Han Dieperink

It was a master plan. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation was supposed to send massive private capital flows into green investments, finance the Green Deal, and allow Europe to set an example for the rest of the world. Not a nonbinding directive, but an ambitious framework meant to discipline the financial sector and crush greenwashing.

Nervousness around AI stocks reached a boiling point last week. Michael Burry, the investor who became famous for predicting the 2008 mortgage crisis, placed short positions on Nvidia and Palantir.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether artificial intelligence is in a bubble. The more important question is whether that’s necessarily a bad thing.

The recent developments in the Middle East make one thing absolutely clear: president Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the logical conclusion if we look at what the prize is supposed to reward: concrete peace achievements that save lives.

Last week, during the Fund Event, I sat in a packed room around a metaphorical campfire. This time, questions didn’t come through the chat, but as paper airplanes floating through the air. Some landed in the fire and were answered immediately. Others fell into the ashes. Time to pick those up.

October has a bad reputation in the markets. The biggest crashes in history – 1929, 1987, and 2008 – all took place in October. This pattern does not appear to be a coincidence but rather the result of structural factors that make this month particularly volatile.

The Federal Reserve last week cut interest rates from 4.25–4.50 percent to 4.00–4.25 percent and will lower rates further at the remaining meetings of the FOMC, the Fed’s policy body. This comes even as financial conditions have already improved and there is still an extraordinary amount of liquidity on the sidelines.

In 1996 I came across Cisco’s annual report, which included a CD-ROM presentation by CEO John Chambers titled The internetworking takes off. At that point, there was absolutely no sign of a dot-com hype, though Alan Greenspan thought otherwise in his irrational exuberance speech of December 1996.

Jerome Powell is facing what may well be the most important speech of his career. This week, at the annual Jackson Hole symposium, the Federal Reserve chair must not only defend his policy, but also the very principle of central bank independence.

Vanguard now owns more shares in MicroStrategy than its founder despite publicly dismissing crypto as speculative. The irony is hard to miss, but the real lesson is that so-called passive investing is becoming anything but passive.