The oil market has entered choppy waters once again. Crude prices fell by a dramatic 18% in April y/y — the sharpest monthly drop since November 2021 — partly due to a global slowdown, but more due to a power struggle within OPEC+.
Meeting on the sidelines of the recent Asian Development Bank’s annual gathering in Milan, Italy, the officials reiterated their support for a rules-based, free and fair multilateral trading system.
The US intimidates certain countries. But America is just a paper tiger. Don’t believe its bluff. One poke and it’ll burst!
Maintaining a complex balance between profit, geopolitical alignment and risk management, the presence of Asian nations in Russia reveals a divergence between Western corporate exodus and Eastern mercantile strategy.
President Xi made no mention of long-standing territorial issues with China’s closest neighbours including Japan, South Korea and the self-governing country long claimed as an integral part of China by Beijing: Taiwan.
When the US administration under President Donald Trump announced sweeping import tariffs on ASEAN nations, it triggered an immediate ripple across Southeast Asia’s export-dependent economies.