Project Vault’s hybrid public-private design for stockpiling critical minerals raises serious concerns about voluntary participation, operational complexity, and the risk that the programme will fail precisely when it is most needed.
Category: Analysis
Posted inThink Tank News
ISEAS: Malaysia’s geoeconomic alignment under Anwar
Malaysia’s claim to neutrality in the US–China rivalry is undermined by sector-level structural alignment, particularly in semiconductors, which constrains the country’s real policy freedom even when aggregate trade and investment figures appear balanced.
Posted inAnalysis
Mapping JBS’s Luxembourg Holding Structure: Section 301 Exposure Assessment
A walk through the intermediate holding layers that determine where tariff and trade-remedy exposure actually lands in a multinational meat group.
Posted inAnalysis
Reading the EU’s RED III Transposition: Member State Variance in Annex IX Treatment
National transposition choices are producing a fragmented compliance map, with the treatment of advanced feedstocks the sharpest point of divergence.
Posted inAnalysis
Why the IPEF Supply Chain Pillar Underdelivered: A Two-Year Retrospective
The crisis-response architecture is real, but the absence of market access kept the supply chain pillar from reshaping commercial decisions.
Posted inThink Tank News
Cato: Section 122 is Trump’s illegal stopgap
The Trump administration’s invocation of Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a 10 percent global tariff is legally and economically flawed, because a goods trade deficit does not constitute a balance-of-payments deficit as the statute intended.
Posted inAnalysis
Carbon Border Adjustment and the Quiet Reshaping of Aluminium Trade Flows
Even in its reporting-only phase, the EU carbon border mechanism is already redirecting which tonnes go where ahead of the definitive regime.
Posted inThink Tank News
Cato: Jones Act data reveals universe of blocked trade
Voyage-level data from the Trump administration’s Jones Act waiver demonstrates that the 1920 law has been suppressing intra-US trade by preventing domestic cargo movements that the market clearly wanted to make.
Posted inThink Tank News
PIIE: A positive trade policy for US agriculture
US farmers have suffered from the shift away from free trade agreements and from the volatility caused by the Trump administrations’ tariff-driven trade wars.
Posted inAnalysis
De Minimis Reform: Estimating the Compliance Burden on Low-Value Air Cargo
Tightening the low-value import threshold shifts cost onto express logistics and customs systems long before it changes consumer prices.