After Liberation Day: gold, rates and currency shifts

Max Castelli, head of strategy for sovereign institutions at UBS Asset Management, joins Yara Aziz, economist at OMFIF, to unpack the global reserve response after 2 April – a date proclaimed by President Donald Trump as Liberation Day. They dive into US policy shifts, the dollar’s evolving role, rising demand for gold and whether Europe is finally ready to take the lead. 

Zain Saidin, chief executive officer of Tassat, joins editor of OMFIF's Digital Monetary Institute, Lewis McLellan, to discuss the value of private blockchain networks for regulated finance.   The discussion covers how the transparency typical of public blockchains may present trade-offs where counterparties want to know each other but cannot know each other's trading behaviour. They also discuss Lynq – a real-time yield-bearing settlement network for digital assets, sitting on a private institutional network.

Ahead of the Blue Economy and Finance Forum taking place on 7-8 June 2025, Louise Heaps, Global Lead Sustainable Blue Economy, and Maud Abdelli, Greening Financial Regulation Initiative Lead at the Worldwide Fund for Nature, join OMFIF's Isabella Frymoyer to explore how financial institutions can advance ocean sustainability. The conversation highlights the key priorities, challenges and tools needed to scale investment in the blue economy, ultimately outlining the importance of encouraging blue sustainable growth.

Jonathan Griffiths, senior investment specialist at Capital Group, joins Arunima Sharan, senior economist at OMFIF’s Economic and Monetary Policy Institute, to unpack Capital Group’s 2025 Capital Market Assumptions and explore perspectives for institutional investors navigating an increasingly complex global investment landscape. They discuss themes ranging from opportunities in emerging market, to fixed income strategies and currency outlooks over the next two decades.

Instant payments systems are proliferating rapidly, and many central banks are working hard on interlinking them to enable quick, efficient cross-border payments. However, while IPS can provide extremely rapid, low-cost payments, they are not immune to fraud and erroneous payments. Given the speed of settlement, these problems can be even more difficult to resolve than they are for other payments systems.   Petia Niederländer, head of payments, risk monitoring and financial literacy at Oesterreichische Nationalbank, and Cian OMurhu, managing director and head of strategic transformation office at Swift, join Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss the technical infrastructure required to address these issues, how they are being implemented and what work still needs to be done.

Real-world asset tokenisation is accelerating, particularly within private distributed ledger technology platforms like R3's Corda. But Richard Brown, R3’s chief technology officer, believes that the future of financial market infrastructure lies in the convergence of private networks like Corda and public networks like Ethereum and Solana. He joins Lewis McLellan, editor of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss the opportunity that DLT presents for an overhaul of financial market infrastructure where the openness, liquidity and composability of public networks is combined with the regulatory confidence offered by private networks.

Paul Blustein, author of King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency, joins OMFIF to discuss his latest book and thoughts on why the dollar has been, continues to be and will remain the world's dominant currency.  He discusses why the euro and renminbi are not viable alternatives, whether there is a role for cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, if excess US use of financial sanctions could weaken the dollar's global role and what other landmines might lie ahead, including American dysfunction. 

OMFIF’s 2024 survey of central banks found that, while three-quarters of respondents are continuing their plans to issue central bank digital currencies, one-third have delayed their timelines. However, this was before the change in US government and the decision not to pursue CBDCs, instead prioritising digital assets. A follow-up OMFIF survey revealed that this development has encouraged some central banks outside the US to move in the opposite direction and accelerate their CBDC plans. Wolfram Seidemann, chief executive officer of Giesecke+Devrient Currency Technology, joins John Orchard, chairman of OMFIF’s Digital Monetary Institute, to discuss why CBDCs should be issued sooner rather than later, how public sector payment rails can boost private sector innovation and what the future financial system might look like.

Amelia Santos-Paulino, chief of investment research at the United Nations Trade and Development's investment and enterprise division, joins OMFIF to discuss some of the key priorities in sustainability for UNTAD in 2025. She considers the space for trade and investment flows in international climate discussions, particularly in the face of recent elections. She also discusses the critical growth sectors associated with sustainable trade and the opportunities and challenges faced by emerging markets in this area.

Max Castelli, head of strategy for sovereign institutions, and Philipp Salman, director of strategy for sovereign institutions at UBS Asset Management, join Yara Aziz, economist at OMFIF, to discuss how sovereign investors are adapting their strategies for 2025. They explore US President Trump’s policies, the outlook for the dollar and the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of the Magnificent Seven stocks.