Trade blocs, currency regimes, sanctions, alliances, great power competition — explained for people who need to understand, not just follow.
ASEAN is often described as Southeast Asia's answer to the EU. It is not. It is a consensus club that exists precisely because its members do not want supranational authority.
ASEAN members: 10. Combined GDP: ~$3.6 trillion (2023)
Reserve currency status survives long after the issuer's economic share has fallen. The reason is liquidity and habit, not strength.
USD share of global FX reserves: ~59% (IMF COFER, Q4 2023)
The USGS annual Mineral Commodity Summaries is the boring reference document that organises Western critical-minerals policy. For rare earths, lithium, cobalt, and graphite the concentration patterns are real — and more complicated than the 'China dominance' headline suggests.
Refined rare-earth output: China 87%, Malaysia 5%, Estonia 1%, US 1% (USGS MCS 2024 estimates).
Three shipping alliances — 2M, Ocean Alliance, THE Alliance — controlled over 80% of east-west container capacity through 2024. Lars Jensen at Vespucci Maritime has tracked the 2025 reshuffle after MSC announced its exit from 2M. The post-2025 structure is less concentrated by alliance, more by carrier.
Top-3 carrier market share on Asia-Europe trade lane: 47% in 2018, 53% in 2024 (Drewry Maritime Research).
AfCFTA entered force on 1 January 2021. The 2026 five-year mark is a useful checkpoint. The trade-flow data shows what has moved (payment infrastructure, customs harmonisation), what hasn't (services, labour mobility), and where the structural constraints really sit.
Intra-African trade: 14.4% of total African trade in 2021, 17.2% in 2025 (UNECA).
Chris Miller's 2022 history argued that semiconductor supply chains are not commodities but a layered industrial system — design, EDA tools, fabs, lithography, materials. Each layer has chokepoints, and the policy response since 2022 has been shaped by that map.
ASML EUV machines shipped to date: ~250 units worldwide; none to mainland China since 2019 (SEMI / ASML annual reports).
ASEAN's consensus rule is a feature, not a flaw. A short explanation of why the bloc moves slowly on contested issues and what it can deliver when the question is technical. We cover the South China Sea, the ASEAN Way, RCEP, and why treating the bloc like the EU produces frustration on both sides of the negotiation.
Why the dollar's reserve role survives even when its issuer's economic share falls. Liquidity, settlement habits, and the coordination problem of switching currencies. We also unpack the role of central-bank weaponization risk, the euro's fragmentation problem, and what slow diversification away from the dollar actually looks like in COFER data.
A walk through what SWIFT actually does and why removal from it is a slow-acting sanction rather than an instant cutoff. Covers messaging, correspondent banking, and the limits of alternative networks like CIPS and mBridge. Includes a quick tour of how the 2022 Russian-bank removals propagated through global settlement and why the operational effect was real but partial.
Our plain-language glossary defines the terms you'll encounter — from "current account surplus" to "Monroe Doctrine" to "extraterritorial sanctions".