Investment Officer Netherlands

The war between the United States, Israel and Iran is casting a shadow over a crucial week for central banks. The US Federal Reserve meets on Wednesday, followed a day later by the European Central Bank.

The Asian bond market continues to deepen, supported by local and international interest.

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.

Investors in evergreen funds apparently did not fully grasp what they were getting into when they entrusted their capital to these “semi-liquid” vehicles investing in private markets. After Blue Owl, two large private credit funds managed by Blackstone and Blackrock were hit last week with a surge in redemption requests.

Oil prices can swing by tens of dollars within hours, as happened this week amid the war surrounding Iran. Yet the headline oil price is only one signal from the commodity markets. A further ten indicators reveal where pressure in the energy system is truly building.

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.

Finance is full of repetitive work, often done manually. Reconciliation, reporting, and various calculations to evaluate assets are part of daily life. But in recent years, the AI storm has arrived.

With euro stablecoins and a digital euro, Europe wants to counter the looming dollarization of the European economy. In consumer payments, the sovereignty of the euro is already under pressure, the European Central Bank warns.

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.

Investors are increasingly focused on what the war with Iran could mean for the global economy. The surge in oil prices is reviving fears of stagflation, as higher energy costs threaten to push inflation higher while economic growth comes under pressure.