• "Capitalism isn't here an economic system of inequality but a social form of power and domination... capitalism is the domination of the present by the past." - Barnaby Raine [00:05:13]

• "What might it mean to be a good heir? What does it mean to inherit those old ideas in different conditions?" - Barnaby Raine…

• "When China or indeed other developing countries become wealthier they will want to look like the west... I said wait, that's really an assumption." - Keyu Jin [00:06:18]

• "The Chinese average Chinese would say they prefer over 90% for security over liberty and in the US less than 30% would prefer security over liberty." - Keyu Jin…

"He saw that the trend of Chinese history was China was a great power when it was a unified and able to keep foreign adversaries under control and divided; and China collapsed as a great power when neither of those propositions held true." - Kevin Rudd [00:08:31]

"It reminds me of that last scene in Orwell's novel with Winston, where he realizes as he…

Note: *Recorded on June 25, 2026 at 2:00pm Taiwan Standard Time

1. Executive Briefing (TL;DR)

• The Core Thesis: China’s state-driven economic framework is generating severe structural imbalances marked by oversupply and crashing domestic confidence, triggering a retail and real estate downturn. Faced with intensifying Western trade disputes and structural decoupling, Beijing is explicitly shifting its…

"the words peace and deal are doing a lot of very heavy lifting in that particular sentence... what is being flagged here... looks to be a memorandum of understanding or I would call it a memorandum of misunderstanding" - Michael Every [00:00:00]

"what you see and what you get in the Middle East can sometimes be extremely very different things."…

• Speaker: Michael Zezas, Deputy Global Head of Research at Morgan Stanley. [00:00:00]
• Release Date and Time: Thursday, May 28, 2026, at 10:30 a.m. in New York. [00:00:11]

1. Context and Historical Market Drivers

• Geopolitical Catalyst: The macroeconomic and political relationship…

"The past teaches us that there are some evil elements out there and they're not really representative ordinary people... we do have such people out there and often in very important and powerful positions." - Richard Werner [00:03:39]

"You need if you're planning for world war you also need to make sure the opponent is built up first to have a…

"Now it's 27% of every croner or you know we spend on budget is financed by the return from the sovereign wealth fund and I remember back in 1996 it was zero and it has gone from zero to now 2 trillion" - Jens Stoltenberg [00:02:45]

"The regulatory environment is allowing scaled consolidation and there is so much change coming with the…

• "Strategy is first of all a psychological exercise." - Thomas Gomart [00:08:26]

• "War and trade are only two ways to reach the same aim, which is to possess what you desire." - Benjamin Constant (quoted by Gomart) [00:16:51]

• "The dollar is our currency and your problem." - **John…

This video from the channel Inside China Business provides a detailed analysis of the shift in global trade dominance from the United States to China, specifically focusing on the critical minerals industry and the human capital crisis facing North American mining.

The Global Trade Paradigm Shift [00:00:01]

• Historical Context (2000): Two decades ago, the…

"In 1976 a British general named John Glubb published a study of 11 empires from the Persians all the way to the British Empire and he found that every single one of these empires lasted approximately 250 years." - Think School Host [00:00:30]

"At its zenith the American left and the American right built the greatest empire of all time." - Balaji…