While the US and China try to seek agreement in their trade war, the prospect of a wider spat could open up as the US eyes technology issues. Jonathan Bell reviews the latest developments.

TXF last week held its annual Cape Town Conference on southern African Commodities, Export & Project Financing. Here, Jonathan Bell highlights some of the key takeaways from the event and some further recent important major project developments.

There has been innovation within commodity and trade finance structures as market participants and practitioners get more ambitious with the tools available to them. TXF caught up with Catherine Lang-Anderson, counsel at Allen & Overy, to discuss such innovations alongside other topics like sanctions, M&A activity in the commodities sector and blockchain.

With stringent regulation and increasingly complex transactions pitched against borrowers’ expectations for rapid decision making, the pressures on due diligence are at an all-time high. Matt Reed, Associate Director at RedRidge Diligence Services, discusses the latest trends in how capital providers in the trade and project finance space are managing these pressures.

Making sense of the bigger picture of the state of the global commodity markets is no easy task. But here, Jonathan Bell meets up with a long-time friend and real commodity guru in Geneva - Jean-Francois Lambert, former head of HSBC commodity finance, and now founder and managing partner of Lambert Commodities.