Five years on from the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, we may have hoped to be enjoying a more stable geopolitical and macroeconomic environment by this point.

But with the threat of deep and far-reaching tariffs very much on the agenda in the United States, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and ongoing volatility in the Middle East, that is not the case. It is fair to say that the one constant we can expect in the near term is uncertainty. On top of that, while inflation, and consequently interest rates, have begun to fall, this process is taking much longer than some initially anticipated.

In fact, the macroeconomic picture generally can at best be described as mixed. GDP growth in the European Union was a meagre 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024, while both Germany and France saw their GDP fall quarter-over-quarter. Moreover, the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.3 percent from 6.2 percent in December in the European Union, and from 4.3 percent to 4.4 percent in