All Insights
Commodity Watch: The Sticky Economics of Sugar
<p>It is a truism, backed by plenty of stats and anecdotes, that immigrant communities lose their language first and their preferences for familial foods last. Many have a childhood dish (or a grandma’s meal) that they still hanker for. Food habits are sticky.
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10 August 2026
Commodity Watch: The Quiet Power of Diesel
<p>In the Book of Secrets, Al-Razi, a 10th-century Baghdad-based chemist and physician outlined how to distil crude into usable fuel. His method was lab-based and small-scale. As long as wood, coal and whale oil remained cheap and available, no one took it to scale.</p>
27 July 2026
Commodity Watch: Small Markets, Big Consequences
<p>In Poor Richard’s Almanack, Ben Franklin touched on the “horseshoe parable” where a kingdom is lost for want of a horseshoe nail. The parable is at times cited as an example of butterfly effects, but it also highlights how small fracture points can lead to dire results.</p>
22 July 2026
Commodity Watch: Lending Through the Ages
<p>Clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia were used to record the terms of loans. The first recorded instance of such a loan in ~2500 BCE centred on a long-standing dispute between two city-states over leased land, missed payments and destroyed collateral, which ultimately led to war and the first recorded calculation of compound interest.</p>
13 July 2026
Commodity Watch: History in Every Teacup
<p>Before America was a place of coffee drinkers and coffee houses, tea was it. In the 1760s, the thirteen colonies consumed 1.5 pounds of tea per person, enough for almost one cup per day1. 90% of that tea was bought from the Dutch and smuggled in to circumvent British duties and trade restrictions.</p>
6 July 2026
Commodity Watch: Sulphur Steps into the Spotlight
<p>Today, sulphur is more than an agricultural input (it is key for fertilisers and necessary for global food production). Elemental sulphur is a precursor of sulphuric acid (85% of sulphur is processed into sulphuric acid), which is an integral input for a variety of human activities including mining and industrial output. </p>
29 June 2026