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The Beach IFA Monday Espresso is your essential five-minute investment briefing, equipping you with everything you need to know for the week ahead. Marlborough's Multi-Asset Solutions Investment Team summarise market events over the past seven days and preview the key events in the week ahead, while also sharing their expert insights.
Monday Espresso Podcast - 23rd Marh 2026
[00:00:00] Rory Dowie: Good morning. Today is Monday the 23rd of March, which means two things. One, the clocks are changing this weekend, and secondly, it's my birthday tomorrow. I'm Rory Dowe, Portfolio Manager here at Marlborough. Joining me today is Nick Warmisham. Nick is an Investment Analyst on the team. Nick, firstly, good morning, and secondly, quite a big week last week.
[00:00:17] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah, good morning Rory. And yes, a huge week central banks were in focus on both sides of the Atlantic. Oil markets were rattled by the conflict, and Iran and Nvidia closed out its GTC conference in California with some eye-catching numbers.
[00:00:29] Rory Dowie: Before we get into the detail, Nick, let's give our listeners a quick look at how the markets have been performing.
[00:00:34] Rory Dowie: Can you run us through some of the numbers from last week?
[00:00:36] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah. Well, it was definitely a week of two halves. We had a surprisingly strong start to the week, followed by a sour end with all major markets ending up, down, leading the downturn were Europe and the UK off nearly 2% for the week. The US did fare slightly better down just over 0.5%.
[00:00:54] Rory Dowie: Okay. That's helpful Nick. And I guess just thinking about it since the start of the US military action in Iran, what are those returns looking like since that war started?
[00:01:02] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah, well since the start of the invasion at the end of February, the US is actually holding up the best out of all the major markets.
[00:01:09] Nicholas Warmisham: It's down only 4%, whilst the others are down between 8 and 10.
[00:01:13] Rory Dowie: Okay, so US fairing the best currently, which I guess makes sense as the US generally is the most energy dependent region outta those major regions. Secondly, you know, the dollar often acts as a safe haven, which typically supports dollar asset prices.
[00:01:27] Rory Dowie: Moving on, Nick, we had a huge amount of activity on the Central Bank side of things last week. What can you tell our listeners there? Did the conflict have an impact on rate decisions?
[00:01:35] Nicholas Warmisham: So the Fed went first on Wednesday and ended up holding rates at 3.5 to 3.75% as expected. That's two holds in a row after three cuts last year.
[00:01:45] Nicholas Warmisham: With the message coming from Powell, being that they're taking a wait and see approach. I would say the market is still expecting one more cut this year, although seven out of 19 committee members now think that rates should stay on hold for all of 2026, which is one more hawkish voice than in December.
[00:02:02] Rory Dowie: Okay. And I guess the big debate now is, you know, what's the oil price gonna do with inflation? Was there any kind of update on the thinking of central banks around inflation?
[00:02:11] Nicholas Warmisham: Yes, they now see PCE or personal consumption expenditures inflation at 2.7% this year, which is up from the previous forecast.
[00:02:21] Nicholas Warmisham: I would say growth held up though at 2.4%, but the bigger story is the uncertainty. The Fed added new language explicitly flagging the Middle East conflict as a risk to the outlook marking the first time Iran has appeared in an FOMC statement.
[00:02:35] Rory Dowie: Worth noting there's also some political noise around the Fed right now.
[00:02:38] Rory Dowie: Powells term ends in May, and the succession question is still very much alive. I guess setting the US aside close to home, Nick, what did Europe do?
[00:02:48] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah, well, ECB and the Bank of England both held on Thursday, we're both shifting to a more cautious tone. Lagarde walked back on her good place language on the Eurozone and the Bank of England was even more direct.
[00:03:02] Nicholas Warmisham: It is worth noting that they had been expecting to cut this meeting, but the energy shock changed that. They warned CPI will be higher near term as a direct result of the Iran conflict. The bank of Canada also held, and the governor actually raised the possibility of rate hikes if inflation broadens out.
[00:03:19] Rory Dowie: Okay, so I guess the bottom line for our listeners is that the rate cutting cycle is effectively on pause at the moment, and that's kind of pretty consistent across the globe. Central banks want to ease, but they can't until that energy picture settles down. And that brings us neatly onto Iran, Nick, as if we did that on purpose.
[00:03:34] Rory Dowie: I guess first of all, from a market perspective, the issue is oil, its price level, and also the duration of that price level stays high. Can you give the listeners an update and perhaps put it in context with them how the oil price has been behaving since start of the war?
[00:03:48] Nicholas Warmisham: Of course, well before the war, Brent Crude was around $70 a barrel.
[00:03:52] Nicholas Warmisham: It spiked to nearly $120 and then pulled back to around a hundred dollars and then surged again this week, close to 110. This was after the strikes on the South Pars gas field. The world's largest natural gas reserve. Iran threatened to retaliate against energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.
[00:04:12] Nicholas Warmisham: So that's what driven prices higher again midweek. This uptick in oil prices was one of the main reasons why we saw equity market sell off over the latter half of the week.
[00:04:21] Rory Dowie: So I guess you've spoken there around, you know, people are getting concerned about, you know, supply disruption is supply of oil, getting any help from anywhere.
[00:04:30] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah, well, we saw a few attempts to stabilize the price over the past week or so. The IEA responded with the largest emergency oil reserve release in its history, 400 million barrels and the US also tapped into its strategic petroleum reserve. However, prices kept rising. This tells us the market is. Still expecting larger disruptions than these reserves can fix.
[00:04:52] Rory Dowie: Yeah. The IEA there being the International Energy Agency. That will make sense. Nick, I guess for our listeners at home, what does that mean kind of in their day-to-day lives?
[00:05:01] Nicholas Warmisham: Yeah, well, a few things. First, being higher petrol prices, which are already up significantly.
[00:05:07] Nicholas Warmisham: And utility bills are also heading higher. Something the Bank of England flagged directly this week. The broader economic read is that every 10% rise in oil adds roughly 0.4% to inflation, and we've already seen a 40 to 50% rise. There was a small positive sign. The first non Iranian cargo passed through the straight last weekend with its tracker on suggesting some cautious, normalization, but it was only one tanker.
[00:05:33] Nicholas Warmisham: So we're still certainly not out of the woods yet.
[00:05:36] Rory Dowie: Alright, let's move on to something perhaps a little bit more positive to end the week on Nick, NVIDIA's Global Tech Conference wraps up this week. What was Jensen Huang saying there?
[00:05:44] Nicholas Warmisham: Jensen Huang took the stage in San Jose on Monday to a packed house of over 30,000 people and he opened with a headline number.
[00:05:52] Nicholas Warmisham: Nvidia now has combined purchase orders for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip platforms of $1 trillion through 2027. A year ago, they were projecting just half of that.
[00:06:03] Rory Dowie: Okay, and what's driving that demand, Nick?
[00:06:05] Nicholas Warmisham: The shift from training AI models to actually running them in production, what Juan calls the inflection point of inference.
[00:06:13] Nicholas Warmisham: Every time someone uses an AI application that requires computing power, Agentic AI, where AI spawns other AI tasks automatically is multiplying that demand exponentially.
[00:06:26] Rory Dowie: Okay. That's helpful Nick. Thank you. And I guess for our listeners, robotics and autonomous vehicles are also a big theme of that conference.
[00:06:32] Rory Dowie: If you've got some time, it is worth watching some of those sessions on YouTube on demand. Finishing off, Nick, what do our listeners have to look out for this week?
[00:06:40] Nicholas Warmisham: A bit of a quieter week in the economic calendar relative to the central bank meetings bonanza we saw last week. I would say the key thing is the PMI data, which we're getting in the US and Europe, but clearly the main thing that we will be watching for is any major developments in the Middle East conflict.
[00:06:59] Rory Dowie: Brilliant. Thank you, Nick. To our listeners, thanks for joining. Wishing you all a great week ahead.