Huileng Tan

Huileng Tan is a senior reporter at Insider who covers the intersection of global markets, the economy, commodities, and investing, with a consistent focus on how politics and policy drive financial moves. Since joining Insider in 2021, she concentrates on explaining market swings, currency shifts, and energy prices through the lens of geopolitics and big‑power competition. Her coverage stands out for tying day‑to‑day market action to longer‑running structural themes such as sanctions, dedollarization, and the global role of China.

Markets under pressure from geopolitics and energy

Tan’s core beat is global financial markets, and she repeatedly traces stock and bond moves back to political shocks and commodity price swings. In her markets reporting, she has detailed how investors react when the US and Israel’s war on Iran pushes oil prices higher and sends major indices into correction territory, turning a sell‑off into a wider risk‑off moment. She also writes daily briefs for Insider’s Africa edition that track oil spikes, tumbling stocks, and commentary from banking chiefs such as Jamie Dimon, framing each move within the broader decisions and trends shaping markets. Across these pieces, she uses concrete price action, analyst quotes, and investor commentary to show how war, energy supply fears, and policy uncertainty feed directly into volatility and asset allocation.

Her coverage of commodities is woven tightly into this markets work. Tan reports on oil prices jumping past key thresholds and explores how those levels affect corporate costs, consumer inflation, and central‑bank expectations. She connects higher energy prices to currency moves and reserve behavior, turning what could be a narrow commodity story into a wider view of financial stability and investor confidence. The result is a beat that treats stocks, bonds, and oil prices as parts of the same system, rather than isolated tickers.

China, currencies, and the shifting global order

A second strand in Tan’s work is the economic and financial fallout from China’s rise and Russia’s wartime geopolitics. She has examined Russia’s attempts to convince Southeast Asian countries to ditch the dollar in order to escape Western sanctions, using that push to show how desperate Moscow is to protect its economy and war financing. In another piece, she describes how China has become a crucial economic lifeline for Russia during the war, outlining how sanctions avoidance, military support, and economic assistance keep the Russian economy going — but at the price of an “embarrassing reversal” in Moscow’s dependence on Beijing.

Tan extends that geopolitical lens to the global currency system. She has reported on a “stealth erosion” in US dollar reserves, explaining that while the dollar’s share of global holdings is slowly slipping, no clear replacement has emerged. In that work, she shows how dedollarization headlines translate into incremental reserve shifts rather than an abrupt regime change, helping readers distinguish between political rhetoric and actual data. Her reporting on China’s hottest consumer brands taking aim at companies such as Starbucks and Nike similarly places corporate competition inside a larger narrative about China’s growing economic influence and its challenge to established Western firms.

Technology and policy also appear in this China‑focused beat. Tan has covered directives ordering Chinese government officials not to use iPhones for work, situating the move inside a broader tech war between Washington and Beijing. That story treats a single corporate product ban as a window into industrial policy, security concerns, and the way governments use procurement rules to weaponize technology markets.

Investing, corporate leaders, and the AI economy

Tan frequently uses voices from major companies and investors to explain how technological change and corporate strategy intersect with markets. In a widely cited piece on Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, she reports his view that it “doesn’t matter what kids study in the AI era,” tying that claim to concerns about entry‑level white‑collar jobs and the kind of skills that will remain valuable as automation spreads. This work connects executive commentary to labor‑market dynamics and investing themes, showing how AI reshapes both corporate valuations and career paths.

Her markets coverage also incorporates investor and strategist perspectives, assembling what “smart people are saying” about sell‑offs linked to war in Iran, rising oil prices, and shifting expectations about policy support. In these articles she curates quotes from banks such as Barclays and prominent investors to illustrate how professional market participants interpret volatility and position around it. Tan occasionally writes more human‑scaled business stories — for example, profiling a former programmer who becomes a barista — but even these pieces emphasize economic choices, work, and the changing value of skills.

Backgrounders and earlier reporting on trade and information controls

Before joining Insider, Tan built a track record covering China’s economy, trade tensions, and information controls for major business and policy publications. She has written on how the coronavirus outbreak in China accelerated supply‑chain shifts that started during the US‑China trade war, outlining the strategic re‑routing of manufacturing and the political drivers behind corporate decisions. In earlier work, she examined Chinese warnings of a “bumpy journey” in trade with the US and promised retaliatory measures after Washington blocked a proposed acquisition, using the episode to show how deal‑making, regulation, and geopolitics intertwine.

Tan has also produced backgrounders on regional security issues, including the China–North Korea relationship, which place economic ties alongside defense and diplomatic considerations. Across this earlier reporting, she consistently treats business stories as part of a wider policy and security landscape, a perspective she carries into her current focus on markets, commodities, and investing at Insider.