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Analysts expect Brent crude to trade at about $90 in fourth quarter, up from earlier $80 prediction

Goldman Sachs has raised its oil price forecast as disruptions to energy production in the Gulf drag on amid the ongoing Middle East conflict. 

The investment bank’s commodity analysts now project that Brent crude, the international benchmark, will trade at about $90 a barrel in the last three months of this year, up from an earlier projection of $80. 

In a note published late on Sunday in the US, the analysts forecast that oil exports from the Middle East will only normalise by the end of June, rather than by mid-May, and that the crisis had cut oil inventories by up to 12mn barrels a day in April.

Goldman now expected US oil to trade at about $83 a barrel in the fourth quarter, up from its previous $75 forecast. Brent was up more than 1 per cent on Monday, exceeding $106 a barrel.

Prices have surged more than 20 per cent since April 17 as peace talks between the US and Iran stalled and Washington enforced its own naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. In early March, Brent traded at almost $120 a barrel.

“Prices remain below the late March peak, likely because market expectations of Hormuz reopening have reduced the risk premium and led to destocking,” the analysts wrote. 

Longer-dated Brent futures show the market is still expecting oil prices to fall, with December futures trading about $84.80 a barrel. 

Goldman noted there would be long-term “scarring” of Gulf production capacity of about 500,000 barrels a day, primarily due to losses in Iraq. 

Global stock markets have rallied despite the recent oil price spike, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite closing at record highs on Friday due to strong corporate earnings.

Goldman’s analysts also warned that the economic fallout from higher energy prices would be greater than the headline price of oil suggested, due to the risks of product shortages and “the unprecedented scale of the shock”.

The bank also highlighted the risk of US oil export restrictions, which could further widen the difference in prices between Brent and US oil.

The FT reported last week that Asian refineries are cutting production, squeezing the supply of jet fuel and other refined products as the loss of Middle Eastern crude drives up the cost of securing alternative supplies.

Banks charged sharply different fees for access to Anthropic investment

Disparate pricing raises prospect of investors earning unequal returns in the same deal on the basis of who their banker is

Sabastian Sawe is first person to win a marathon in under 2 hours

Kenyan athlete in ‘supershoes’ breaks world record in perfect conditions in London race

Sabastian Sawe has become the first person to complete a competitive marathon in under two hours, setting a new world record as he claimed victory in perfect weather conditions at the annual race in London on Sunday.

The Kenyan crossed the finish line near Buckingham Palace in 1:59:30, just 11 seconds ahead of Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha, who was making his marathon debut. 

Kejelcha and third-placed Jacob Kiplimo from Uganda both joined Sawe in breaking the previous world record time of 2:00:35 for the marathon distance of 26.2 miles, set in Chicago in 2023 by Kelvin Kiptum, who died in a car crash in early 2024.

While Eliud Kipchoge completed a marathon distance in under two hours in 2019, it was done under controlled conditions and not as part of a race. 

Sawe, who won the London marathon last year in a time of 2:02:27, made a previous attempt to break the two-hour mark in Berlin last year, but failed due to unusually hot weather. Speaking to the BBC after crossing the line on Sunday, the 31-year-old said: “I am feeling good. I am so happy. It is a day to remember for me.”

In the women’s race, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa broke her own world record, set last year in the same race, after finishing the London course in 2:15:41. 

Elite marathon runners have been getting quicker in recent years, in large part due to advances in running-shoe technology.

Both Sawe and Assefa were wearing Adizero Pro Evo 3 shoes, which were only unveiled a few days before the race. Known as “supershoes”, such ultralight, high-tech trainers cost hundreds of dollars a pair, but are worn only once in competition races by elite runners. 

Since the release of the Nike Vaporfly, the first supershoe, in 2017, the number of men and women breaking new time barriers has risen sharply. 

Based on a UK size 8.5, the new shoes worn on Sunday by Sawe and Assefa weigh just 97 grams, according to Adidas, making them 30 per cent lighter than the German sportswear company’s previous design. They also cost $500 a pair.

More than 59,000 people took part in this year’s London marathon, a new record and a further sign of the post-pandemic boom in running. More than 1.1mn applied to participate, a record for a marathon and up from 840,000 a year earlier. Organisers are considering making the London marathon a two-day event next year, which would enable more than 100,000 to take part.

Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid combine forces ahead of this year’s election

Former Israeli prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are to merge their political parties ahead of this year’s election, in a bid to unseat the long-serving Benjamin Netanyahu.

The dramatic move will probably make their unified party the largest in opinion polls ahead of elections that by law have to be held by the end of October. Netanyahu is aiming to secure a seventh term as prime minister when Israelis head to the ballot box.

Bennett, who will lead the new combined opposition party, was already running nearly even with Netanyahu’s Likud party before the merger.

“The unity between us is a message to the entire people of Israel: the era of division has ended. The era of repair has arrived,” Bennett wrote on social media platform X on Sunday, ahead of a planned evening press conference with Lapid.

The right-wing Bennett served as premier in 2021-2022 during a shortlived coalition government jointly headed with Lapid. The centrist Lapid subsequently served as interim prime minister for several months after parliament was dissolved amid defections from Bennett’s previous party.

Bennett, a former settler leader, served in multiple Netanyahu governments including as defence minister before falling out with the veteran prime minister.

After the collapse of his own premiership in 2022, Bennett left politics but is now plotting a comeback as a hawkish consensus option as the Middle East remains gripped by conflicts.

He has emphasised the importance of good governance and military service for all, as multiple corruption scandals engulf the current Netanyahu government, including the premier’s ongoing trial.

Bennett has repeatedly highlighted the manpower shortage in the Israeli army, and has criticised the ruling coalition’s insistence on exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory conscription.

Lapid, who initially served as foreign minister under Bennett, is a longtime Netanyahu rival whose Yesh Atid party is the second largest faction in the current parliament.

As opposition leader, however, Lapid has drawn criticism from anti-Netanyahu voters for not doing enough to topple the current far-right coalition, especially during the government’s bid to undermine the independence of the country’s judiciary and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.  

Yesh Atid’s polling numbers have dropped precipitously over the past year, as Bennett and other anti-Netanyahu politicians gained in popularity, which analysts said explained Lapid’s readiness to hand the top job to Bennett.

In a statement on Sunday, Lapid said: “This move is intended to unite the [anti-Netanyahu] bloc, put an end to internal divisions, and focus all efforts on winning the critical upcoming elections — and leading Israel forward into the future.”

The current Netanyahu ruling coalition is badly trailing the opposition parties in recent opinion polling, although rightwing politicians like Bennett have made public avowals that they will not join forces with Arab Israeli factions to gain a parliamentary majority. Without the support of Arab political parties, the chances of the opposition winning an outright majority in the upcoming election will, according to polls, be extremely tight.  

It also remains unclear if the merger between Bennett and Lapid is a real political union or merely a “technical” alliance for the upcoming election, after which both factions will split once more.

Bennett’s party, founded last year, still has no official name and only three other candidates on its list.

Lapid founded Yesh Atid over a decade ago, and it currently has over twenty lawmakers in parliament and a nationwide party machine.

Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO, says its AI chips and models can help the data centre business gain ground

Google’s cloud boss says that a pair of new chips and rapid advances at its DeepMind AI lab will help it close the gap with Microsoft and Amazon in the fiercely competitive cloud computing market.

Thomas Kurian said that after a slow start in AI and entering the cloud business late, Google’s “full-stack” AI strategy — which includes building chips, data centres, foundation models and products in-house — was starting to pay off. 

“We’re not just a hyperscaler reselling other people’s technology. Our differentiation comes down to the fact that we own the IP, the model and the chips are ours,” Kurian said in an interview.

“For every dollar of revenue, we’re not shipping 80 per cent of it to either a model or chip provider, which allows us to invest more,” he added.

Eight years after joining Alphabet from Oracle, Kurian has grown its cloud market share from 7 to 14 per cent — cementing his position as a contender to be Google’s next leader.

But Google Cloud remains a distant third to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure in the $418bn cloud-computing market. Alphabet has also been criticised for allowing OpenAI and Anthropic’s chatbots and coding assistants to leapfrog its own AI products.

AI is now helping Google Cloud to grow faster than its rivals; it reported a 48 per cent jump in revenue in the final quarter of 2025 and is on track to generate more than $70bn this year, up from $43bn in 2024.

Google believes its TPUs and Gemini models are far ahead of Amazon’s Trainium chips and Nova AI system as well as Microsoft’s Maia processors and MAI models. This makes the search giant less dependent on partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI or on Nvidia’s expensive GPU chips.

Kurian said that Google’s 12-year investment in DeepMind allowed it to continually improve its proprietary chips and deliver consumer and enterprise AI products at a lower cost with better margins.

Google unveiled two new chips this week at a splashy event in Las Vegas, the eighth generation of its TPUs, or Tensor Processing Units. One specialises in training AI models, while the other has more memory to run AI systems faster, known as inference.

“You need a large lab in-house to really build an amazing chip [and] I don’t think the other players are building their own models, of any quality at least,” Kurian said. Only Nvidia currently rivalled Google’s combination of AI hardware and integrated chip software, he added.

Google’s emergence as a competitor to Nvidia has strained the relationship between the two companies, even as Alphabet remains one of its biggest GPU customers.

A report from Epoch AI estimates that Google controls about a quarter of global AI computing power, about 3.8mn TPUs and 1.3mn GPUs. Microsoft is second with 3.2mn Nvidia GPUs.

In a recent podcast, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang criticised Google for not submitting its AI chips to independent tests and cast doubt on their performance and efficiency claims. 

He added that “100 per cent” of demand came from Anthropic and without the start-up “why would there be any TPU growth at all?”

Kurian responded that nine of the top 10 AI labs used TPUs, including ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines. OpenAI cannot because of an exclusivity deal with Microsoft.

“They have a choice of what to buy. If we were not competitive in performance, in price, in quality, they would choose not to do so,” he said.

Anthropic on Friday struck a deal under which it will buy more of Google’s chips. Google agreed to invest up to $40bn in the start-up and provide 5GW of computing capacity over five years, worth more than $200bn.

Google is also spending heavily on its in-house AI efforts, with capital expenditures forecast to rise to $185bn this year. Kurian argues the vast sums are justified by customer demand and strong revenues.

He said OpenAI and Anthropic face a more difficult financial path, which could also imperil Big Tech groups that rely on them. Both start-ups are losing tens of billions a year as they race to secure computing power to train and run their models.

“Those AI providers depend on private capital markets, which are reaching a saturation point,” he added. “If you’re going to go public, you can’t be lossmaking forever. And if you stay private, you cannot raise venture money forever.”

This year OpenAI and Anthropic raised more than $150bn in two of the largest private fundraisings in history as they prepared for IPOs. Dozens more start-ups have raised multibillion-dollar sums.

“Over the next year to two you will see some shakeout in the market,” Kurian said. Whether “particular providers are going to make it or not largely comes down to the economics”.