Corporate credit markets have become unsettled about the potential for advanced agentic AI tools from firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI to automate functions across legal, analytical, marketing, and sales workflows, effectively targeting the software as a service (SaaS)/enterprise software space.

The latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that the U.S. has firmly established itself as a net exporter of total petroleum products, a shift that first occurred in 2020 and has continued for several years.

It’s difficult to separate the human and emotional side of war from the economic and market impacts. Without minimizing the human element, we focus on markets here. From that perspective, the energy market is the primary way through which this crisis will affect markets globally. Oil and natural gas production and transit have already been disrupted, sending prices sharply higher. If these disruptions are severe and long lasting, they have the potential to influence inflation expectations, weigh on business confidence, and elevate volatility across asset classes, all of which will likely translate into lower stock prices. Simply put, the more intense and prolonged the geopolitical shock, the larger the likely market impact.

Dividend strategies, a.k.a. equity income strategies, have outperformed to start the year, owing to the value-led cyclical rotation we are seeing in domestic equity markets.