Strategic Intelligence Feed

Diamond markets are living through a stark divergence this year. Lab grown stones, chemically identical to mined diamonds, have collapsed in price by roughly three quarters since 2020 and now make up close to half of American engagement ring sales, while De Beers, the 137 year old company that built

Somewhere between 36 trillion and over 100 trillion dollars in assets is expected to pass from the baby boomer generation to their heirs over the coming two decades, depending on which research firm's methodology is used, a sum large enough that even the more conservative estimate exceeds the

The first advanced chips built entirely on American soil in years are now coming off the line at a new fabrication plant in Arizona, a milestone years and tens of billions of dollars in the making, backed by federal funding aimed at reducing the country's dependence on chip

Property insurers have been retreating from some of the country's largest housing markets at a striking pace, with hundreds of thousands of California policies canceled since 2021 and enrollment in the state's insurer of last resort surging as private carriers pull back from wildfire exposed areas,

Global fertilizer markets have spent the past several years absorbing repeated shocks to potash supply, the mineral that underpins crop yields worldwide, with prices spiking to historic highs in 2022 as trade in the fertilizer from one of the world's largest producing nations was disrupted. Prices have since

Indonesia, which controls roughly 42 percent of the world's known nickel reserves, has spent this year tightening its grip on the metal that underpins much of the global electric vehicle battery supply chain. Mining quotas have been capped, export restrictions on unprocessed ore have hardened into a broader

A missile strike on a Qatari industrial complex earlier this year knocked out roughly a third of the world's helium supply overnight, sending prices sharply higher and straining everything from MRI machines in hospitals to the semiconductor fabrication plants that now consume a growing share of global helium

The gold and silver mining industry is moving through one of its largest waves of mergers and acquisitions in years, with deals concentrated in these two metals accounting for the large majority of mining transaction value so far this year, and headline deals reaching into the tens of billions of

American natural gas exports are climbing at a pace that has turned the country into the fastest growing source of energy supply on the planet, with liquefied natural gas shipments now averaging well over sixteen billion cubic feet a day and new export terminals coming online through this year and

Poland has been the world's largest official gold buyer this year, adding more than 80 tons to its reserves and pushing toward an approved target of 700 tons, a stockpile that would place it among the ten largest sovereign gold holders on the planet. The country's

Private credit, the fast growing market of loans made outside the traditional banking system, is facing its most challenging stretch since the 2008 financial crisis, with default rates climbing and regulators from the Federal Reserve to the International Monetary Fund flagging the sector as a potential vulnerability. Several large funds

The Bank of Japan has been steadily raising interest rates through this year, moving away from the near zero policy that has defined Japanese monetary policy for decades, and each step higher narrows the gap that has made borrowing cheap yen to buy higher yielding assets elsewhere such an enduringly