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Global Markets
Economies and markets beyond the United States.
The Yen's Broken Speedometer: A Record Defense Bought the Least Time
Japan spent a record ¥11.73 trillion defending the yen in April-May 2026 and got one of the shortest-lived bounces of the past decade, even though the 10-year interest-rate gap usually blamed for yen weakness has more than halved since 2022. A day-by-day look at four interventions finds that neither the long nor the short rate gap orders how long the defenses held, which is suggestive, not conclusive at four data points, that something other than the carry trade is now setting the yen's floor, and reframes Tokyo's shift to surprise 'ambush' intervention as a possible fix for the wrong problem.
Two Stocks Are the Korean Stock Market Now
When the KOSPI tripped its circuit breaker on 26 June 2026, the wires said 'Korea down 8 percent' and the official close said down 5.81 percent. Decompose the fall and roughly two-thirds came from just two semiconductor stocks, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which now make up about 55 percent of the index, meaning a memory-chip selloff and a Korean stock-market crash have become arithmetically the same event.
The Tenth: Why France Can Hold the Digital Tax Canada Gave Up
On 26 June 2026 President Trump threatened a 100% tariff on goods from any country that keeps a digital services tax, a threat strikingly like the one that pushed Canada to abandon its own tax within 48 hours a year earlier. Our analysis finds France can hold firm for three reinforcing reasons, not one: its goods exports to the US are about a tenth of Canada's as a share of its economy, it negotiates behind the 27-member EU rather than alone, and a February 2026 Supreme Court ruling stripped most of the legal force from the tariff weapon itself. Because all three differ at once, the Canada-France contrast is suggestive, not a controlled experiment, but it points to a hard pattern in trade brinkmanship: leverage flows to whoever can most afford to walk away.
