China Powers Germany's Exports
German exports soared past pre-pandemic levels in June for the first time since the coronavirus crisis wreaked havoc on trade, official data showed Monday, as the industry shrugged off supply chain shortages.
The pandemic has severely disrupted global supply chains, leading to shortage in raw materials or components including timber, plastics and steel.
Germany's crucial car industry has also been hit by a global computer chip crunch caused by a surge in demand for home electronics as employees are asked to work from home to cut infection risks.
But Europe's biggest economy exported 118.7 billion euros ($140 billion) of goods in June, 1.1 percent more than in February 2020 -- before the health emergency snared Germany.
The indicator rose for the 14th month in a row, and was 1.3 percent higher compared to May, after seasonal variations and calendar effects were taken into account.
"Today's strong data illustrates that supply chain frictions have not yet affected German exports," said analyst Carsten Brzeski of ING.
But he warned that this could change in coming months.
"While order books are still richly filled, supply chain frictions, particularly the lack of microchips, could lead to more delivery problems in key sectors like the automotive industry and therefore to some distortions of export data in the coming months," he said.
Imports also saw a slight gain of 0.6 percent compared to a month ago to 102.4 billion euros.
Demand from the European Union for German goods was up 26.1 percent compared to a year ago, while that from other countries rose 20.7 percent.
China, a key market for Germany, imported 16 percent more than a year ago.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.