In this episode, we continue our series on the Top 10 Geopolitical Risks for Businesses in 2026, turning to Risk #3 — Industrial Policy and Geoeconomics. We examine how governments are abandoning decades of free-market orthodoxy in favour of state-led industrial strategies designed to protect national interests, secure supply chains, and reassert economic sovereignty.

The discussion explores:

• How industrial policy has re-emerged as the economic extension of great-power competition and techno-nationalism.
• The evolution from neoliberalism to interventionism, tracing roots from Alexander Hamilton to the CHIPS Act and beyond.
• How national security framing justifies tariffs, subsidies, and state involvement across sectors once considered purely commercial.
• The semiconductor industry as a case study—why it set the template for deeper state-corporate integration.
• The tension between what is good for a corporation and what is good for a country, illustrated through U.S.–China technology policy.
• Winners and losers: how energy, hydrocarbons, and certain emerging markets like Vietnam and Mexico could benefit, while agriculture and innovation face headwinds.
• Why protectionism may be more destabilising than industrial policy itself.
• The rise of a “Hamiltonian capitalism”—a new model where prosperity and security are increasingly fused.

Key Takeaway

The liberal economic order is giving way to a Hamiltonian era of strategic capitalism. For corporations, success will depend not just on market performance but on political alignment, negotiation, and an ability to operate within government-defined priorities.