🇨🇳China is quietly reshaping the global oil market:
China's crude oil imports fell -20% MoM in April, to 8.2 million barrels per day, the lowest in at least 2 years.
This is down -30%, or -3.5 million barrels per day, from pre-war levels of ~11.7 million barrels per day.
To put this into perspective, the decline nearly matches the daily total oil consumption of Japan.
This is also 2 times larger than the volume supplied by the UAE pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz.
Furthermore, Chinese state-owned oil companies have been reselling crude cargoes to European and Asian buyers, a sign that inventory levels are comfortable despite a global supply shortage.
China is supporting the global oil market even amid severe shortages.
The Bank of France found a novel way to get their gold out of U.S. custody without a diplomatic kerfuffle: Sell it at a profit in New York, then buy it right back on the continent.
As part of their fiscal year 2025 announcement, the central bank revealed an “exceptional item” that allowed it to flip a EUR 2.9 billion loss into an EUR 8.1 billion annual profit.
“Income from assets held for own account rose by EUR 12.2 billion as a result of an exceptional item,” the Bank said in the March 25 press release. “In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while the volume of gold reserves remained unchanged, the Banque de France had to align a residual portion (5%) with technical guidelines, resulting in a significant realised currency gain. This exceptional foreign exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion for 2025.”
The move was as clever as it was profitable. Unlike the ongoing saga of Germany’s massive U.S.-based gold holdings – which remain in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s vaults, much to the consternation of many of the country’s politicians – the Bank of France did not try to raise the issue of withdrawal or transfer of their gold. Instead, they simply sold the older, less pure gold bars in New York for what they were worth in U.S. dollars as gold prices were reaching all-time highs, then pocketed the cash and bought bars that met their updated weight and purity standards in Europe, as prices conveniently pulled back.
This resulted in a win-win-win for France’s central bank: No diplomatic pushback from the U.S. administration during a period of contentious relations over tariffs, Greenland, Ukraine, and now Iran, no fees for transportation and security across the Atlantic, and what worked out to a massive profit on the transactions themselves, boosting the Bank’s overall financial position.
“Central banks sold a net 30t of gold in March, with sales from Turkey (60t) and Russia (16t) offsetting purchases elsewhere,” said Marissa Salim, Senior Research Lead, APAC at the World Gold Council on Tuesday. “Quarterly data from the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) also showed net sales of 22t in Q1 2026.”
EU-Japan joining hands to break China’s supply chain grip
The European Union and Japan are hardening their economic partnership against what they increasingly regard as China’s strategic manipulation of global supply chains. This sharpening convergence was on full display in early May, when the EU and Japan convened the 7th High-Level Economic Dialogue (HLED) in Brussels. The meeting reflected a notable hardening of language and intent. European and Japanese officials focused squarely on vulnerabilities stemming from concentrated supply chains, particularly China’s dominance in critical minerals and clean technology manufacturing.
While diplomatic caution ensured that Beijing was not always explicitly named in every formulation, the thrust of the discussions left little ambiguity. The EU and Japan are increasingly coordinating to counter what they see as China’s use of non-market policies, export restrictions, and state-backed industrial expansion to distort global competition and create asymmetric strategic dependencies.
What began over the past decade as a conventional trade and regulatory relationship has evolved into a far more geopolitical alignment centered on economic security, industrial resilience, and technological sovereignty. $BTC $BNB #FedChairTransitionNears
NVIDIA AND IREN ! JUST ANNOUNCED A NEW PARTNERSHIP "NVIDIA and IREN intend to support deployment of up to 5 gigawatts of NVIDIA DSX-aligned AI infrastructure across IREN's global data center pipeline over time." "As part of the partnership, IREN issued to NVIDIA a five-year right to purchase up to 30 million shares of ordinary stock at an exercise price of $70 per share, resulting in a right to invest up to $2.1 billion, subject to certain conditions including regulatory." $IRENon
🚨Japan is likely SELLING US Treasuries to defend the yen:
Federal Reserve custody holdings of US Treasuries fell by -$8.7 billion to $2.73 trillion in the week ending May 6.
This is consistent with Japan selling US government debt to fund an estimated $54.7 billion in yen purchases over the same period, according to Bloomberg.
Since 2022, Japan has spent more than $200 billion in total defending the yen, selling US Treasuries each time to raise the dollars needed for intervention.
Importantly, Japan is the largest foreign holder of US government debt, and continued Treasury sales could put further upward pressure on US yields at a time when they are already rising due to surging oil prices and growing fiscal deficit concerns.
In past interventions, Japan did not draw down its cash reserves, according to Bank of America, implying the funding likely came entirely from bond sales.
If the same pattern held this time, the total impact on US Treasury supply from this intervention would be around $70 billion, further lifting yields.
Japanese interventions are adding pressure to the Treasury market.
BREAKING: China’s central bank bought +8 tonnes of gold in April, the most since December 2024.
This follows +5 tonnes acquired in March, the 2nd-largest two-month addition since Q1 2024.
This also marks their 18th consecutive monthly purchase, bringing total official holdings up to a record 2,322 tonnes.
Year-to-date, China’s central bank has bought +15 tonnes of gold, on track for its biggest annual purchase since 2023.
Since 2022, the country has officially increased its gold holdings by +372 tonnes, or +19%, making China one of the strongest gold buyers in the world.
ChatGPT dominates Africa’s AI chatbot market with 84.38% share, far ahead of Microsoft Copilot (6.99%) and Perplexity (4.72%).Despite Google’s strong presence on the continent, Google Gemini holds just 3.29%AI use in Africa is driven by accessibility, mobile use, and affordability. $BNB $BTC #AI
Anthropic’s Claude is one of the most popular AI chatbots on the market. According to the San Francisco-based AI company, many of Claude AI’s users are in the U.S. Today’s visualization shows the top 20 countries based on global usage of Claude.ai. Insights for this analysis are drawn from Anthropic’s Economic Index, published in September 2025. The United States leads global Claude AI usage with 21.6%, followed by India, Brazil, and Japan. Countries like Brazil, Japan, and South Korea each hold 3.7%, showing that both emerging and advanced economies make the top ranks, but for very different reasons. $BNB $BTC #AI
Nvidia remained the dominant supplier of AI compute capacity in Q4 2025, shipping 2.96 million H100 equivalents—about 65.5% of the included total.H100-equivalent compute capacity (H100e) is used as the measure, which converts each chip’s peak dense 8-bit operations into the equivalent number of Nvidia H100 GPUs.Google was the clearest challenger at 976k H100e, while AMD (226k), Amazon (221k), and Huawei (132k) made up a much smaller second tier. $BTC $ETH #AICHIPS
Nominal (current) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Russia is $2.66 trillion ($2,656,452,000,000) as of 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).The GDP growth rate in 2026 is 1.1%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).GDP per Capita in Russia (with a population of 143,394,458 people) is $18,525 in 2026, an increase of $553 from $17,972 in 2025; this represents a change of 3.1% in GDP per capita.