Investment Officer Luxembourg

The World Bank on Tuesday warned that the global economy is facing a 1970s-style stagflation with a protracted period of feeble growth and elevated inflation.

“For many countries, recession will be hard to avoid,” World Bank President David Malpass said at the presentation of the bank’s latest Global Economic Prospects report, which noted an increased risk of stagflation ”with potentially harmful consequences for middle- and low-income economies alike”.

The Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform, known as SDI AOP, offers the opportunity to standardise SDG impact measurement and develop a broad benchmark for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“The platform can become a global standard for SDG investing,” said Manuela Sperandeo, Head of Sustainable Indexing for EMEA at BlackRock, in conversation with Investment Officer. 

As the financial industry continues to call for more clarity and guidance to handle what even supervisors see as the “astonishing” complexity of the emerging EU framework for sustainable finance, impact investments and ESG, European regulators have added a range of technical details to sustainability rules over recent weeks. 

Luxembourg has frozen some 4.3 billion euro in Russian assets, mostly held in shares, bonds and bank accounts, as part of the international sanctions against Russia, the finance ministry said.

The Luxembourg Business Register, at the request of the finance ministry, so far has identified more than 90 persons and 1,100 legal entities registered in the Trade and Companies Register (RCS) for which there are details of persons included in the sanctions lists. 

Luxembourg’s SES SA, which likes to describe itself as the world’s only multi-orbit satellite player, has announced the successful launch of senior unsecured fixed rates due 2029 for a total amount of 750 billion euro.

The seven-year notes bear a coupon of 3.50 percent and were priced at 99.725 percent of their nominal value, representing a credit spread of 175 basis points and a yield-to-maturity of 3.55 percent.

European central bank policy makers will meet in Amsterdam on Thursday at the invitation of Klaas Knot, the Dutch central bank governor who is known for his hawkish approach to interest rates and his support of a 50 basis point rate hike in July. And: when will the ECB start discussing Quantitative Tightening, like the Fed?

When it comes to equity valuations, most investors are concerned with the price/earnings ratio. And while that P/E ratio has fallen to just below the average of the past decade, the picture painted by another valuation measure is much less attractive.

An American early-stage fintech named Pontoro recently pitched in Luxembourg its development of an innovative new digital assets platform that makes infrstructure investments more liquid, and thus less difficult to finance.

Luxembourg Finance Minister Yuriko Backes is visiting London this week, at a time when advocates of maintaining strong UK-EU financial services relationships are struggling to have their voices heard. The Luxembourg government has sought to take the heat out of Brexit arguments since the 2016 leave vote, and this visit is the latest such effort.