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The United States does not dominate every foreign government contract. It dominates many of the contracts that would be hardest to replace. Cloud platforms, enterprise software, fighter jets, air-defence systems and hospital records sit deep inside the machinery of the state. As America’s alliances become less predictable, that concentration is turning an old commercial advantage into a strategic vulnerability for its partners.

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This summary covers The Economist’s August 22nd, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as China's spreading supply chains and published under the headline Routes and branches.

Globalisation is not retreating so much as changing address. Chinese manufacturers are building factories across the world, but the result is not a clean shift away from China. Instead, Chinese companies are extending their own industrial ecosystems into new countries, carrying suppliers, logistics networks and strategic technologies with them.

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The toll castle of Pfalzgrafenstein once exploited a narrow stretch of the Rhine. Its rulers could lower chains across the river, stop passing ships and charge for access to a waterway they had done nothing to create. That arrangement is an old illustration of economic rent: income extracted by making a cheap or abundant resource artificially scarce.

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The familiar warning that the stock market is not the real economy now has a second layer: benchmark indices are no longer good portraits of the stock markets they supposedly represent. A handful of enormous companies, many tied to the artificial-intelligence investment boom, increasingly determine the movements of indices containing hundreds or thousands of stocks. The result is that diversified-looking portfolios can carry far more concentrated and volatile risks than their labels suggest.

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America’s tariff campaign against China has produced exactly the kind of supply-chain shifts its critics predicted. The Trump administration now treats that outcome as evidence of a vast foreign conspiracy. In a White House paper called “The Great Transshipment Scam”, trade adviser Peter Navarro accuses dozens of countries of helping Chinese goods dodge American tariffs. The article argues that this diagnosis confuses genuine customs fraud with the ordinary restructuring of global supply chains.

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China’s official urban unemployment rate presents an implausibly calm picture of the world’s largest labor market. Since the measure was introduced in 2018, it has landed between 5% and 6% in 99 of 115 months. Even during the covid-19 shock it never rose above 6.2%. The article argues that this stability is not reassuring. It is a warning that the statistic may be shaped by the government’s targets and by the way China’s migrant workforce moves in and out of the survey.

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Bond investors are sending governments an uncomfortable message: borrowing is becoming more expensive for reasons that will not disappear with a single policy announcement. Long-term yields have climbed across rich countries, reflecting a mix of renewed inflation fears, heavy corporate borrowing and deep concern about public debt. The article argues that official efforts may calm markets briefly, but governments have few painless ways to restore confidence.

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Daron Acemoglu occupies an unusual position in economics: he is both one of the field’s most accomplished scholars and a target of mounting unease among his peers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor shared the 2024 Nobel prize for research on how institutions shape prosperity, has produced hundreds of papers and routinely influences public debate. The article’s concern is not that his work is incompetent. It is that prestige, productivity and technical sophistication may have given several contestable ideas more authority than their evidence deserves.

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Calling someone a Luddite usually ends an argument. The word suggests reflexive fear of technology: people smashing useful machines because they cannot understand progress. The original Luddites were more complicated. Their story, and a later struggle over computers in India, suggests that resistance from workers rarely determines whether a technology spreads. The decisive force is usually the state.

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The landing that never came

For much of the early 2020s, central bankers described the fight against inflation as an attempt to land an aircraft. A “soft landing” would bring price growth back under control without causing a recession. A “hard landing” would crush inflation by damaging the economy. The supposedly unserious third possibility was “no landing”: growth and inflation would both remain strong, leaving policymakers permanently aloft.