Week signals: Filling in the blanks
Plus: watch points for Chile, Ecuador, the US, Saudi Arabia, semiconductors, and South Africa.
Hello,
In this week’s edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. A distracted media, conflict supply chains, and the costs of looking away.
UP AHEAD. Elections in Chile and Ecuador, the Epstein bill, MBS goes to the mountain, Nvidia’s earnings, and the G20.
And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: Africa’s underreported conflicts
Co-authored with Oscar Martin.
The week began with the end of the US shutdown, thanks to a breakthrough in Congress. It ended with the start of a showdown on Jeffrey Epstein, thanks to a breakup between Donald Trump and some of his most loyal supporters. In between, a huge amount of news happened outside the United States, as it almost always does, from dual terror attacks in Delhi and Islamabad, to a suspension of the Cambodia-Thailand ceasefire, to more major strikes between Russia and Ukraine. But if you were only getting your news from cable TV (or not reading Geopolitical Dispatch) you may not have seen it.
Each day, an accumulation of small events, often in the corners of the world where most live but few notice, accumulates to produce tectonic shifts that may only reveal themselves in developed markets or policy many months after the fact (and usually too late). More often than not, these events occur in Africa, home to a growing share of the world’s population and some of the world’s most dynamic, if misunderstood and mispriced, economies.
And sometimes these aren’t small events, but big ones. Not the announcement of a Trumpian invasion of Nigeria, or next week’s G20 summit in South Africa, which he’ll boycott (more on that in the Week Ahead, below), but in the often obscure but always complex civil conflicts that rage, and have been raging, for decades in places like Sudan and the Congo.
This week, Oscar Martin, our Paris-based analyst, takes a closer look at those wars and places, identifying the costs they’re incurring to their own citizens, plus the costs to the world, including business, of looking away.