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Trade Wars
China’s Trade Surplus Tops $1 Trillion, Underscoring Its Export Dominance
China’s trade surplus in goods this year topped $1 trillion for the first time, a milestone that underscores the dominance that the country has attained in everything from high-end electric vehicles to low-end T-shirts. For the first 11 months of the year, China’s exports increased 5.4% from the year-earlier period to $3.4 trillion, while the country’s imports declined 0.6% over that same stretch to $2.3 trillion. That brought the country’s trade surplus this year to $1.08 trillion, China’s General Administration of Customs said Monday. That remarkable figure, never before seen in recorded economic history, is the culmination of decades of industrial policies and human industriousness that helped China emerge from a poor agrarian economy in the late 1970s to become the world’s second-largest economy.
Chinese exports to the U.S. for November plunged 29% from a year earlier, even as Beijing posted an overall 5.9% increase in exports to the world. That increase was largely the result of a 15% surge in Chinese shipments to the EU from a year earlier, while exports to Southeast Asia climbed 8.2% from the year-earlier period. When calculated by value, China accounts for roughly 15% of global goods exports. But in volume terms, Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China estimates that every shipping container being sent from Europe to China is outnumbered by the four containers heading in the other direction. In volume terms, he estimates that China accounts for some 37% of everything being exported in shipping containers.
Read more at The WSJ
Nvidia Wins Trump’s Approval to Sell H200 AI Chips in China
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that he will allow Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab to ship its H200 chips to approved customers in China and other countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong national security. The U.S. Department of Commerce is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD, Intel, and other U.S. companies, Trump said in a post on X. The move could be worth billions of dollars for Nvidia, the world's most valuable company.
Nvidia's H200 is a generation behind its latest Blackwell chip, which is considered among the most advanced and high-powered AI chips available anywhere. Trump said the Blackwell chip would not be part of the deal. Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. government would take a 25% cut of sales of the approved chips, up from a previously announced 15%. However, it remains to be seen whether China will allow imports of the chips. After the U.S. said it would allow an even older generation of Nvidia chip, known as the H20, to be sold in China, Xi's government essentially said it did not want them.
Read more at NBC News
Cargo Theft on the Rise With Smaller Businesses Most Vulnerable
Reports of cargo thefts have more than doubled in the last five years, according to CargoNet, a unit of Verisk, a global data and analytics company. More than $325 million in goods have been reported stolen so far this year. Cargo theft hits companies of all sizes, but small businesses are particularly vulnerable because one lost shipment can mean the difference between profit and loss. This kind of theft often goes unreported because businesses don’t know who to contact, they worry their insurance premiums will rise or they don’t want vendors or customers to know, said Jessica Renner, cargo claims and risk manager for Jarrett Logistics, a logistics firm.
Cargo theft hits companies of all sizes, but small businesses are particularly vulnerable because one lost shipment can mean the difference between profit and loss. This kind of theft often goes unreported because businesses don’t know who to contact, they worry their insurance premiums will rise or they don’t want vendors or customers to know, said Jessica Renner, cargo claims and risk manager for Jarrett Logistics, a logistics firm.
Read more at The WSJ
Volvo CEO Predicts 2026 Sales Rebound, Calls U.S. Ideal Market For Electrification
Volvo has been busy since Hakan Samuelsson took over as CEO in April, starting his second stint as chief executive. The company has confirmed it would add production of the XC60, its global bestseller, at its underutilized U.S. factory. Volvo filled a huge gap in its China lineup with the debut of the XC70 long-range plug-in hybrid, which was the automaker’s No. 1-seller in the country last month. And Volvo has added production of the EX30, its top-selling electric vehicle, in Belgium, protecting the small SUV from margin-reducing EU tariffs that contributed to stalled sales in 2025.
The moves have Volvo poised to reverse a global sales slump and return to growth in 2026, Samuelsson said. He discussed this and provided insights on the traits he’s looking for in his successor in an interview with Automotive News Europe Managing Editor Douglas A. Bolduc on Nov. 26.
Read more at Automotive News
IBM to Buy Confluent for $9.3 Billion to Expand AI Services
IBM announced Monday it is acquiring data streaming platform Confluent in a deal valued at $11 billion. “Data, and especially real-time data, is incredibly important to how an enterprise functions,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Monday. “Nobody can live with month-old data, or even week-old data, and Confluent has the most capable technology to unlock the real-time value of data.”
Krishna said Confluent will be part of its software unit. IBM said the deal will bolster its artificial intelligence offerings as it expects global data growth to more than double by 2028, with the movement into AI agents accelerating in 2026. The addition of Confluent fits with IBM’s deal last year to land cloud software maker HashiCorp for $6.4 billion and the 2023 move to acquire Apptio in a deal valued at $4.6 billion. Both of those acquisitions were all-cash deals. Confluent has more than 6,500 clients across major industries and works with Anthropic, Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, Snowflake and others.
Read more at CNBC
Boeing Completes $8.3B Spirit Aerosystems Acquisition
Boeing completed its acquisition of fuselage supplier Spirit Aerosystems on Monday. The deal is valued at $4.7 billion, and Boeing is taking on the fuselage supplier’s roughly $4 billion in debt, for a total value of $8.3 billion. The acquisition contains all of Spirit AeroSystems’ Boeing-related commercial operations, including fuselages for the 737 program as well as major structures for the 767, 777 and 787 Dreamliner aircraft. Additionally, it involves the commercial purchase of fuselages for P-8 and KC-46 military aircraft. Boeing has also acquired portions of Spirit AeroSystems’ Belfast, Northern Ireland, operations and will function as an independent subsidiary as Short Brothers, a Boeing Company.
Boeing has established Spirit AeroSystems’ defense segment as Spirit Defense, Ortberg said in a statement. The defense segment will continue to support its customers as an independent supplier to the defense industry. It will also act as a non-integrated subsidiary of Boeing’s defense, space and security division for financial reporting as well as select functional and site support while maintaining independent management and operations. The transaction expands Boeing’s global maintenance, repair and overhaul services footprint. Spirit AeroSystems’ aftermarket businesses also add to the company’s rotable, lease and exchange portfolio.
Read more at Manufacturing Dive
NextEra To Build 15 Gigawatts Of Power For Data Centers By 2035
NextEra Energy plans to build 15 gigawatts of new power generation for data center hubs by 2035, CEO John Ketchum told investors on Monday. NextEra is the largest renewable energy developer in the U.S. through NextEra Energy Resources, and also owns Florida Power & Light. The utility also operates a fleet of nuclear- and natural gas-powered plants. NextEra also announced a partnership with Alphabet’s Google unit on Monday to develop three gigawatt scale data center campuses in the U.S. with plans to expand to additional locations.
The data center hubs will use all forms of energy, Ketchum said. NextEra announced a deal with Google in October to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa through a power purchase agreement. The data center hubs will help NextEra meet its target of building four to eight gigawatts of new gas generation by 2032 and considerably more by 2035, Ketchum said. NextEra is developing a pipeline of 20 gigawats of gas generation.
Read more at CNBC
Solar Flare May Spark Strong Geomagnetic Storm, Northern Lights This Week
It’s been a busy few weeks on the sun, and yet another eruption of material has been blasted out into space. If conditions are right, it could spark strong G3 geomagnetic storm levels on Earth. On Saturday, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) noted that an M8.1 solar flare, “an eruption of energy from the sun that generally lasts minutes to hours,” had been detected. Considered “more infrequent,” this flare is weaker than the X-class flares seen in November that led to widespread northern lights viewing in the U.S.
Late last night, the SWPC said a full-halo coronal mass ejection, or CME, associated with the flare had occurred. That CME “is expected to impact Earth early to midday” on Tuesday and, depending on “the orientation of the embedded magnetic field,” it could lead to G3 storm levels. When CMEs, essentially “sun burbs” of plasma and magnetic material hurled into space, interact with Earth’s atmosphere, they cause geomagnetic storms. The storms are measured on a five-point scale, much like tornadoes. G3-strength geomagnetic storms have been known to bring the northern lights as far south as the lower Midwest and Oregon. But, forecasting geomagnetic activity can be difficult until the “burb” is closer to Earth. Current forecasting from the SWPC suggests the Kp index could reach such strength at around 4 a.m. EST Tuesday and continue through the day.
Read more at The Hill
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