Last month’s summit in Berlin on “European Digital Sovereignty” gathered +900 policymakers, industry leaders, investors and researchers from the 27 EU Member States. Initiated by France and Germany, measures were presented aimed at fostering innovative solutions and infrastructures while reducing technological dependencies and protecting strategic assets. The summit served as a ...

The inflation crisis in the Euro Area is over, but the real story is how stubborn services price inflation has become. On Tuesday, Eurostat published its flash estimate for euro area inflation in November, which came in at 2.2% year-on-year, up slightly from 2.1% in October. The HICP inflation estimate for Belgium stood at 2.6%. While inflation remains above the ECB’s target, i ...

Data centers have become convenient villains in the public debate. They are blamed for overloading the grid, worsening congestion, consuming “too much” electricity, and wasting heat that evaporates uselessly into the air. And yes, these concerns come from real pressures: Europe’s electricity grids are strained, clean generation is lagging behind demand, and many data centers st ...

Two weeks ago, our brief outlined what COP30 needed to deliver: clearer national climate plans, stronger protection for tropical forests, and credible finance for emerging economies. Now that the summit has concluded, the results show meaningful steps forward but stop short of the structural change that science indicates is necessary. Belém did not shift global climate politics ...

Japan is slowly transitioning into a new financial era. Headline inflation has remained above the Bank of Japan’s 2% target since April 2022, marking the longest period of above-target inflation in more than 35 years. While the initial surge was driven largely by higher fresh food and energy prices, underlying inflation has also firmed, albeit more gradually. During this period ...

Image generated by Gemini   After a bruising two years marked by falling discretionary spending, bloated inventories, and rising costs, the global sporting-goods sector is searching for its next turnaround story. Investors may not need to look far: the world’s largest sporting events are lining up like a perfectly staged relay. Between the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2026 Winter O ...

Europe’s wind industry has been one of its greatest industrial achievements. For decades, European engineers and companies have defined global standards in turbine technology, offshore construction and system integration. The sector contributed in 2024 more than €54 billion to Europe’s GDP and exports €13.8 billion worth of high-value equipment and services each year[1]. These ...

Of course, our MacroFriday is focused on macro-economic developments, but some companies have grown so large and/or important that their impact on the economy and financial markets can no longer be overlooked. One such company is Nvidia, which has rapidly become the largest company in the world. On Wednesday, investors followed the publication of Nvidia’s third-quarter results ...

How to Value (Tech) Stocks Traditional ways to value companies (such as multiples, sum-of-the-parts, discounted cash flows…) already existed long before Econopolis was founded. However, for emerging subindustries (like software SaaS), these tools often fail spectacularly. A young tech company often reinvests every dollar of revenue back into growth, resulting in negative earni ...

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about ‘Resource Nationalism’ in which I talked about a record deployment of clean energy technologies which were propelling unprecedented demand growth in the so-called critical minerals markets. As a result of this, these energy transition minerals, which used to be a rather small segment of the market, had moved to centre stage in the ...