Trump's Taiwan Call Redraws Asia's Risk Map as Markets Catch Their Breath

Oil settled after Wednesday's plunge on Hormuz relief signals, and Asian equities followed Wall Street's AI-driven rally into Friday's open. Two stories define the morning: a geopolitical protocol break and a supply chain breach. Trump's confirmation that he will speak directly with Taiwan's president breaks four-decade US protocol in a single announcement, landing one day after Xi and Putin concluded their Beijing summit formalising cooperation on AI, satellite internet, and open-source software. Reading the sequence, Beijing is unlikely to treat this as a one-off. Magnus Honeyfield's column leads today: $68.5 billion in cat bonds priced almost entirely on US perils while Munich Re forecasts rising western Pacific typhoon frequency. Capital is priced on the wrong ocean, and the delta is actionable for anyone running APAC reinsurance or cat-exposed portfolios. On the breach front, GitHub confirmed 3,800 repositories compromised via a malicious VSCode extension, a development tool embedded in virtually every enterprise dev environment, and a signal that the extension marketplace has become a preferred attack vector. The SCMP report that a Pentagon delegation may visit Beijing within weeks is the one channel that could contain the Taiwan signal before markets price in a structural cross-strait shift.