GLB and Chevron Bring Additive and Base Oil Expertise to Lagos Blenders
13 October 2026 On 6 October, GLB Chemical Services Limited, Gapuma’s Nigerian company, co-hosted a joint seminar and customer engagement session with Chevron Oronite and Chevron Base Oils. The event was for lubricant blenders and was held at the Lagos Continental Hotel. The venue was well suited to the occasion. Formerly the InterContinental Lagos, the hotel stands on Kofo Abayomi Street in Victoria Island, home to most of the city’s foreign consulates and multinational businesses. For the morning (or day), it brought together a community whose work is largely invisible yet felt everywhere: the companies that turn imported additives and base stocks into the finished oils used across Nigeria’s roads, ports and industries. A finished lubricant is, at heart, a partnership of two ingredients. Base oil is the body; additives are the intelligence. Chevron Oronite, whose brand dates back to 1917, develops, manufactures and markets performance additives for lubricating oils and fuels. Those additives are blended into refined base oils to dissolve deposits, inhibit corrosion, control oxidation and reduce friction and wear. Chevron Base Oils supplies the other half of that equation. Bringing both under one roof gave Lagos blenders a rare chance to discuss formulation, quality and supply with the people who know each component best. For GLB, the session reflected a simple principle. A distributor earns its place by shortening the distance between global technology and local customers. That means bringing expertise into the room, answering questions directly and listening carefully to what the market will need next. It is a principle Gapuma applies across its West African footprint, from Nigeria to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. GLB extends its thanks to Daren Barnes, Eric de Goustine and Sarah Kathoun of Chevron Oronite for travelling to Lagos, and to every blender who took part. Pictured (left to right): Thompson Longe, GLB Chemical Services Limited; Daren Barnes, Chevron Oronite; Prakash Ramchandani, GLB Chemical Services Limited; Eric de Goustine, Chevron Oronite; Sarah Kathoun, Chevron Oronite; Akash Suhanda, GLB Chemical Services Limited.
Gold, the Fed and the Limits of the Lever
7 Oct 2026 Gold has lost roughly a quarter of its value since January, in the middle of a war. The explanation lies less in the Gulf than in Washington – and in a lesson first taught in 1979. A haven that stopped behaving like one Gold is supposed to rise as the world grows more dangerous. On the 221st day of the conflict between the United States and Iran, it is doing the opposite. Having touched a record of around $5,600 an ounce in late January, the metal now trades near $4,180 – roughly a quarter lower – and at the end of September it fell to a seven-week low. Writing for Investing.com this week, the analyst Satendra Singh reaches for the obvious parallel: the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and the 444 days that followed. The comparison is instructive, though not quite for the reason usually given. The crisis of 1979 was a hostage standoff, not a war. Gold surged regardless, reaching $850 an ounce on 21 January 1980. Then it fell away, and went on falling. Diplomacy did not break the rally – the hostages remained in captivity for a further year. The price of money did. The price of money On 6 October 1979 – forty-seven years ago this week – Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve abandoned gradualism. It set out to control the supply of money directly and let interest rates find their own level. They found it near 20 per cent. In March 1980 President Carter added credit controls of his own, which deepened a downturn and were dismantled within months. Inflation eventually broke. So did gold. The mechanism at work today is the same one, in a lower key. The war disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and carried Brent crude from around $73 a barrel to $118 by late April. US consumer price inflation reached 4.2 per cent in May, with energy the principal cause. The Federal Reserve, now chaired by Kevin Warsh, responded in September by raising rates to a range of 3.75–4.00 per cent. The vote was unanimous, and 16 of its 18 policymakers expect at least one further rise before the year is out. The next decision falls on 27–28 October. Gold pays no interest. When cash and bonds pay more, and the dollar firms, the cost of holding it rises. The conflict, in other words, is weighing on gold by way of inflation: the market is trading the central bank’s response to the war rather than the war itself. Whose hand is on the lever? It is tempting to speak of a president reviving a Carter-era playbook. The phrase assumes that the playbook is his to open. For the most part, it is not. Fiscal policy belongs largely to Congress, and a federal deficit in the region of 6 per cent of GDP leaves little room for manoeuvre in any case. What remains to the White House is persuasion, appointment and pressure – real influences, but not controls. Monetary policy belongs to the Federal Reserve. President Trump has argued that rates should stand at 1 per cent or lower; the chairman he chose has raised them. The echo of 1979 is exact in one respect only: Carter appointed Volcker, and it was Volcker’s medicine, not Carter’s, that the economy swallowed. The one lever that is unmistakably the President’s is the war. At a rally in Nebraska on Monday he described higher prices as “a small price to pay” and said the conflict would be over very soon. If that proves right, the reopening of Hormuz would do more to lower inflation, and with it interest rates, than any instruction to the central bank. That is a matter of diplomacy, not macroeconomic management. What it means For commodity traders. Dollar funding is becoming dearer at the very moment that energy, freight and feedstock prices remain volatile. Working capital costs more, and a firm dollar bears down on buyers in import-dependent markets, not least across West and Southern Africa. In such conditions the tenor of financing, the depth of counterparty relationships and the discipline of hedging count for more than any directional view. Hormuz remains the barometer. For investors. Gold is not a hedge against bad news as such. It protects against falling real yields and a weakening currency; it offers little shelter from a central bank intent on restoring both. Those who bought at the peak in 1980 waited nearly three decades to see that price again. The difference today is that central banks themselves remain steady buyers, which lends the metal a support it lacked then. For savers. Higher rates are, at last, a headline in their favour. The figure that matters, however, is the real return. A deposit paying 4 per cent while prices rise by 4 per cent is merely standing still. The lesson of 1979 is not that history repeats. It is that the crisis was brought to an end by a central banker in Washington and by negotiators in Algiers. Neither was pulling a presidential lever. This article is commentary and does not constitute investment advice.
Clariant Brings Its Laboratories Closer to the Customer in China
6 October 2026 Chemistry travels well, but innovation is better done close to home. That is the thinking behind Clariant’s decision to open two new research and development laboratories for its Additives business in China, announced on 18 August. The first sits at Daya Bay in Huizhou, beside the company’s flame retardants plant. That plant was inaugurated in 2023 and gained a second production line last November, taking total investment in the site to CHF 100 million. The new laboratory will develop the next generation of flame retardants and is designed to welcome collaboration with Chinese universities and innovation partners. The second is in Shanghai, within the additives technology centre at the One Clariant Campus. Its field is performance additives – antioxidants, light stabilisers and waxes – and its facilities run from synthesis and analytics through to pilot-scale production. Taken together, the two represent a change of kind. Clariant already developed applications locally; it can now create new additives in China from first research to pilot scale. The materials in question serve some of the fastest-moving industries anywhere, among them e-mobility, electronics, artificial intelligence and packaging – sectors in which a few months gained in development can decide who leads. The laboratories also complete a picture that has been taking shape for some time. Last November Clariant announced a joint venture with Fuhua on phosphorus-based flame retardants, and opened a second line at its Cangzhou plant, run jointly with Beijing Tiangang, to serve China’s nylon industry. Research, manufacturing and partnership now sit side by side in the same market. The company calls the approach “In China, For China”, and for its customers the result is practical: shorter lead times, quicker technical support and products designed around their own requirements. Manuel Mueller, Head of Strategy and Innovation for the Adsorbents & Additives business unit, put the ambition plainly: to strengthen Clariant’s standing as the “partner of choice for innovative and sustainable additive solutions”. It is a phrase that will ring true to anyone who works with the company. Gapuma’s own partnership with Clariant lies in a different field – Well Service Additives, across Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – but the qualities on show in Huizhou and Shanghai are the ones we have come to know: patience, investment and a readiness to stand close to the customer. We congratulate our partner on a significant milestone.
The Atlantic Turn: Africa’s New Trade Corridors
The Port of Lobito, Angola – the Atlantic terminus of a 1,300 km rail corridor from the Copperbelt By: Shahab Mossavat 2 October 2026 For decades, the copper of Central Africa has gone to sea the long way round. Mined in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo and in northern Zambia, it has travelled by lorry east to Dar es Salaam or south to Durban, across several borders and over journeys of around a month. The Atlantic was, to all practical purposes, out of reach. That is no longer so. The Lobito Corridor – some 1,300 km of railway from the Copperbelt to the Angolan port of Lobito, along the line of the old Benguela railway – is carrying freight again. The first trial consignment of Congolese copper concentrate reached the coast in eight days. Operated under concession by a consortium of Trafigura, Mota-Engil and Vecturis, and backed by the European Union and the United States, it is among the most closely watched infrastructure projects on the continent. More than a mineral line It would be easy to read this as a mining story. The more interesting question is what travels the other way. A railway that takes copper out can bring goods in: fertilisers, industrial chemicals, coatings raw materials, water treatment polymers and grain. These are the inputs on which farms and factories depend, and they can now reach inland markets faster and at a lower landed cost. Predictability matters as much as speed. A manufacturer who can rely on a delivery date holds less stock, ties up less capital and can plan production with confidence. That is how a mineral route becomes an economy. The governments concerned are insistent on the point. As Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka of the Democratic Republic of Congo has said: “The Lobito Corridor must not be just an infrastructure project, but a real lever for economic transformation serving the people.” The real prize is inbound – the industrial and agricultural inputs that reach inland markets The money is beginning to follow the argument. In August, the African Development Bank approved a $255 million loan and a $10 million grant for Zambia’s part in the corridor, including a new railway of about 500 km to join the Angolan line. The financing is tied to trade facilitation, agriculture and energy as well as to transport. One coast, many doors Nor is Lobito alone. Far to the north-west, five West African states – Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria – have agreed by treaty to build a six-lane highway of more than 1,000 km from Abidjan to Lagos, and to run it as a single supranational asset under its own authority. Costed at some $15 billion, the project has moved from technical studies to the investment stage. Taken together, these projects describe something larger than any one route. The Atlantic seaboard – from Abidjan round the Gulf of Guinea to Luanda and Lobito, and on past Walvis Bay to the Cape – is starting to behave less like a string of separate ports and more like a connected system. This is the coast on which Gapuma works. We deliver across 30 African nations, with a presence in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Angola and South Africa. For more than a quarter of a century we have learned that each coastal state is also a door: to its neighbours, and to the landlocked markets behind them. As the corridors mature, those doors open wider. The hard part None of this is guaranteed. The Lobito line still carries a small fraction of what its backers project for 2030. The Zambian link is only now being financed, and the Abidjan–Lagos highway has yet to break ground. New track does nothing to speed a slow customs post, and Africa’s earlier mineral railways enriched their ports while bypassing the people along the route. But the direction is set, and the opportunity is plain. The advantage will go to those who already know the ports, the paperwork and the people, and who can turn a faster route into a dependable supply. The copper will find its way to the sea regardless. The test of this new geography is what comes back up the line. Two corridors, one coast: the Atlantic seaboard from Abidjan to Cape Town.
Returning Home: Phume Mazibuko Rejoins Gapuma as Operations Associate
28 September 2026 Some people pass through an organisation; others are shaped by it, and help to shape it in return. Gapuma is delighted to announce that Phumelela Mazibuko – known to colleagues as Phume – has rejoined the company as Operations Associate, just over a year after first arriving as an intern. Her return is a source of real pride for all of us. It is also a quiet affirmation of something we have long believed: once people come to Gapuma, they become invested, and that sense of belonging stays with them. A deliberate beginning Phume’s path to Gapuma began with a recommendation. A family member pointed her towards the company as a good place to learn, and she followed up on her own initiative, writing to us with her CV and a clear account of why she wanted to enter the industry and understand how a trading business operates from the inside. That directness set the tone for her seven-week internship in the summer of 2025. She came to learn, and she did – not only about the mechanics of commodities and speciality chemicals trading, but about herself. “The internship taught me what I wanted from my working life,” she says. “I realised I wanted a dynamic role, one where I would be solving problems that have real commercial impact. That was the moment everything came into focus.” Choosing to come back What stayed with Phume after her placement ended was the combination of culture and industry. The pace, the responsibility and the people around her matched the kind of professional she wanted to become. So rather than wait for a vacancy to be advertised, she took the initiative once more. She wrote to her former supervisors to ask whether there might be room for a graduate, and what followed was a series of open, constructive conversations. Together, we shaped a role that did not yet exist, but which we recognised would be essential to Gapuma’s commercial success and to the smooth running of the business day to day. It is a story that reflects well on Phume’s resourcefulness, and on a company willing to make room for talent when it knocks on the door. The role As Operations Associate, Phume will focus on making Gapuma’s daily operations as efficient and productive as possible. Her responsibilities include: supporting the end-to-end execution of supply chain activities quality control keeping documentation organised and up to date ensuring compliance standards are upheld across the commodities and chemicals we trade, and across our suppliers and clients monitoring and tracking key performance indicators managing risk, and developing strategic solutions across each of these areas It is a wide-ranging brief, and one that places her at the heart of how the business functions. Looking ahead For Phume, the return feels less like a new start than a continuation. “Gapuma’s culture, combined with the industry itself, was exactly what I was looking for as I developed professionally,” she says. “Coming back was an easy decision. I’m thrilled to be home, and I’m genuinely excited about what lies ahead – for me, and for the company.” Welcome back, Phume. It is wonderful to have one of our own home again.
The Lights Go Out in Hull: How Energy Costs Are Redrawing the Chemical Map
23 September 2026 There is a particular silence to a mothballed chemical plant. The flares die and the pipework cools, and a site built to run without pause for decades simply stops. This week, that silence descended on Saltend, on the north bank of the Humber, where Ineos began idling its three acetyls plants. Two have already ceased production and the third will follow within days. They will remain idle until further notice. What makes the moment significant is not only what these plants make but what they were. According to Ineos, they are the last world-scale acetyls units left in Europe. Every other producer on the continent has already closed, and each closure was blamed on the same thing: energy costs that could not be competed with. A problem of physics as much as price The chemistry explains the vulnerability. At Saltend, natural gas is both the energy that drives the process and the feedstock from which acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate are made. When gas prices rise, the whole operation becomes uneconomic, however modern the equipment or efficient the process. Prices have risen sharply. Wholesale gas in Britain and Europe has almost doubled since July, as disruption to oil and gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz has rippled through global energy markets. “I’m sure people will find it hard to believe that we are being forced to mothball some of the most efficient plants in Europe but with gas prices now 12 times the level in the US and 8 times that of China, we just cannot compete,” said Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder and chairman of Ineos. That 12-to-one ratio is Ineos’s own calculation. Independent market data put the gap between British and American gas nearer eight to ten times, depending on the hub and contract measured. On any measure, it is a chasm that no operational excellence can bridge. Part of a pattern, not an isolated event Hull is not an outlier. Yara mothballed its ammonia plant on the same Saltend site in early 2025. Ineos closed Britain’s last synthetic ethanol plant at Grangemouth. The acetyls business itself cut a fifth of its workforce last year. Each decision on its own might be read as a single company’s commercial choice. Taken together, they describe a structural shift: gas-based chemical production is leaving Europe. Ineos has not closed the door entirely. It is reportedly exploring direct purchases of American liquefied natural gas, a process that could take up to a year, and could restart if prices ease. It is also calling on the UK and EU to impose tariffs on Chinese imports. For now, however, a region that consumes these chemicals in large volumes no longer makes them at scale. Where the molecules go next Acetyls are rarely headline news, but they are everywhere. Acetic acid feeds coatings, adhesives and food production. Acetic anhydride is essential to pharmaceuticals, aspirin among them. Ethyl acetate is a workhorse solvent in printing inks, laminating adhesives and flexible packaging. The European manufacturers who depended on Hull have not stopped needing these materials. They have simply started looking elsewhere, to the United States, China, the Middle East and Asia more widely. That search has consequences well beyond Europe. When one major region turns to the global market in a hurry, cargoes are redirected, prices firm and lead times lengthen, including in markets that never bought from Hull. If tariffs are imposed, Chinese product shut out of Europe will seek homes elsewhere, including across Africa and Latin America. There is also a regulatory dimension. Acetic anhydride is a controlled drug precursor, so replacing supply from new origins requires rigorous licensing and end-user checks. “What happened in Hull this week will be felt far beyond Humberside,” said Russell Brill, Director of Purchasing at Gapuma Group. “When a region loses its last major source of a basic chemical, buyers do not stop needing it; they go looking elsewhere, and they all go looking at once. Our job is to make sure our customers are not caught in that rush: to know every credible origin, to secure volumes early and to be straight with people about where prices are heading.” The barometer moves At Gapuma, we have long treated the Strait of Hormuz as a barometer for the direction of global trade and finance. Most of the time, its readings show up in freight rates and insurance premiums. This week, the reading appeared somewhere far less expected: in a quiet chemical park in East Yorkshire. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear. Where chemistry gets made is increasingly decided by the price of energy, and that price is increasingly decided by geopolitics. As regional production gives way to longer, multi-origin supply chains, the distributor’s role changes. It is no longer simply a middleman. It is a shock absorber, a navigator and, at times, the difference between a production line that runs and one that stops. Hull’s plants may yet restart. Until they do, the gap they leave will be filled by those who saw it coming.
Gapuma at the Table as London Hosts UK–Angola Trade Forum
11 September 2026 Gapuma Group attended the UK–Angola Trade & Investment Forum in London this week, as senior figures from government, finance and industry gathered to strengthen ties between Britain and one of Africa’s fastest-diversifying economies. The two-day event – organised by DMA Invest, in partnership with the UK–Angola Chamber of Commerce and Angola’s Agency for Private Investment and Export Promotion (AIPEX) – opened with “Angola Day” at the London Stock Exchange. Kirsty McNeill MP, the UK’s Minister for Africa, opened proceedings, marking Angola’s fiftieth anniversary of independence and pointing to the Lobito Corridor as evidence that transport links only deliver value when they open doors for people, not just goods. She closed by invoking an Angolan proverb that true friendship is tested by travelling together – declaring that Britain is proud to walk this journey with Angola “day and night, near and far.” Angola’s delegation was led by Finance Minister Vera Daves de Sousa, and drew officials from the Ministry of Finance and its supervised bodies, the Ministry of Planning, AIPEX, and a clutch of commercial banks and financial institutions. The Forum’s opening day set out the country’s macroeconomic priorities, its ongoing privatisation programme, tax reforms, and the investment opportunities emerging from its push to diversify away from oil. Day two turned to the practical business of capital: financing strategic infrastructure, promoting exports, and direct meetings between Angolan and British companies, with panels on initial public offerings, debt markets and development finance. Speaking on the second day at the Institute of Directors, Yanish Bagheerutty, Business Development Manager at Gapuma, said forums like this are where new partnerships begin, and that Gapuma intends to keep building its engagement with Angola as the relationship matures.
Propak West Africa 2026: Gapuma Returns to Lagos’s Leading Manufacturing Showcase
10 September 2026 Propak West Africa 2026 closed this evening at the Landmark Centre in Lagos, bringing to an end three days that once again confirmed the exhibition’s place as one of West Africa’s premier gatherings for the packaging, plastics, printing, processing and food manufacturing industries. This year’s edition brought together more than 200 exhibitors and over 4,000 industry professionals from more than 35 countries, spread across four exhibition halls. Alongside the trade floor, a dedicated three-day conference programme gave production and packaging professionals from across the region access to keynote sessions, technical panels and case studies, including a stakeholder session hosted by the Recycling Association of Nigeria on closing the gap between packaging placed on the market and materials actually recovered. Exhibition space had reportedly sold out to around 90 per cent ahead of opening, and the show drew suppliers and technology providers from as far afield as Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America, alongside a strong showing of Nigerian and regional manufacturers. Propak West Africa sits within a wider portfolio of Propak exhibitions across the continent, including the longer-established Propak Africa show in Johannesburg. But within West Africa specifically, it is widely recognised, including by independent industry press, as the region’s leading manufacturing and packaging event – a title borne out by the scale and international reach of this year’s edition. Gapuma was represented on the floor by Prakash Ramchandani, Managing Director of GLB Chemical Services Limited, a Gapuma group company, and Akash Suhanda, Business Development at Gapuma Group Limited, continuing an association with the show that began with the Group’s attendance last year. “Propak West Africa has become one of the most important fixtures on the calendar for anyone serious about manufacturing and packaging in this region,” said Ramchandani. “Being back on the floor again this year, you can feel how much West Africa’s manufacturing base has grown – it’s where relationships are built, and where the direction of the industry becomes visible for the year ahead. For a business like GLB, closely tied to Nigeria’s manufacturing and chemicals sector, that makes it an event worth showing up to, year after year.” The exhibition’s growth this year reflects a broader trend: West Africa’s packaging and manufacturing sectors are expanding steadily, driven by urbanisation, rising consumer demand, e-commerce growth and increasing attention to sustainability and the circular economy. For Gapuma, whose West African footprint spans chemicals, commodities and logistics, events like Propak West Africa offer a direct line into that momentum – a chance to meet suppliers, track emerging technology and stay close to the manufacturers shaping the region’s industrial future. With this year’s edition now behind it, Propak West Africa will return to Lagos next September. Gapuma expects to be there again.
New Abidjan Warehouse Propels Gapuma into CI Top 5
9 September 2026 Gapuma Group marked a significant milestone on 7 September with the commissioning of its new warehouse in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire – a move that reshapes both the scale of its operations and its standing in the market. The new facility spans 3,000 square metres and can accommodate around 150 containers, representing close to a 100 per cent increase on Gapuma’s previous storage capacity in the country. It is a substantial expansion, and one that reflects the pace at which demand for Gapuma’s chemical products across West Africa continues to grow. The warehouse received its first consignment, 135 tonnes of caustic soda, shortly after commissioning – the opening move in what will be a far larger flow of materials through the site in the months ahead. Beyond the numbers, the significance of this step is strategic. “This isn’t just about square metreage,” says Prakash Daswani, General Manager of Gapuma’s Côte d’Ivoire operation. “It changes the dynamics and the landscape of our operations in West Africa, and places Gapuma firmly amongst the top five chemical companies in Côte d’Ivoire.” For a business built on reliability of supply, that additional capacity translates directly into a stronger, more resilient offering for customers across the region. Perhaps most importantly, the new warehouse opens up hinterland markets well beyond Abidjan and Côte d’Ivoire itself, extending Gapuma’s reach deeper into West Africa and positioning the company to serve a wider network of customers than ever before. It is a major step forward for Gapuma, and a clear signal of the ambition driving its growth across the continent. Further announcements on the Abidjan operation, and on Gapuma’s wider West African footprint, are expected in the coming months. We’re proud to share a video of the first consignment arriving below: Content
Dire Straits: The Hormuz Stalemate at Six Months
7 September 2026 The Strait of Hormuz has burned again. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had struck three oil tankers and three US-linked vessels in the waterway, in retaliation for fresh American strikes on Iranian tankers earlier the same day, including the crude carrier M/T Kylo. It is the latest exchange in a confrontation that has now run for over six months, since the United States and Israel opened their campaign against Iran on 28 February, and it comes after barely a month of relative calm. We return to this story, as we have done repeatedly over the past six months, not simply because the flashpoint recurs, but because Hormuz has proved itself a genuine barometer for the direction of global trade and finance. Freight rates, insurance premiums, oil and gas prices, and by extension inflation expectations and interest rate decisions worldwide, all take their cue from what happens in this one stretch of water. Few single chokepoints tell you as much, as quickly, about where the global economy is heading. The toll is no longer abstract. The crisis has claimed twenty seafarers and one port worker, with thirty-five more injured; Iran alone struck at least thirteen commercial vessels in August, including a strike on the tanker MT Sidr that killed two crew. Traffic through the Strait, which normally carries around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and close to a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, remains a fraction of its pre-crisis volume, and increasingly hard to verify: with more vessels switching off their transponders to avoid becoming targets, even Washington’s own figures on daily barrel flows are treated with scepticism by independent maritime analysts. Markets have responded in the only language they know. Brent crude has posted a third straight daily gain, quoted around $79 a barrel by XTB, while broader crude benchmarks tracked by Trading Economics were up roughly nine per cent on the week and trading closer to $91. The World Bank now expects energy prices to surge 24 per cent this year, the sharpest rise since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and overall commodity prices to climb 16 per cent, driven by energy, fertiliser and record metal prices. None of that is contained to the Gulf: it is arriving at exactly the moment the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan are trying to judge whether inflation is beaten or merely resting, with Friday’s US inflation print now doing double duty as a bellwether for both monetary policy and the price of keeping ships moving through Hormuz. Has a resolution become more plausible, or less? The honest answer is: less, for now, though not for want of trying. Delegations from Washington and Tehran did sit down in June around a memorandum of understanding meant to end the war; the Islamabad Talks in the spring produced their own short-lived ceasefire; the two governments have between them stood up a Persian Gulf Strait Authority and an Islamabad Memorandum as embryonic institutional scaffolding; and as recently as 25 August, the US Navy confirmed it had cleared the Strait’s principal shipping lane of more than a hundred suspected mines. Each of these is a genuine, if partial, achievement. But each has also been followed, within weeks, by a fresh exchange of fire, and this weekend’s strikes on tankers and US-linked vessels suggest the underlying dispute, over who controls passage through Hormuz, remains as unresolved as it was in February. That is the real cost of stalemate: not only the lives already lost and the tankers already burned, but a global economy that cannot fully exhale. Insurers cannot fully price Gulf risk while ceasefires keep breaking. Central banks cannot fully relax while a fifth of the world’s LNG and a quarter of its seaborne oil sit hostage to one of the narrowest, most contested shipping lanes on Earth. And companies across the commodities and chemicals trade, ourselves included, cannot plan a “normal” that keeps receding by another month, then another. A durable settlement, whatever shape it eventually takes, is not simply a diplomatic nicety; it is the precondition for the world’s freight rates, feedstock costs and interest rate decisions to return to something like predictability. Until then, the bill for uncertainty keeps being paid, by shipowners, by insurers, by consumers, and by every business that trades across this most contested of waterways. This is the latest in our ongoing coverage of the Strait of Hormuz crisis and its implications for global trade.
When the Boss Becomes the Brand
3 September 2026 This week, for the first time in nearly a century, the face of a serving American president went into general circulation on US currency. The Mint’s new $1 coin, struck to mark the country’s 250th anniversary, carries Donald Trump’s portrait on its obverse – a design the administration argues is permitted under a 2020 coin redesign law, and the first living president’s image on money made for everyday spending since a 1926 commemorative half-dollar bearing Calvin Coolidge. The Treasury has separately confirmed that Trump’s signature will appear on future paper currency too, itself a first: presidential signatures have never before featured on the dollar bill, that honour having traditionally belonged only to the Treasurer and the Treasury Secretary. Whatever one makes of the specific decision, it is a peculiarly literal illustration of a question businesses have been circling for years, one posed again recently by BBC News: when a leader’s image becomes inseparable from the institution they lead, does that institution grow stronger, or simply more exposed? The case for fusion is easy to make, and increasingly well documented. Executives surveyed by Weber Shandwick attribute something in the region of 44 per cent of their company’s market value to the reputation of their chief executive, and roughly half expect that dependency to deepen further. A recognisable, quotable leader can shorten the distance between a company and the people it needs to trust it – investors, journalists, recruits, customers. Richard Branson’s Virgin, Steve Jobs’s Apple and, further back, Walt Disney’s studio all drew genuine commercial advantage from a founder whose face and voice were indistinguishable from the product. Yet fusion has a shadow side that rarely appears in the same press releases. When a company becomes, in effect, one person wearing a corporate structure as a coat, it inherits that person’s moods, controversies and mortality as balance-sheet items. Governance analysts have begun calling this “key-celebrity risk” – the exposure created when a business’s fortunes are staked on a single, unpredictable personality rather than distributed across an institution. Adidas learned the arithmetic of that risk in 2022, when it severed its partnership with Kanye West: the split helped tip the company into its first annual loss in three decades and cost an estimated $1.3 billion in the following year’s revenue alone. Academic research finds a similar pattern in miniature. Studies of “narcissistic” chief executives show they are markedly more likely to chase high-profile brand acquisitions and back vanity-driven strategy, often to the detriment of shareholder returns. History offers a useful corrective, because it allows us to see how these bets aged. The most durable commercial reputations of the last century were rarely built by the loudest men in the room. J. Paul Getty, once reckoned the richest man alive, was famously reclusive, conducting much of his oil empire from behind the walls of an English country estate and, notoriously, installing a payphone for the use of his houseguests. Andrew Carnegie converted a steel fortune into more than 2,500 public libraries, believing – as he wrote in his “Gospel of Wealth” – that a man who died rich died disgraced. Howard Hughes retreated almost entirely from public view in his later years, yet the medical research institute he endowed remains, to this day, one of the largest private funders of biomedical science in America. None of the three sought a personal following. What fame they could not avoid, they spent on something other than themselves. The pattern holds today, if in quieter form. Warren Buffett has spent seven decades cultivating a persona built on absence rather than presence: the same modest house since 1958, the same unglamorous lunches, an aversion to headlines that has become, paradoxically, one of the more effective brand assets in American finance. His own test for Berkshire Hathaway’s conduct is whether it would survive being reported, unfavourably, on the front page of a newspaper – a standard built for institutional durability, not personal acclaim. Tim Cook, taking over Apple from a founder whose personality had become inseparable from the product, chose deliberately not to compete with that persona. He is, by most accounts, methodical, private and unshowy, and Apple’s market value has grown several times over on his watch regardless. None of this settles the question BBC News posed, and it would be wrong to claim it does. A visible chief executive can, in the right circumstances, be a genuine commercial asset, and the data on reputation and market value bear that out. But the weight of the historical record, and of recent corporate casualties, tips gently towards caution. The technology moguls, media personalities and social media entrepreneurs who now treat their companies as extensions of a personal following are running an experiment whose downside case is already visible: fractious, unstable public narratives that move with a single remark or mood, rather than with the underlying strength of the business. Whether the new coin proves a shrewd piece of national branding or a curiosity future collectors puzzle over, it captures something true about the underlying mechanics. Putting a single face on an institution’s money is the most literal way there is of betting that one person will hold steady. The businesspeople whose reputations have aged best are, more often than not, the ones who made themselves faintly hard to picture.
Not Quite a Right: The Strange Origins of the British Bank Holiday, and Its Older Cousin, the Quarter Day
31 August 2026 Ask most people why Britain gets a day off in August, and they will assume it has always been so – as fixed a part of the national furniture as queuing or complaining about the weather. In truth, the bank holiday is a comparatively recent invention, and a stranger one than its name suggests. Before 1871 Before 1871, England’s calendar of rest was a patchwork of religious survivals. The Bank of England itself had once closed for around forty saints’ days and anniversaries; by 1830 that had been trimmed to eighteen, and by 1834 to just four: Good Friday, the first of May, the first of November, and Christmas Day. Most working people had no such luxury. Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day were the only holidays recognised in common law, and the rest of the year’s rare respites were local, seasonal and largely religious in character. Sir John Lubbock and “St Lubbock’s Days” That changed in 1871, thanks to Sir John Lubbock – banker, Liberal MP, and one of the more eccentric figures to grace the Commons. A friend and disciple of Charles Darwin, Lubbock kept a pet wasp, wrote extensively on ants and bees, and made a well-documented attempt to teach his poodle to read (the poodle, historians note, proved unteachable). He was also the driving force behind the preservation of the Avebury stone circles, and later took his title, Baron Avebury, from them. His Bank Holidays Act created four new holidays for England, Wales and Ireland: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day. Good Friday and Christmas Day were left out of the Act entirely, since the law already regarded them as common law holidays and saw no need to legislate twice. Scotland, whose commercial calendar ran rather differently, was given New Year’s Day and Christmas Day instead. Bank clerks, delighted, subscribed to a testimonial fund in Lubbock’s honour and nicknamed the new days “St Lubbock’s Days.” A Right That Never Quite Existed Here lies the peculiarity that gives the bank holiday its unusual legal character, even now. The 1871 Act, and the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971 that replaced it, never gave anyone a right to a day off. What they did was compel banks, and by extension the financial dealings that depend on them, to close. Everything else – whether an office, a shop or a factory floor also shuts – has always been a matter of custom and contract rather than statute. England, in other words, has never really had a “statutory holiday” in the sense that many other countries understand the term; it has a banking holiday that the rest of the economy has simply chosen, over a century and a half, to follow. The 1971 Act tidied the calendar considerably, fixing the Spring and Summer bank holidays to the last Mondays in May and August respectively, and adding New Year’s Day to the list from 1974; an early May bank holiday followed by royal proclamation in 1978. The Older Calendar: Quarter Days None of this has anything to do with England’s much older “quarter days,” though the two are easily confused. Quarter days – Lady Day (25 March), Midsummer Day (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas Day (25 December) – date to at least the Middle Ages, when they marked the four points at which rents fell due, servants were hired, and legal accounts had to be settled and publicly recorded. They were chosen not for astronomical precision, though they fall roughly near the equinoxes and solstices, but for memorability: in a largely illiterate society, a religious feast day was easier to keep track of than a date on a page. Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation, was so central to this system that it served as the first day of the legal and civil year in England until the calendar reform of 1752 shifted the new year to the 1st of January. Its ghost survives in the British tax year, which still begins on the 6th of April – Lady Day, nudged forward by the eleven days lost when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian. Scotland, characteristically, kept its own set of “term days” – Candlemas, Whitsunday, Lammas and Martinmas – which never quite lined up with the English calendar either. Two Calendars, One Crossing Point So the relationship between the two systems turns out to be one of contrast rather than continuity. Bank holidays are a Victorian invention, designed to give the world of finance and industry an orderly, predictable rest; quarter days are a medieval one, designed to keep the world of rent, tenure and debt equally orderly. The two overlap at exactly one point in the year: Christmas Day, which happens to sit at the crossing of both calendars, arriving as a common law holiday and a quarter day in the same twenty-four hours. Everywhere else, the two systems run on quite separate tracks – one built for leisure, the other for obligation – a reminder that behind Britain’s most casual traditions there is usually a longer and rather more particular story than the name suggests.