Opinion

De ECB heeft stablecoins een plekje gegeven in haar Financial Stability Review. Nu mag je in een stuk met daarin de term stabiliteitsbeoordeling verwachten dat het vooral over risico’s gaat, maar dan nog blijft de insteek van de ECB opvallend. Het ongegeneerd willen voortrekken van de traditionele bankensector is meer dan veelzeggend.

For decades, we have embraced the rise of passive investing (hammock investing) as the ultimate democratization of the financial markets. The gospel of low costs, broad diversification, and market returns seemed infallible. But while passive assets under management have climbed to astronomical levels, a wave of critical academic research reveals a troubling paradox: the instrument designed to help investors may be structurally distorting the market and ultimately diminishing their wealth.

Fund passports were built on the same vision that shaped the Schengen Zone: shared trust and borderless movement. Luxembourg remains at the center of that idea.

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.

Financial markets are under pressure. Not only stocks but also other asset classes are mostly moving lower. Are we dealing with unique factors, or is there a single overarching culprit?

It was in May 2018 that the European Commission launched its highly ambitious European Sustainable Finance package. Seven years later, the political winds in Europe have shifted significantly, and sustainability ambitions are being scaled back step by step.

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.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twelve months, you can’t have missed witnessing one of the strongest gold rallies in recent decades. The number of parroted stories about gold has exploded, often relying on the same comparison. Yet it’s exactly that comparison which shows that not everyone sees the golden bull in the right perspective.

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.

Now that Trump has been taking things a bit easier over the past few weeks, stock valuations have become the topic dominating the markets. Market commentators are tripping over each other to declare how wildly overvalued the big tech names supposedly are. It’s a lot of parroting, really, while the actual numbers tell a more nuanced story.