Credit, metals, political economy.
States are not hoarding metal; they are taking positions in the plants that process it. Metal by metal, which ones are becoming strategic reserves and who captures the rent.
Durable rent in the two-trillion-dollar private-credit market sits in two layers only: liabilities that cannot be recalled, and origination broad enough to leave direct lending when it stops paying.
The region's crises aren't ideology — they're one recurring engine: deficit-financed redistribution behind an administratively defended exchange rate.