The trade truce between the world’s two largest economies was renewed this week the way most useful things are: in a notice. The US Trade Representative extended all 178 exclusions from Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods to 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on 9 January 2027, covering goods entering from 10 November¹. That is 164 product categories carried over from earlier relief, plus 14 types of equipment used to make solar products¹. “In light of ongoing discussions with China,” the notice says, the extension is “appropriate”¹.

Beijing matched it, line by line. China’s State Council Tariff Commission kept its extra 24% tariff on US goods suspended for two more months, to 10 January 2027, Forwarder News reports, citing the finance ministry notice and Seoul Economic Daily; the separate 10% extra duty stays². The commerce ministry also kept on hold its export-control measures against 16 US entities, and tighter controls on heavy rare-earth metals, battery lithium and graphite and rare-earth technology were postponed to the same date². Desk arithmetic: if the pause lapses, a US exporter faces a 34% extra Chinese duty instead of 10%.

The small print is the news. China’s text, in Seoul Economic Daily’s machine-assisted translation, says Beijing will “closely monitor follow-up U.S. actions and adjust related retaliatory tariff measures at an appropriate time”, a reference to US plans to replace court-voided emergency tariffs with Section 301 duties². Washington’s tone is no warmer: on 6 November, Jamieson Greer pressed Vice Premier He Lifeng on farm purchases, rare earths and critical minerals¹.

For you. Two months is short for diplomacy and long for a logistics planner. It covers December and ends less than four weeks before Lunar New Year on 6 February, as Forwarder News notes². If you buy anything with Chinese graphite, magnets or solar parts inside it, the price you are quoted today assumes the truce holds to 10 January. That is a date to put in the diary, not a reason to panic. Nothing here is investment advice.

Friedrich Merz has written to European Council President António Costa that a “collective commitment … without exception” to Ukraine’s funding is an “essential pre-requisite” for “discussing any further matters, particularly those with financial implications”, the Guardian reports from Brussels¹. In plain terms: Germany signals it will block the EU’s 2028–34 budget unless every member state contributes to Kyiv.

The ledger behind the letter. Last year the EU agreed to lend Ukraine €90bn, meant to cover two-thirds of its military and civilian costs for 2026 and 2027¹. Russia’s bombardment has since raised those costs. Zelenskyy has asked for €70bn to close a budget gap; the EU has endorsed that figure and pledged to find €45bn, with the UK and Canada among those expected to cover the rest¹. Desk arithmetic: that leaves €25bn for Ukraine’s other allies to find.

Who stays out. Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia opted out of the €90bn loan and have indicated they will stay out of the next round. Bulgaria has now joined them¹. “What the chancellor is doing is typical blackmail, and I will not give in to it,” Slovakia’s Robert Fico said in Bratislava, next to Czechia’s Andrej Babiš¹. Merz’s own complaint is that bilateral help is “carried mostly by only a few member states”¹.

The machinery. Berlin also wants decisions on funding Ukraine moved from unanimity to qualified-majority voting, so a single government cannot block them¹. Costa’s office confirmed it had received the letter. It said Ukraine would come up at the informal summit in Dublin this Friday and at a special budget summit on 26–27 November¹. Costa wants a budget deal by the end of the year¹.

The timing matters. …

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The Annex reads the method behind the headline. Today’s: Uppsala University says premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), the severe form of premenstrual syndrome, “does not follow any universal pattern” but falls into three subtypes¹. The paper, led by Ella Schleimann-Jensen and Erika Comasco, appeared in Nature Communications on Tuesday².

The design. Women with PMDD and healthy controls rated their symptoms every day for two menstrual cycles on an online version of a standard scale, the Daily Record of Severity of Problems, with 21 items each scored from 1 (“not at all”) to 6 (“extreme”)². The diagnosis was prospective: symptoms had to rise by more than 50% from the follicular to the luteal phase². Participants came from the screening phase of two Uppsala drug trials, one of escitalopram and one of a progesterone-receptor modulator, recruited through newspaper, campus and social media adverts².

The result. Statistical modelling of the diaries found three groups: severe PMDD with early onset, about two weeks before menstruation and peaking about five days before; severe PMDD with late onset, rising about ten days before and peaking around the start of menstruation; and a moderate late-onset group peaking about four days before¹. Over time, rising anxiety tended to be followed by more irritability, low mood and mood swings¹. The paper calls anxiety “a central symptom” in how the episode unfolds².

The footnotes that matter. The press release says 90 women with PMDD and 40 controls¹; the paper reports 44 controls and 134 participants in total². Small, but it is the kind of thing a reader should check. The authors write that “no separate sample size calculation was performed” for this observational analysis and that it “was not separately preregistered”². …

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You already know the headline number: Wednesday’s power was auctioned on Tuesday at a German-Luxembourg daily average of €316.65 per megawatt hour, a step down from two records¹. This morning the more useful number sits one table over. SMARD’s generation forecast for Wednesday, which had not yet appeared when we checked on Tuesday afternoon, puts onshore and offshore wind together at about 148.1 gigawatt hours². Desk arithmetic: that is about 49% more than the 99.1 GWh forecast for Tuesday and roughly double Monday’s 71.6 GWh².

Line chart of the daily average German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity price from 1 September to 11 November 2026, in euros per megawatt hour. It falls to €13.12 on Sunday 25 October, climbs to €314.85 on Thursday 29 October, and stays between €242.13 and €275.64 on every delivery day from 2 to 8 November. It jumps to €345.64 on Monday 9 November and a record €351.48 on Tuesday 10 November. The latest value is €316.65 for delivery on Wednesday 11 November, €34.83 below Tuesday and still higher than any delivery day before 9 November on the chart.

Source: Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de day-ahead DE-LU daily averages, delivery days 1 Sep to 11 Nov 2026 (Wednesday 11 Nov €316.65, auction of 10 Nov), retrieved 11 Nov 2026, 05:17 CET · CC BY 4.0 · CSV

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Today the five economists of the German Council of Economic Experts, chaired by Monika Schnitzer, hand their annual report to Chancellor Friedrich Merz at 12:00 CET and present it to the public at 14:30 CET². The council says the report covers the economy in 2026 and 2027, how to narrow the financing gaps and net borrowing in the federal budget, and how to revive weak productivity growth in German firms¹. Nothing in it is public yet; anyone quoting its numbers before 14:30 is guessing.

What the advisers said last time. In the spring the council forecast only 0.5% growth for this year, largely because of the Iran war; since then the economy has proved more resilient than expected, and AFP expects the forecast to be revised². In last year’s report the experts criticised the government for spending much of its special funds on “consumptive” outlays rather than investment². That criticism is the yardstick for today.

Why the timing is pointed. On Thursday the budget committee holds its clean-up session, the Bereinigungssitzung, which the Bundestag’s own information service expects to run “into the early hours of Friday”, with every departmental budget called up again and “numerous changes” still expected³. The budget accompanying act for 2027 is due for final committee discussion the same day³. As of Tuesday morning, the coalition had paused the committee’s clean-up draft while its leaders kept negotiating, with the electricity tax the central dispute⁴.

The longer number. Merkur, citing Reuters, ZDF and others, reports a planned €118.7 billion of new core borrowing next year, close to €204 billion including the special funds, and an uncovered financing need of around €115 billion for 2028 to 2030⁴. Desk arithmetic: the special funds add roughly €85 billion to next year’s core borrowing.

For you. Read the advisers’ report as a checklist and Thursday’s session as the receipt. …

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If you signed a new gas contract for a detached house today, you would pay on average 14.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the energy industry association BDEW’s latest price check, dated 10 November¹. That is 3.8 cents, or 34%, more than at the start of the year¹. The figure is for contracts that can be signed now, for a house using 20,000 kWh a year¹.

Electricity moved less. A new power contract for a household using 3,500 kWh a year averages 40.1 cents per kWh, 2.9 cents or 8% above January¹. Desk arithmetic: on those reference consumptions, the rise since January adds about €760 a year to a new gas contract and about €101.50 to a new power contract.

The sentence that matters most. For customers in running tariffs, the BDEW writes, there have been “bislang keine Auswirkungen”: no effects so far¹. Price changes usually take effect at the start of a year, or the price is fixed for a set period¹. So the 34% describes the shop window, not most households’ bills.

Why it is not 2022. The association says wholesale gas prices rose because of the Iran war but less steeply than in 2021 and 2022, that there is no shortage of gas supply this time, and that imports are far more diversified¹. That is little comfort for a household whose fixed price runs out next month, but it is the difference between an expensive winter and a frightening one.

For you. Find your contract and note two dates: when your fixed price ends and how much notice you must give. If your supplier announces a price rise, German law generally gives you a special right to terminate (Sonderkündigungsrecht); comparing before the letter arrives costs nothing. Moving house or changing supplier? Compare against the 14.9 and 40.1 cents, not against last year’s price.

The loudest AI results this season came from the people who design accelerators. The most instructive came on Tuesday from Neubiberg, near Munich, where Infineon makes chips that convert and control electricity. For its fiscal year to the end of September 2027, the company forecasts revenue of about €20 billion, at an assumed $1.15 per euro, and expects revenue from power supplies for data centres to reach “close to €4 billion”¹. Desk arithmetic: that is about a fifth of the whole.

The quarter behind it. In July to September, revenue was €4.706 billion, up 19% on the year and 13% on the previous quarter; the segment result, Infineon’s preferred profit measure, was €1.119 billion, a margin of 23.8% against 18.2% a year earlier¹. For the full year 2026, revenue was €16.353 billion, up 12%¹. Growth came from automotive, green industrial power and power and sensor systems; connected secure systems declined¹. The shares rose about 6% in Frankfurt by late morning on Tuesday, according to dpa-AFX².

The dull machinery. Data centres are, among other things, electricity customers, and their power has to be converted and controlled before it reaches a chip. Infineon names data centre power supplies, the “expansion and modernization of energy infrastructure”, electromobility and software-defined vehicles as the drivers, said chief executive Jochen Hanebeck¹. Those are customers with grid connections, factories and fleet orders, not only research budgets.

What the money costs. Infineon plans to invest €3.0 to 3.5 billion in fiscal 2027 and expects free cash flow of about €1.8 billion, after €993 million in 2026¹. Desk arithmetic: the planned investment is larger than this year’s entire free cash flow, by a factor of about three to three and a half. The board wants to lift the dividend by three cents to €0.38¹.

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Europe’s respiratory season has a shape this week, and it is not the one you would guess. In its week-44 overview, published on 9 November, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) says consultation rates for respiratory illness are “slowly increasing” but still at low or baseline levels in every reporting EU/EEA country¹. The main contributor is SARS-CoV-2, with median test positivity of 11% in both primary and secondary care¹. A week earlier the figures were 5.2% in primary care and 4.8% in hospitals². Desk arithmetic: roughly a doubling in one reporting week, from a low base.

Flu is the other half. ECDC puts influenza test positivity at around 5% and says detections have been consistently above inter-epidemic levels since week 37, “but the epidemic has not yet started”¹. The viruses are type A, mostly A(H1N1)pdm09; most hospital detections are in adults over 65¹. RSV remains “very low”¹.

Germany looks similar, a week behind in the published data. The Robert Koch-Institut’s report for 26 October to 1 November found respiratory viruses in 58 of 90 sentinel samples, mostly rhino- and enteroviruses (43%); influenza A was in 6% and SARS-CoV-2 in 4%, and no RSV was found³. Among hospital patients with severe respiratory infections, 4% had a Covid-19 diagnosis and 3% influenza³. Wastewater shows SARS-CoV-2 now circulating nationwide, still clearly below last year’s level but rising for several weeks; the flu load is edging up too³.

None of this is an alarm. It is the dull machinery doing what it is paid for: sentinel doctors swabbing, labs typing, wastewater plants sampling, two agencies writing “low but rising” in time for anyone who wants to act on it. The time to arrange a jab, if your doctor recommends one, is while the line reads “not yet started”.

The second day of talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States in Abu Dhabi is due to begin at 09:00 CET, RaiNews reports, citing Tass². Overnight, the first day was reread by each side in its own light. The useful parts are the small, checkable ones.

The map. President Zelenskyy said Russia had claimed at the table that it occupied half of Donbas. “This is the problem. Putin lives in a different reality,” he wrote, adding that “the American side confirmed the Ukrainian assessment of what is happening on the battlefield”¹. That is one side’s account of what another side said. It is still worth noting: talks only work when people at least agree on the facts.

The list. Ukrainska Pravda, citing a source close to Kyiv’s delegation, reports that the parties agreed on a “large-scale” prisoner exchange “in the near future”². No date or number has been published, and neither Moscow nor Washington has confirmed it in the reports we checked. Zelenskyy called the session “constructive and fairly substantive” and said the release of prisoners is a priority².

The truce on offer. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Ukraine had handed partners its own proposal for a ceasefire covering the energy sector and the Black Sea and was waiting for a Russian reply². He also told Reuters he had asked Marco Rubio to speed up interceptor deliveries¹. On Tuesday, Sergei Lavrov said Russia would not accept “another truce or another ceasefire” without knowing what follows².

The architecture. Zelenskyy said the agenda included a new security architecture for Europe, but that “nobody saw the documents” the Americans discussed with the Russians¹. He asked Europe to name its own negotiator “this month, not later”².

For you: ignore the adjectives and look at the inventory. Partial truces, prisoner swaps and a named European envoy are things a ministry can sign, log and check. If day two moves any of them from a source’s notes into an official statement, that is progress, however unexciting it sounds.