The insatiable hunger for electricity The world stands on the brink of an unprecedented surge in electricity demand. Buildings are becoming increasingly energy-intensive due to smart technology, heating, and cooling systems that are rapidly electrifying. On top of that, the explosive growth of data centers and artificial intelligence is driving demand further. According to the ...

While (increasingly smaller) parts of the global population still question whether climate change is real, or at least how much it matters for their daily lives, one sector is already feeling its effects directly. The insurance industry exists to measure and price risk, and the steady rise in natural disasters is starting to disrupt that business model in a fundamental way. We ...

This week’s MacroFriday takes another look across the Atlantic, focusing on the second pillar of the Fed’s dual mandate: inflation. While labour market conditions continue to cool, yesterday’s Initial Jobless Claims rose to their highest level since October 2021, consumer prices in the US are heating up again. Yesterday’s release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) brought few su ...

Sure enough, ‘Generative AI’ in the form of LLMs are great at organizing and presenting the worlds information. Whether neural nets, the technology underlying today’s generative AI, will also provide new, foundational knowledge outside the current lexicon remains to be seen. Subdomains such as mathematics, programming, physics and drug discovery seem suitable for achieving brea ...

A few weeks ago, a first-of-its-kind agreement was reached in the offshore wind sector: Ørsted, the Danish renewables giant, struck a deal with JERA Nex-BP and EnBW to compensate for expected production losses due to wake effects from the future Morgan and Mona offshore wind farms in the Irish Sea. These projects, totaling 3 GW of capacity, are expected to impact wind flow to e ...

I write this MacroFriday just after the highly anticipated August Non-Farm Payrolls. July’s release signaled weak job creation at 73.000, but it was the hefty –258.000 in downward revisions to prior months that really stood out. The three-month average slipped to just 35,000 jobs per month, which was the lowest since 2010 (excluding the volatile 2020 period). For August, econom ...

Not for its Riviera this time, but for its yields. As we noted in the last #MacroFriday before the break, Europe’s yield curves have continued to steepen this year, and France stands out as rising political uncertainty pushes up borrowing costs. Its 10-year yield is back near 3.5%, and the spread between French and German 10y government bond yields (‘Le Spread’) around 0.8%. ...

Now that the summer is coming to a close and Belgian rainy days are making a comeback, it’s worth looking back at how cities around the world endured yet another season of extreme heat. In June 2025, parts of the Balkans already saw temperatures soar to 40°C. Across the Atlantic, a persistent heat dome kept much of North America sweltering, with cities like Boston and New York ...

Reading earnings reports is like solving a puzzle: the edges provide some guidance, but the picture only becomes clear once the key pieces fall into place. Nvidia is such a key piece. With its quarterly results and outlook, the company provides not only insight into its own performance but also into the broader dynamics of the technology sector. Nvidia sets the pace: where it g ...

There has been considerable discussion around the rise in long-term US government interest rates. While European government bond yields have clearly moved higher since the beginning of the year, it is the long end of the US yield curve that is unchanged since the beginning of the year. Unchanged? Hardly. Over the past six months, we’ve seen notable volatility. Following ‘Libera ...