🔥 We have had a terrifying week. Last week began with the hangover from a powerful attack by Iran against Israel, and all week long there were fears about Israel’s response. It is noteworthy that although the mainstream press has treated this with a biased view, condemning Iran’s attack, but omitting the allegations before the UN that Iran made, asserting that, just as Israel had claimed its right to defend itself, Iran was also claiming its right to defend itself against the Israeli attacks made days earlier against its embassy in Syria.

🌍 These nuances seem to be important in the geopolitical scenario. We have, on the one hand, a meeting of the European Union G7 on the occasion of the attack suffered by Israel. But at the same time, we have countries such as Turkey, a NATO member, whose Prime Minister, Erdogan, assured days ago that Israel was trying to create a greater regional conflict with provocations such as the attack on the Iranian embassy. Therefore, the polarization of this conflict would indeed have the necessary ingredients for a world war, as many point out.

💰 More money for war: As if that were not enough, in a rare show of bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday, April 20, granted a new $95 billion military aid package to Ukraine and at the same time also included military funding to Taiwan and Israel and threatened to ban TikTok. The approved Ukrainian package also gives Biden the authority to seize and sell Russian property, giving Ukraine the money it needs to fund reconstruction.

💸 Gold: Let’s remember that one of the reasons why gold could be so extremely strong is precisely because of the message that the confiscation of Russian assets sends to the rest of the global economic powers, in particular China, which seeing how unilaterally certain Western countries are appropriating Foreign Assets, could decide to withdraw its reserves from those countries and recapitalize them in gold.

🤑 FED: from a purely economic perspective, Jerome Powell, last week, stated that if high inflation persists, the Fed can keep rates as long as necessary. This obviously disappointed a bull market, which since his promises in December 2023 to cut rates, has been discounting an event that does not seem likely to occur in the near future.

🔍 Especially interesting will be the PCE inflation data to be released on Friday, which will give us a clue as to what is the real situation that the Fed is watching. We will also have, from the Atlanta Fed, its usual forecast of the next GDP growth for the US economy.

🇪🇺 Europe: this does not mean that the European Central Bank will follow the same steps as the FED. in the case of Europe, as we have also mentioned in previous reports, it would urgently need a stimulus, given the economic recession in which it seems to be involved. in this regard, today we will have the words of Christine Lagarde, ECB president, and we will know the PMI data from Europe tomorrow.

💻 US tech sector: last Friday, NVIDIA took a beating in the market with a loss of around 10%, dragging the Nasdaq 100 below the SP500. in this respect, this week is crucial, as the other tech giants will report results on Wednesday and Thursday (Meta, Google and Microsoft).

🛢️ Commodities: despite the tensions between Iran and Israel, crude oil does not seem to have risen dramatically and we are at similar levels to those we saw in our last reports, even slightly lower, with Brent currently trading above $86 a barrel, which would indicate that the market is discounting low risks of a more open conflict.

😨 Scary: Especially scary was the rumour that spread after Israel’s attack on Iran on April 19. Journalist Pepe Escobar of The Cradle newspaper claimed that, according to intelligence sources, Israel had tried to detonate a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere over Iran, with the intention of triggering an electromagnetic pulse that would leave Iran without electrical capabilities. The attack would have been attempted with an F-35 aircraft, which after leaving Jordanian airspace, would have been intercepted and shot down by a Russian aircraft, possibly from the Russian base in Syria.