independence and openness to capital — and no country can have all three.
Explainer
How player transfer markets work, and why prices can seem so detached from reality
When teams buy and sell the contracts of athletes, they are trading scarce talent under unusual rules. The result is a market prone to bidding wars and sharp swings in value.
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.
