Week ending Sunday, March 1, 2026
Market snapshot: Friday close / late-session levels, Feb 27This week’s moves didn’t really feel like the start of a fresh trend. It was more about markets tightening the screws on two existing themes: geopolitical risk premiums and interest-rate expectations.
Spot gold pushed up to about $5,230.56/oz, close to a one‑month high, helped by softer U.S. yields and another round of safe-haven buying. Silver did even better on the week’s risk-on/risk-off swings, with spot silver trading around $93.74/oz late in the session.
In energy, Brent finished at $72.48/bbl after a sharp jump as traders repriced supply risks linked to Iran.
On the FX side, the dollar index (DXY) slipped to 97.61, while EUR/USD hovered near 1.1818 and USD/JPY around 155.95. It was very much a “holding pattern” tape, where positioning and month‑end flows mattered about as much as the data.
Outside the major markets, the most investable story for Vietnam was political clarity turning into economic messaging. Vietnam’s Communist Party confirmed Tô Lâm for another term as general secretary (unanimously, according to Reuters). It paired that with a reform‑and‑growth message that openly targets >10% annual growth for the rest of the decade. That goal is aggressive, but more importantly, it signals to investors that growth and reform remain top policy priorities and that the administrative setup is steady.
The bigger international headline was the Trump–Tô Lâm White House meeting. Trump said he’d work to get Vietnam off the U.S. restricted lists that currently limit access to advanced American technology. On top of that, there was a bundle of commercial announcements, including Vietnamese airlines agreeing to buy 90 Boeing aircraft as part of a broader set of deals. For markets, the takeaway isn’t the photo op—it’s the direction of travel: deeper U.S.–Vietnam commercial and tech ties, while Vietnam sticks with an export‑led growth model.
For Australia, the macro story stayed firmly “rates first.” After inflation picked back up, the Reserve Bank of Australia shifted more hawkishly, lifting the policy rate to 3.85%. Officials also signaled they’re looking closely at new monthly inflation indicators as potential inputs for future decisions, even as they still rely mainly on the quarterly trimmed mean. For investors, that means Australia’s rates narrative is very much alive, and AUD‑sensitive assets will keep trading not just on the headline CPI print, but on how credible and timely those inflation signals look.
A related regional theme—important for Australia’s neighborhood and for development finance more broadly—was the Asian Development Bank’s move to scale up coordination across the Pacific. The ADB and the Pacific Islands Forum signed a partnership framework focused on climate finance, fiscal resilience, and disaster‑risk funding tools, and the ADB beefed up its Suva hub. That’s the backdrop to the recurring borrowing needs in Pacific island economies: it’s not about prestige projects, it’s about climate adaptation, rebuilding resilience, and stabilizing budgets after shocks—factors that increasingly drive sovereign risk and long‑term investability.
In Northern Europe, the week also underscored that seasonality is an economic input in its own right. Nordic winter holidays tend to redirect spending into domestic travel and winter sports, giving services demand a short‑term boost even when the top‑down macro picture looks flat.
Putting it all together: gold and oil moved because risk premia moved, FX mostly chopped sideways as month‑end flows met mixed data, and the clearest non‑price signals came from Vietnam’s leadership continuity plus U.S. tech access story, and Australia’s evolving inflation/rates framework.
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