The numbers
behind the narrative.

The Quant (thequant.market) is an independent publication of data-driven analysis of global trade, tariffs, finance and economics, published from Hong Kong in seven languages.

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Long-form pieces built on primary data, written to change how you read the headlines.

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Finance

AI Investments Are the War Bonds of the New Cold War

The AI buildout is not a bubble. It is a war bond market. $730 billion this year. Four CEOs who say they would rather go bankrupt than lose. War bonds pay off only in victory.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Economics

China Now Has the World's Largest Capital Stock — per Person, a Third of America's

The flow of world investment crossed in 2011; the accumulated stock crossed in 2022. Where the stock has and has not crossed — structures, equipment, housing, knowledge — says where the next two decades of building will go.

8 Nov 202611 min read

Economics

Where the World's $26 Trillion of Fixed Investment Goes

China takes 26 cents of every fixed-investment dollar on earth — and in 2024 India passed Japan as the world's third-largest site of fixed investment.

8 Nov 202611 min read

Economics

The Borrower of Last Resort: Washington Now Clears 8% of GDP in US Savings

Four sectors, one identity, 66 years: the borrowing side of America's savings has changed hands three times, and it now sits with the federal government at depths previously seen only in recessions.

6 Nov 20268 min read

Economics

When To Announce The Restructuring of the World's No. 2 Economy: China Threaded an 18-Month Window

Six years after the three red lines killed the property boom, the timing call holds up in the data. The verdict on the replacement engine takes a decade more.

5 Nov 202610 min read

Finance

The Limits of Intelligence: What the AI Prize Is Worth, and Who Gets It

The first three papers in this series established that roughly $730 billion a year is being spent on a war logic, not a return logic. This one asks the question that decides whether the war bonds pay: how big is the prize, and how many hands does it land in? The answer is a matrix, not a number — and the private marks have already priced the best cell in it.

3 Nov 20268 min read

Trade Audit series

One country at a time, every number checked.

Scorecards, market share and value chains for the world's biggest exporters.

All trade coverage

002

Australia

Australia built the fastest export growth of any advanced commodity economy since 1990 on a single, narrow bet: Chinese demand for its raw materials.

7 min readView audit

003

Brazil

Brazil runs one of the world's largest commodity trade surpluses — but it is shrinking, not setting records.

7 min readView audit

004

France

France's trade deficit collapsed from a record €161.7 billion in 2022 to €69.2 billion in 2025 — a 57% improvement.

9 min readView audit

005

Vietnam

Vietnam's exports grew from $2.4 billion in 1990 to $475 billion in 2025 — a 198-fold increase, among the fastest of any economy on record. But the domestic value-added share of those exports fell from 76.9% in 1995 to 52.0% in 2020 (the last year the OECD series measures it) — by far the steepest decline in the value-added data we track. Vietnam built one of the world's most explosive export machines. The question is how much of it Vietnam actually owns.

4 min readView audit

006

Mexico

Nearshoring pushed Mexico to a record $663.7 billion of goods exports in 2025 and made it the United States' largest trade partner — but Mexico retains a far smaller share of each export dollar than its peers. On the OECD's cross-country measure, Mexico kept 65 cents of every export dollar in 2020, the last year measured, versus 92.5 cents for the US. Mexico's own statistics office puts the figure higher (77%) and rising — but no post-2020 data yet exists to judge whether the nearshoring boom has moved it.

4 min readView audit

007

South Korea

South Korea exported $709.7 billion of goods in 2025 — a record, and the first time above $700 billion — driven by a semiconductor super-cycle.

6 min readView audit

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Trade3 Nov 2026

One Tonne of Chips Now Buys 8,600 Tonnes of Crude Oil

Export value is decoupling from export weight, and the densest goods on the ledger increasingly ship from East Asia, not the West.

8 min

Trade18 Oct 2026

The World's Most Traded Good Is Still Oil — Until 2027

The world's most-cited trade ranking is now an accounting choice. The same publisher's two 2024 crude totals are $210bn apart — and one of them is physically impossible.

5 min

Trade4 Oct 2026