Opinion

Faithful readers of this column know that I am deeply concerned about the politicization of the European Central Bank (ECB). Lessons from monetary history and piles of academic research support that concern: we simply know that a central bank that listens to what politicians want is bad news for inflation in the medium term.

As geopolitical tensions rise, capital is quietly repositioning. Luxembourg is emerging as a European anchor for globally minded family offices, with Singapore reinforcing the shift from the Asian side.

Necessity breaks laws, but it also breaks existing patterns, paradigms, and drives innovation. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. Not abundance or curiosity, but circumstances in which delay is not an option.

Imagine this: you predict stock returns for January 2026 using company data from all of 2026. Data that only becomes available during that year (or even afterward). Sounds absurd? Yet this is exactly the methodological foundation of one of the most cited findings in climate finance: the carbon premium.

The signals that citizens and businesses are willing to leave their country if the tax burden becomes high enough are increasing rapidly. As a result, an economic theory that is already fifty years old—and long dismissed as meaningless fantasy—is suddenly taking center stage.

An unprecedented wealth transfer is underway. Over the next two decades, an estimated 124,000 billion dollar in assets will shift globally from the baby boomer generation to younger generations.

Financial services firms increasingly test new markets through sales-as-a-service models, relying on experienced industry connectors instead of building costly local teams. Luxembourg’s global ecosystem makes this approach particularly relevant.

The price of a barrel of crude oil surged past the $100 mark as the situation in the Middle East escalated further. A small price to pay, according to the president of the United States. Yet I suspect Trump is taking too narrow a view of the true cost of this new military intervention – if he is even considering those costs at all.

Write a prompt asking Claude to act like an investor who wants to know everything about a company. Upload the quarterly results of a business you follow. Click. Wait fifteen minutes. And there it is: an investment memo with a cash-flow model, scenario analysis, a risk overview and a valuation framework. Neatly structured.

Within one hundred hours, American and Israeli forces struck nearly 2.000 targets in Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei and dozens of senior officials were killed. It is the largest American military operation in the Middle East since 2003. The initial market reaction was remarkably muted, but the oil price tells a different story.