Strategic Intelligence Feed

American reactor operators bought 12,710 thousand separative work units of uranium enrichment services last year. Of that, 3,284 thousand units, or 25.8 percent, came from Russia. That was the largest single source, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and domestic American supply, which accounted for

The United States government began storing helium underground near Amarillo, Texas in 1925. It stopped in June 2024, when the Bureau of Land Management completed the sale of the Federal Helium System to the industrial gas company Messer for 460 million dollars. The package included the Cliffside field, its wells

American institutional timberland produced a cash yield of 1.55 percent over the four quarters to June, on the index that has tracked the asset class since 1987. For the 2025 calendar year the figure was 1.65 percent, against an average ten year Treasury yield of 4.29 percent.

The United States now taxes imported aluminium at fifty percent. The rate went from ten percent to twenty five in February of last year and to fifty in June, all country exemptions were removed, and talks that would have given Canadian metal a lower rate collapsed in August. The Midwest

The United States began this year with 130 operating refineries and 18.2 million barrels a day of crude distillation capacity. In the week ending the eleventh of September those plants ran at 96.8 percent of capacity, and they have run above 97 percent for most of the late

The thirty year Japanese government bond yielded 4.05 percent on the seventeenth of September. The twenty year yielded 3.82 percent and the ten year touched three percent at the start of the month, a level last seen in 1996. The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate to

Tin settled at 53,745 dollars a tonne on the London Metal Exchange this week, having started the year at 42,050 and set a record of 54,760 in January. Exchange stocks stand at 4,645 tonnes, down about fourteen percent since the first of January. Against annual world

The World Platinum Investment Council published its quarterly balance this month and reversed itself. In May it forecast a deficit of 297 thousand ounces for this year. It now forecasts a surplus of 265 thousand ounces, a swing of 562 thousand ounces in a single quarter. Almost none of that

The European Central Bank published its annual review of the international role of the euro in June, and one line in it travelled further than the rest. At the end of 2025, measured at market value, gold accounted for 27 percent of total official foreign reserves worldwide. United States Treasuries

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 285.4 million barrels in the week ending the fourth of September, according to the Energy Information Administration. The four salt dome sites on the Gulf coast can hold 714 million, so the reserve stands at about forty percent of its physical capacity. It peaked

A large power transformer is the least glamorous object in the electricity system and the one nothing works without. It is a steel core wrapped in copper, sitting in oil inside a tank, and its job is to change voltage so that power generated in one place can be used

The Agriculture Department's September estimates put world wheat ending stocks for the coming marketing year at 276.3 million tonnes against total use of 826.8 million, which works out to a stocks to use ratio of about 33 percent. World corn stocks come to 272.1 million