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January’s Baltic Dirty Tanker Index just delivered its strongest reading since 2006. The obvious question is: why now? Is it Geopolitics? As the Trump administration pushes a more assertive doctrine of US hemispheric dominance, actions against Venezuela — including tanker seizures — now amount to a de facto constraint on the country’s oil exports. China’s oil-for-loan scheme with Venezuela has been disrupted, while Beijing’s arrangements with Moscow and Tehran also look endangered by US...

The world is watching Uncle Sam For roughly 80 years, Pax Americana wasn’t just military or political — it was monetary, legal, cultural, logistical. The dollar, US Treasuries, insurance law, shipping finance, classification norms, sanctions regimes, tech standards, even how crises are interpreted : you don’t opt out of that by holding a different passport. So when the US system looks erratic, it’s not “foreign news” in the way, say, Italian politics or Brazilian politics appear to...