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Amazon.com may be the best bet among the Magnificent Seven. These other three stocks look attractive, too.

They’ve gone from the Mag Seven to the Lag Seven.

We’re talking about Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon.com, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Tesla, which contributed more than half of the S&P 500’s gain of 23% in 2024 as they rose an average of 60%. With the stocks down an average of 15% so far this year, they now account for about 95% of the index’s decline of 6% in 2025.

But don’t write off the market’s former leaders just yet. While their declines conjure up bad memories of the tech bubble’s former giants— Cisco Systems, WorldCom, and AOL among them—the Magnificent Seven aren’t destined to fail or fade into insignificance. They remain too dominant, accounting for a third of the current market value of the S&P 500, and too reasonably priced, with six of the seven trading for 18 to 30 times projected 2025 earnings. (Tesla, at 85 times, is the notable exception.)

The Mag Seven now “trade at their lowest valuation premium relative to the rest of the S&P 500 since 2017,” according to Goldman Sachs strategist David Kostin, “despite consensus earnings expectations that the group will collectively continue to grow [earnings per share] at a faster rate than the S&P 493.”

That spectacular earnings growth, not bubbly sentiment, is what has driven the group’s outperformance over the past seven years, Kostin adds. Nvidia’s earnings are up tenfold since 2018, while Amazon’s have increased fivefold and Alphabet’s have risen fourfold. Rather than any major fundamental issues, the declines are a result in part of selling by hot-money hedge funds and other institutional investors who had piled into the stocks in the past two years, he writes.

There are risks. All seven are exposed to a slowing economy and the impact of a trade war, which could ding profits in 2025. Size also becomes an impediment to growth, though the companies serve large addressable markets. Investors also worry that most are spending more than ever on artificial intelligence—and therefore producing less free cash flow.

Investors can play the entire group with the Roundhill Magnificent Seven exchange-traded fund (ticker: MAGS), which equal-weights the stocks and trades for around $47. But there may be something to be said for being choosy. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Nvidia are the most attractive, even if they might not appeal to classic value investors. Apple and Microsoft are less tempting, while Tesla is a special case, deserving of its own treatment.

Amazon might be the best of the bunch. The stock has slumped nearly 20% from its February record high to around $194, and is now trading for 25 times Evercore ISI internet analyst Mark Mahaney’s 2026 earnings estimate—a figure based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, that includes the stock-based compensation that many other tech companies still exclude from their preferred earnings calculations. And Amazon is trading at its lowest price/earnings multiple ever, he notes.

Mahaney likes the setup for Amazon. It recently launched an enhanced version of its digital assistant Alexa, and a satellite internet service similar to Elon Musk’s Starlink called Project Kuiper is due by the end of the year. The company is also investing heavily in—and reaping large cost savings from—automation as it adds robots to its fulfillment centers.

Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud-computing provider; it now has over $100 billion of annual revenue and is probably worth at least $1 trillion. Amazon’s margins are expanding in its North American retail business, which could pass Walmart in sales this year. It has an underappreciated, high-margin advertising business that now boasts $70 billion in annualized revenue.

Not everything is perfect. Its capital spending could top $100 billion this year, and growing competition from Walmart both in stores and online poses a challenge. Higher tariffs could depress consumer spending and Amazon’s sales.

Those risks look reflected in Amazon’s stock. It trades at a discount to both Walmart, which fetches 32 times 2025 earnings, and Costco Wholesale, which goes for 50 times, even though Amazon has higher projected profit growth than both. The company has over $100 billion in cash—against about $50 billion in debt—and could begin paying a dividend and repurchasing stock in the next year. Mahaney calls the Outperform-rated stock one of his top picks. His price target is $270, up 39% from Thursday’s close.

If Amazon investors have concerns, Alphabet’s have worries. The stock, now trading around $163, has a valuation of 18 times this year’s earnings, the lowest among the Mag Seven and the only member with a below-market multiple.

Mahaney ticks off the major investor issues: potential disruption to its search business from AI-driven rivals, the ongoing government antitrust effort, and a lack of spending discipline as the company’s capital expenditures are set to rise 40% this year to $75 billion. “There is a lot of fear there,” he says.

Maybe too much fear. On search, Mahaney says Google is holding its own, with his firm’s recent surveys showing that the search engine still commands a nearly 80% share and is particularly strong in commercial search, which matters for advertising. On antitrust, the Trump administration could show more restraint than Biden’s regulatory team.

Alphabet also has kept a better handle on costs than investors appreciate. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman recently noted that Alphabet’s operating margins rose four percentage points in 2024 and that the company’s new chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, “is committed to accelerating efficiency initiatives.”

Investors also get a valuable tech conglomerate beyond search. Alphabet’s businesses include YouTube; a cloud-computing business that does $50 billion in sales annually; the Android mobile operating system; and Waymo, one of two leaders in autonomous driving along with Tesla.

Alphabet has two classes of public stock outstanding—voting (GOOGL) and nonvoting (GOOG). Consider the voting stock, which now trades at a 1% discount its nonvoting shares.

Meta might have the fewest warts among the Mag Seven. Over the past three years, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from being a near-pariah to one of the most indispensable tech CEOs, having maneuvered Meta to the forefront of AI, streamlined expenses, and significantly boosted earnings, while overseeing a tripling in the stock price.

The stock had a 20-day win streak that began in late January before joining the Big Tech slump. Shares have dropped nearly 20% from a record $750 to around $600, and now trade for about 23 times projected 2025 earnings of $25 a share.

Still, Meta is the only Mag Seven stock in the black this year and arguably has the best near-term financial outlook, as the company uses AI to enhance the customer experience and better target advertising.

Mahaney sees a lot to like, including 40% operating margins against 32% for Alphabet. Then there are monetization opportunities in relatively untapped Meta products like WhatsApp, Threads, and Facebook Marketplace.

Nit-pickers might point to the fact that Meta is planning on spending $65 billion this year, up 75% from 2024, while revenue growth could slow to 10% in 2025 from 18% last year. In the fourth quarter, the company elected not to buy back stock for the first time in about eight years—a sign Zuckerberg didn’t think the shares were cheap following its run-up.

Spending concerns could be alleviated if Zuckerberg decides to cut Meta’s Reality Labs, the company’s metaverse business, which lost almost $18 billion, or about $6 a share, last year. The stock no longer looks overvalued after its drop. Mahaney has an Outperform rating and $725 price target on the shares, up 23% from a recent $590.

Perhaps no stock’s fall from grace has been more surprising than Nvidia’s. The AI chip maker has slumped to $115 from a high of $150, a 23% decline, and now trades for about 25 times 2025 earnings. Growth concerns, as well as tariffs and regulatory risks, have caused the drop, which Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon recently called “a little stunning, especially at the start of a product cycle,” a reference to Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips.

Investors should leave those worries behind. Barron’s tech columnist and Nvidia expert Tae Kim recently wrote that Nvidia “has strong quarters ahead, given the successful launch of Blackwell and the growing demand for AI driven by innovations such as agents, reasoning capabilities, and multimodal models that can process images, videos, and audio.”

Nvidia’s P/E ratio is also near a 10-year low. “[Investors] have historically done well to buy the stock at 25x or lower,” Rasgon writes. “[Worries] that the AI trade is ‘over’ seem a little premature to us.” He has an Outperform rating and $185 price target on the stock, up 60% from Thursday’s close.

Apple has been hit hard lately, falling about 10% in the past week, but even after the drop, it may be one of the least attractive stocks in the group.

While the company has an enviable ecosystem that fuels a valuable and growing services business with over $100 billion in sales, its revenue growth remains sluggish: It is projected to grow sales at less than 5% for the current fiscal year ending in September. And the stock, at around $210 and trading for almost 30 times estimated earnings, doesn’t look cheap.

Apple has had unexpected delays rolling out an enhanced version of Siri, its digital assistant, giving iPhone users one less reason to upgrade their phones this year and highlighting what critics have called a lack of innovation at the tech giant.

Apple also has a China problem. MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett notes that revenue fell 11% during the latest quarter in its second-largest market. Its vaunted ecosystem is no match for Tencent Holdings’ dominant WeChat, which combines online communications, social media, and payments. Without China, there likely won’t be a long-awaited iPhone supercycle, Moffett says. He has a Sell rating and $184 price target on the stock, down 12% from a recent $210.

Microsoft, down 8.8% over the past 12 months, has been the worst performer among the seven stocks over the past year. Investors reacted negatively to decelerating fourth-quarter growth in its Azure cloud business outside of AI. While Microsoft has better growth prospects than Apple—earnings are projected to rise 11% in the current fiscal year ending in June and 14% the following year—the stock looks fully priced at 29 times current-year earnings.

How to Tell If the Stock-Market Selloff Has Hit Bottom

It doesn't quite feel like it's time to buy just yet. But here are three tests to help you decide.

Anyone trying to make sense of the stock-market plunge by focusing on President Trump's tariff yo-yo was left scratching their head at the start of this week. Shares in Tesla, run by Trump's chainsawer-in-chief Elon Musk, plummeted 15% on Monday to take them back below where they were before the election. Yet shares in General Motors and Ford, both much more exposed to tariffs on steel, Canada and Mexico than is Tesla, actually rose, bucking the wider selloff.

Tariffs were the wrong place to look for an explanation. Look deeper into the trading dynamics, and a picture forms of the broader market forces that sent stocks into correction territory this week.

The odd Tesla/Ford moves were more likely driven by what Wall Street types call capitulation. That's when traders have thrown in the towel and are closing out bets they had been holding on to in the hope of a turnaround.

Blame the army of individual day traders who obsessively follow Tesla (GM and Ford are both regarded with scorn by this crowd). These speculators finally gave up as Tesla lost all its postelection gains.

The irony for those who abandoned Tesla is that the stock then leapt on Tuesday and Wednesday (and Ford fell, while GM went sideways), before resuming its slide on Thursday. Trump peddling Teslas in front of the White House provided a justification for some to try to buy the dip. Also at play: another technical move driven by hedge funds.

Tesla was the single biggest short position of hedge funds at the end of January, the latest data available, according to Goldman Sachs. Hedgies' bet on Tesla's share price falling had been extremely painful when the stock rocketed higher after the election. The drop back made them some profits (or perhaps merely reduced their losses). That made it easier to buy back the stock to close the trade.

All this matters when trying to decide if the market is done with its correction. Stocks tend to overshoot reality both on the way up and on the way down, as investors get overexcited or depressed. After the election they overshot upward wildly, far beyond what was justified. If they overshoot down, it will be time to buy.

It doesn't quite feel like it's time to buy just yet. But here are three tests to help you decide:

Sentiment has already turned sour among private investors. Bears outnumber bulls in the weekly survey by the American Association of Individual Investors, and financial newsletters are more negative than positive about the outlook for stocks, according to the Investors Intelligence survey. Sentiment is a contrarian indicator, and when it's very negative it can be a good time to buy, as it becomes hard to get even more depressed. If the cloud of negativity lifts, it would help stocks popular with individuals, such as Tesla.

Among institutional investors, however, there's not enough sign of panic to make me want to go back in. Hedging in the options market has picked up, a sign of worry. But levels aren't even as high as when the Japan carry trade unwound suddenly last summer. I like to buy when fear drives stocks too low, but this is not that moment.

Leverage adds to the overshoots, as hedge funds and day traders borrow to buy stock, or have to sell to pay back their borrowing. At major market lows, leveraged traders are forced to close trades to repay debt. This accelerates the drop -- and helps find the bottom.

Monday gave a taste of the chaotic trading that results from the unwinding of leveraged trades, but hedge funds have barely started to cut their debt, according to the prime brokerage arm of Goldman, which lends to them. The small fall in leverage alone isn't enough to make me think that a rebound in stocks popular with hedge funds, such as Big Tech, is imminent.

Overshooting fundamentals is another sign we've hit a major low. David Kostin, chief U.S. equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, compares economically sensitive cyclical stocks with defensive stocks to try to work out what economic growth rate is priced into markets. He concluded this week that, after the bank lowered its forecast growth, stocks aren't pricing in a significant slowdown.

Goldman has plenty of company in cutting economic forecasts as weak data prompts a growth scare that has rippled through stocks. But economic forecasts are guesstimates, not science, and whether there's been an overshoot depends on what you think will happen to growth under Trump.

Investors who think the concern is overdone should think cyclical stocks, such as Ford and GM, are a bargain. The increasingly vocal group predicting recession will prefer defensives, or to get out of stocks entirely.

How to decide? The uncertainty created by Trump has clearly affected some household and CEO spending plans, but I'm unsure if the caution is widespread enough to tip the economy over the edge. This is hard to call, because it's impossible to know either what Trump will do next or how much the uncertainty itself will slow the economy.

Last week I wrote that I was paralyzed by all the uncertainty. The signs of at least some capitulation this week make me think a rebound is closer, but there isn't -- yet -- enough panic to trigger my contrarian buy-when-I'm-scared impulse.

How Wall Street, Business Got Trump Wrong

They thought his second term would be like the first, giving priority to economic growth and the stock market. He had other ideas.

The day after last fall's election, the stock market soared. And why wouldn't it? Investors assumed Donald Trump's second term would be like his first, giving priority to tax cuts, deregulation and economic growth. Tariffs would come later, after lengthy deliberations. Trump would treat the stock market as his real-time report card.

His advisers reinforced that impression. A few days after Election Day Scott Bessent, now Treasury secretary, hailed the "markets' unambiguous embrace of the Trump 2.0 economic vision," in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Trump, he wrote, would "ensure that trade is free and fair."

We now know that business, investors and many of the incoming president's own advisers misread him. His priorities weren't theirs. In recent weeks, he has brushed aside a stock-market correction and warnings of inflation and weaker growth in pursuit of one goal: tariffs high enough to divert production of imported goods to domestic factories, shattering supply chains built up over decades.

In the process, Trump's rhetoric has turned more sober and defiant. The president who promised a golden age would begin the day of his inauguration now won't rule out recession. The president who once tweeted obsessively about the stock market now suggests ignoring it.

He urges the public to think long-term: "If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective," he said in an interview that aired on Fox last Sunday.

Trump himself is known less for his 100-year perspective than announcing policies on the fly and changing them days later. He could reverse his latest tariffs at any moment, or double down.

But the direction of travel is clear -- and a rude awakening for the financial world. No one thought Trump had become a disciple of Milton Friedman in his four years out of office. Still, mainstream advisers had curbed his most radical impulses during his first term. Many assumed the same from his new, mostly mainstream economic team: Bessent as Treasury secretary, financial-services executive Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary, and Kevin Hassett as director of the National Economic Council.

A year ago, Bessent told clients that "tariffs are inflationary" and "the tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table but rarely discharged." In September, Lutnick described tariffs as a "bargaining chip" to make others lower their own tariffs and said they wouldn't be imposed on things the U.S. doesn't make. On Sunday, Hassett insisted that the U.S. had "launched a drug war, not a trade war," against Canada.

But in his second term, Trump has shown little deference to advisers, Congress or any other guardrails. He has discharged the tariff gun so often that new duties already cover $1 trillion of imports, soon to be $1.4 trillion, nearly four times his first-term total, according to the Tax Foundation.

He hasn't exempted things the U.S. doesn't make. He isn't using tariffs to lower others' duties, at least not yet. And he sure looks like he is waging a trade war with Canada, for reasons having nothing to do with the official motive, fentanyl: its trade surplus, its treatment of U.S. banks and dairy products, its insistence on remaining a separate country.

The world may be unprepared for April 2, when administration officials are to report on the feasibility of reciprocity. That originally meant that U.S. tariffs would match those imposed on it by others, and could therefore go up or down. It was to be a more benign alternative to a universal tariff on everyone and everything.

But Trump defines reciprocity to include everything he considers an unfair trade barrier, such as value-added taxes. It will likely be another pretext to simply raise tariffs a lot.

Having misread Trump on trade, will business and investors be right about him on taxes and deregulation? Probably, with the caveat that both will reflect Trump's priorities, not theirs.

Republicans in Congress plan to extend all the tax cuts they enacted in 2017. They are also contemplating bringing back some expired tax provisions important to business for capital equipment and research.

But simply extending or restoring past tax cuts isn't as stimulative as introducing them for the first time. Moreover, the 2017 tax law was largely designed by congressional Republicans who gave priority to boosting investment and U.S. competitiveness, by lowering the corporate rate from 35% to 21% and slashing the tax burden on foreign profits. Both provisions are permanent.

By contrast, new tax cuts will reflect Trump's priorities: tax breaks on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits, which do little for investment. He has proposed a 15% corporate rate but only for production in the U.S., mimicking a tax break Republicans killed in 2017 because it was expensive, hard to administer and ineffective.

On deregulation, businesses and analysts remain bullish. Trump has been busy axing Biden-era rules and sacking enforcement staff at various agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Here, too, there is a caveat. Trump is also using regulatory power to punish those who cross him politically. A merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media might be at risk because Trump is suing Paramount unit CBS for how "60 Minutes" edited an interview with his election opponent Kamala Harris. Trump's order stripping Perkins Coie, a law firm with Democratic ties, of security clearances, government contracts and federal-building access was widely noted by corporate executives.

As a community, business leaders welcome Trump's return to power. As individuals, many live in fear of it.

Trump's arbitrary and personalized policymaking is at odds with the predictability that businesses crave. Trump could tamp down the anxiety by laying out a coherent agenda ( as some advisers have attempted) and a process for implementing it, such as asking Congress to write new tariffs into law, as the Constitution stipulates.

But that isn't his nature. He sees the discretionary power to impose and remove tariffs and other measures as essential to dealmaking.

The result has been economic-policy uncertainty at levels seen in past shocks such as the 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2008-09 financial crisis and the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Those were all driven by events beyond U.S. control. This one is man-made, and will wax and wane with that man's word and actions.

UBS is integrating thousands of Credit Suisse paintings, sculptures, posters and model ships. ‘There’s still art that will be found somewhere, in a closet in Shanghai or something.’

When the Swiss banking giant UBS UBS 3.22%increase; green up pointing triangle bought its rival Credit Suisse in 2023, it got roughly a half of a trillion dollars in assets as well as customers and offices around the world. It also took on a fleet of model ships, and more than 13,500 artworks, including pieces by Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton, as well as piles of decorative posters.

UBS took over Credit Suisse after it failed under the weight of scandals and losses—including corrupt loans in Mozambique, a rogue private banker and a loss of more than $5 billion when a client went bust. In the integration process, UBS has merged some entities, moved clients over to its systems, unloaded assets and cut jobs.

Still outstanding is the thorny integration of all of that Credit Suisse art. The key questions for UBS’s department are whether to store, display, sell or donate it.

The art haul brought the total size of its collection to more than 40,000, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars even before the integration. Credit Suisse’s art was largely from local Swiss artists—not a seamless fit with the UBS collection, which takes a more global approach, with works from names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Lucian Freud.

There is “never a dull moment,” said the global head of the UBS art collection, Mary Rozell. An art lawyer and historian who grew up in a small town near the Adirondack Mountains in New York, Rozell runs the roughly dozen-person team tasked with the art integration.

One day last fall, high in the Swiss Alps, a semi truck full of fine art sputtered to a halt on a narrow mountain pass. A UBS employee stepped out into a snowstorm, and surrounded by steep cliffs, she tried to help free the truck from the snow and ice.

Hours later, the truck returned to the twists and turns of the Fluela Pass and finally reached Davos. It pulled up to a small UBS office where art handlers emptied the cargo into the bank as the November sun went down. The dozens of paintings, photographs and prints, estimated to be worth thousands of dollars, had been taken from a closed Credit Suisse office in St. Moritz.

That delivery was a normal day in Switzerland for the UBS art team lately, said Rozell, whose days often involve crisscrossing the U.S., Europe and Asia to decide which art the bank acquires, displays, sells or donates. Much of what goes on in the UBS art collection these days “wouldn’t occur to anyone,” she said.

Global banks like UBS, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase have some of the most prestigious art collections in the world, full of blue-chip works from old masters to modern art. They display pieces on the walls of the bank’s hallways, offices and conference rooms, and they also loan art to museum exhibitions. Sometimes they donate the works to museums.

Art helps banks cultivate wealthy clientele. The most exclusive works often hang inside their private bank wings. Banks make art loans to high-net worth clients—or those that have at least $1 million in investible assets. They also woo clients with connections to the art world and VIP access to exhibitions around the globe. For these clients, their own art can be collateral for loans the bank makes to them.

Art is also a big deal in the C-suite, where picking out paintings for an office is considered a senior executive rite of passage.

Model ships

The first major problem Rozell faced in the integration was identifying all of the art she now is in charge of. Credit Suisse’s database ran on different software, was largely in German and had gaps when it came to key information. The art team expects it will still take months to clean that database, which covers each piece of art’s location, dimensions, valuation, sale history and more.

The Credit Suisse offices that UBS planned to close—many in Switzerland due to overlapping home bases—were full of art. Rozell’s team has to determine which art stays and goes from each office and where to keep it in the meantime.

“There’s still art that will be found somewhere, in a closet in Shanghai or something,” Rozell said. “Or things that hadn’t been accounted for.”

Banks keep some art at expensive, highly secure and temperature-controlled facilities, places the industry can privately exhibit works or even broker deals. But UBS has at points in the integration run out of its available space at the professional storage companies it works with in New York, London and Zurich. That left some of the less-valuable art from the collection tucked away into extra rooms within its offices, the temperature cranked down to protect the works.

Some of what ended up in front of Rozell and her team wasn’t art at all, at least by UBS collection standards.

Take the hundreds of decorative posters that UBS found within Credit Suisse. Framed depictions of everything from landscapes to the abstract, the posters weren’t UBS collection material. The bank decided to sell the posters to employees, who jumped at the chance to buy them. The sale was so popular it ended a day early.

“There’s a picture of some guy, he’s got like eight pictures under his arm,” Rozell said. “You could tell he was decorating his whole bachelor pad in one swoop.”

And then there were the model ships, whole fleets of them, captured by Credit Suisse after its takeover of First Boston in the late 1980s. UBS found the ships showcased on special shelves throughout Credit Suisse offices from London to New York, each estimated to be worth hundreds to thousands of dollars. Elsewhere in the collection there were other nautical motifs, crowd-pleasers on Wall Street, such as historical photos of ships.

The miniature wooden vessels weren’t exactly UBS’s style, but there were so many that the bank couldn’t get rid of them right away. The ships had to instead be auctioned off slowly in tranches, so as to not flood the market. Three of them sold in London this past week.

‘You have to be diplomatic’

Rozell didn’t say exactly how much of the Credit Suisse art the bank might get rid of, but she estimated it might ultimately be hundreds of pieces.

The art it does keep from that collection will be kept mostly within Switzerland, throughout offices and a hotel in Zurich that UBS acquired in the deal. Some of it will be displayed in exhibit lounges at art fairs.

Art collectors sometimes need to get permission from an artist to destroy a work, either because of local laws, the contractual terms of a commission or as a courtesy. UBS has had to take these things into consideration with the Credit Suisse offices in Switzerland, for example, where the bank had commissioned art for specific spaces.

Emails have poured into UBS over the past two years from current and former employees who want to purchase art from the collection.

The bank makes the decision to sell on a case-by-case basis, but the answer is often no. It can’t sell art that is core to the collection, for example. It also declines to sell art over a certain value directly to employees, since it is not a private art dealer. (Proceeds from employee sales are donated to various charities, according to the bank.)

“The higher up the person is, sometimes the more pressure there is,” Rozell said. “You have to be very diplomatic about it.”

There is a laundry list of rules the bank has to deal with to donate a single artwork, which is classified as a charitable contribution and can be tax-deductible. (The UBS art team said it doesn’t typically seek tax deductions when it makes donations).

There are high levels of due diligence required for the recipient organization and its trustees, for example, and anti-money-laundering protocols to take into account. One past donation by UBS, of more than 150 19th- and 20th-century American landscape photographs, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., took five years.

UBS has also had to deal with the complicated past of art at Swiss banks, whose World War II-era activities have faced scrutiny over the unreleased funds of Holocaust victims.

Recently unearthed documents from bank archives showed Credit Suisse, in particular, had Nazi ties that ran deeper than was previously known, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

UBS and third-party specialists searched the Credit Suisse collection for any art with Nazi links, as part of its broader due-diligence process. “According to our research and external authorities, no artworks are subject to any particular provenance issues,” the bank said in a statement.

Déjà vu

When one set of plain steel statues, each around 2 feet tall, reached UBS, with them came a sense of déjà vu.

The statues had been sold by UBS years ago. They were eventually bought by Credit Suisse. In fact, more than a dozen artworks that UBS had previously sold have ended up back in its collection through the same round trip.

Other parts of the two bank collections have clashed on public view. The style of the UBS collection is what Rozell calls “the art of our times,” compared with Credit Suisse’s relatively narrow Swiss approach.

In a UBS exhibition at its New York headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, only one piece of art from the Credit Suisse collection can be found: a chromogenic print by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli. The old Credit Suisse building near Madison Square Park tells a similar story. Artwork from the UBS collection fills the walls of client-facing spaces, while the legacy Credit Suisse collection is mostly in employee-facing common areas like conference rooms and hallways.

Consumers and Businesses Send Distress Signal as Economic Fear Sets In

Canceled trips, fewer dinner parties and falling sales: ‘We are cutting back on virtually everything’

Consumers are starting to freak out.

Dan Armstrong, a building manager and part-time security guard in Braintree, Mass., started getting spooked about three weeks ago, when talk of mass layoffs and higher prices began dominating conversations with friends and colleagues who had never brought the subject up before. They started swapping tips on where to find the best deals for frozen food and gasoline.

On Friday morning, Armstrong, 63 years old, canceled his daughter’s high-school class trip to Spain to free up cash. The trip was going to cost him $322 a month until the trip in spring 2026. The single dad, an independent who voted for Kamala Harris, has also cut back on buying new clothes and ordering food from Grubhub, a treat he and his daughter used to indulge in once a week.

“Things look increasingly bleak for us for the next few years,” he said. “We are cutting back on virtually everything.”

President Trump’s stop-and-start trade wars and other rapid-fire policy changes are making Americans feel gloomy about the economy. Their 401(k)s are down, and their expectations for inflation are up. Now they are paring back spending on extras such as vacations and home-improvement projects.

The University of Michigan’s closely watched index of consumer sentiment nosedived 11% to 57.9 in mid-March from 64.7 last month. Sentiment among Democrats was the lowest ever recorded, including the depths of the 2008-09 financial crisis. Even Republicans are feeling worse, although many think that any short-term economic pain caused by Trump’s moves will be worth it. On a recent Sunday, Trump declined to rule out a recession.

Bleak sentiment about the economy can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nervous consumers tend to cut back, which weighs on spending and economic growth. While economists have been marking down their estimates for the economy, they still expect it to grow.

“The consumer drives the U.S. economy,” said Rebecca Patterson, an economist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Where the consumer goes the economy goes.”

The sour mood is starting to show up in key data. Consumer spending in January had its largest monthly drop in around four years, though some of that might be attributed to lousy weather. Bank of America said customers spent 2% more on their credit and debit cards over the seven days ended March 8, compared with a year earlier, but said spending on airlines fell by 7.1% and home-improvement expenditures were down 2.7%.

“Consumers cut back first on the nice-to-haves and the big-ticket items,” said Patterson. “Within the must-haves like food, they might switch to a lower-cost brand.” People might only cut back modestly because the job market is solid, and many are still enjoying big gains in their personal wealth from higher home prices, she said.

Companies making everything from casual wear to luxury goods and liquor to everyday staples are sounding early warnings of a slowdown in consumer demand. Delta Air Lines and American Airlines cut their first-quarter guidances this past week. On Tuesday, Delta Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian said that there was “something going on with economic sentiment, something going on with consumer confidence.”

Budget-pressured shoppers are exhibiting “stress behaviors, and we worry about that,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said during a Feb. 27 presentation at the Economic Club of Chicago. “You can see that the money runs out before the month is gone,” he added. Working-class and middle-class consumers, hit hard by higher prices, were already beginning to cut back before the November election.

Ellen Miller and her husband, Craig Miller, who live in Quakertown, Pa., already cut back on hosting friends at their home and started smoking and freezing more meat themselves. Last year she skipped her annual tradition of sending out Christmas cards, given the rising prices of stamps.

Sales of her Native American prints and cards on Etsy have seen a marked drop in recent months, while everyday items she buys keep getting more expensive. Consumer prices were up 2.8% in February from a year earlier.

The couple are celebrating their 34th anniversary this weekend. Going out to eat, as they did in years past, is too expensive, so Ellen Miller was planning to cook a special meal at home. On Thursday, she headed to the more cost-friendly supermarket option in her area, a Giant Food supermarket, hoping to get a steak. But the rib-eye she wanted was close to $30 a pound. She ended up buying a whole chicken at a fraction of the price and will be making enchiladas instead.

“It feels like another level of pressure has come,” she said. “Now, it’s even too expensive to have steak at home.”

In February, small-business uncertainty reached its second-highest level in the more than 50 years that the National Federation of Independent Business has been polling small-business owners, the group said. The highest reading was in October, just before the election. Sales expectations declined for a second month in a row after surging following the vote.

Sales at McAlister Photoworks in Columbus, Ohio, are on track to fall more than 20% in March from a year earlier, the owner, Ray Duval, said. The four-person company sells photo prints and related products for an average order size of $44.

The store has recently been averaging 21 transactions a day instead of the usual 30 to 35. Phone calls from prospective customers have slowed to a trickle since the inauguration, said Duval, a libertarian who sometimes wears to work a shirt that says “Not Compatible With Marxism.” Vendors tell him others in the industry are seeing the same thing happening.

“I’m looking around waiting for people to walk in the door, and they’re not walking in the door,” Duval said. “I’m a bad week away from not making payroll.”

GreatBuildz, a company in the Los Angeles area that matches homeowners with contractors, started seeing business slow in late February. Inquiries are down about 20%, and that has led the eight-person outfit to cut back on marketing. GreatBuildz put together a 30-second TV spot a month ago, but is still waiting to air it. “People are psychologically on the sidelines,” said co-founder Paul Dashevsky.

Suresh Mallikaarjun, 68, decided to hold off on shopping for a new car after watching his retirement accounts decline alongside the broader stock market. He earns some money from consulting but draws from those accounts to help cover his living expenses.

A few weeks ago, he signed up for new budgeting software and started examining his expenses more closely.

Mallikaarjun, a Democrat who lives in a Washington, D.C., suburb, voted for Harris. He expected Trump to focus more on issues such as immigration than on tariffs that could whipsaw markets and the economy.

“I’ve lived in this country for 42 years, I’ve never seen a time like this,” said Mallikaarjun, who was born in India. “In January, everything is OK, and then suddenly the whole Earth opens up before you.”

Anxiety is especially high in his region. About a month ago, he attended an event with friends, some of whom are federal workers worried about what Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has in store for them.

“The mood was not very good,” Mallikaarjun said.

Greenland’s political leaders unite to condemn Trump takeover talk

Joint statement issued after US president reiterated his belief that Washington will eventually control the Arctic island

Greenland’s political leaders have united to condemn US President Donald Trump’s repeated desire to take over the Arctic island as “unacceptable”.

The leaders of all five parties in Greenland’s parliament issued an unprecedented joint statement after Trump reiterated his belief that the US will eventually control the geopolitically crucial island of 57,000 people on Thursday in front of the secretary-general of Nato, Mark Rutte.

“We — all party chairmen — cannot accept the repeated statements about the annexation and control of Greenland. As party chairman, we find this behaviour unacceptable towards friends and allies in a defence alliance,” wrote the five leaders, including current Prime Minister Múte Egede and his likely successor Jens-Frederik Nielsen.

Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland dominated parliamentary elections this week on the island in which Nielsen’s Demokraatit won victory by promising independence from Denmark but at a cautious pace.

Pictures of a smiling Rutte sitting beside Trump and occasionally agreeing with him caused annoyance in both Greenland and Denmark, both of whose territories are covered by Nato’s collective defence pledge.

Trump has refused to rule out the use of military action to take control of Greenland and when asked on Thursday about the prospect of annexing the island replied: “I think it will happen.”

“We do not appreciate the secretary-general of Nato joking with Trump about Greenland like this,” said Rasmus Jarlov, head of the Danish parliament’s defence committee. “It would mean war between two Nato countries.”

Greenlanders have long wanted independence from Denmark after a number of scandals such as one involving the forced sterilisation of women over decades.

But residents of the world’s largest, non-continental island are split over the timing of any break with Copenhagen. Rare opinion polls suggest most favour it only when it would not hurt Greenland’s economy.

The five party leaders underscored that only Greenland can speak for itself, and would do so through diplomatic channels.

“We all stand behind this effort and strongly distance ourselves from attempts to create discord. Greenland is a country that we all stand behind,” the joint statement added.

Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, called the Greenlandic leaders’ statement “strong” and added that she wanted “everyone to speak of Greenland with the respect the country deserves”.

In her strongest remarks since Trump renewed his interest in December, she added that Denmark had a “clear expectation that other nations respect our territorial integrity”. 

Nielsen, who will be given first chance to form a new government and is favourite to become prime minister, earlier called Trump’s comments “inappropriate” and urged Greenlanders “to stand together”.

Many politicians and business people in Greenland worry that Trump could try to exploit any push towards independence.

German army struggles to get Gen Z recruits ‘ready for war’

Bundeswehr has a high dropout rate and the number of conscientious objectors is rising in the country

As a podcaster and freelance journalist, Ole Nymoen admits he enjoys freedom of expression and other democratic rights in his home country of Germany.

But he would not want to die for them.

In a book published this week, Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, the 27-year-old argues ordinary people should not be sent into battle on behalf of nation states and their rulers — even to fend off an invasion. Occupation by a foreign power might lead to a “shitty” life, he told the Financial Times. “But I’d rather be occupied than dead.”

Nymoen, a self-described Marxist, does not claim to be representative of Generation Z in Germany. But his stance — and his striking honesty about it — taps into a wider questions facing Europe as it re-arms on a scale not seen since the end of the cold war.

Berlin has poured close to €100bn into new equipment for the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has announced plans to allow unlimited borrowing to fund defence spending as he promised to do “whatever it takes” to protect freedom and peace in Europe.

But, while those funds are helping to plug gaps in arms and equipment, one of the biggest remaining issues is manpower.

Germany’s armed forces commissioner, Eva Högl, this week warned the country was not closer to its goal of having 203,000 active troops by 2031, as the overall size of the armed forces slightly declined last year, partly because of a high number of dropouts. A quarter of the 18,810 men and women who signed up in 2023 left the armed forces within six months.

“This development must be stopped and reversed as a matter of urgency,” Högl said.

A Bundeswehr spokesperson told the FT the military had taken steps to try to stem the outflow of young recruits, including a notice period to avoid “last-minute, emotional” decisions.

But one senior army commander said members of Generation Z — renowned in the business world for their efforts to reshape corporate culture — were also going into the armed forces with different ideas and outlooks. “People are vulnerable, they cry easily,” he said. “They talk about work-life balance.”

“I understand that,” the commander added. “They grew up in a different time. It’s not a bad perspective. But it doesn’t match that well with a wartime situation.”

As Europe has again reckoned with the fear of an aggressive Russia, the continent’s political and military leaders have dramatically stepped up their language about what they expect from the public.

A senior UK general, Sir Patrick Sanders, last year told the British people they were part of a “prewar generation” that may have to prepare itself to enter combat. In Germany, whose 1949 constitution includes a commitment to promoting global peace, defence minister Boris Pistorius last year caused shock by declaring the nation had to be “ready for war”.

The warnings have escalated since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January and began pushing Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire as well as threatening to withdraw long-standing US security guarantees for Europe. Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland, last week said his country was preparing “large-scale military training for every adult male”.

Germany has not gone that far. Top officials from the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the two parties likely to form the next government, have ruled out a revival of traditional conscription. Merz favours a year of national service that would offer military and non-military options.

Still, the question remains to what extent populations in Europe are willing to accept the calls to join up for the armed forces in much larger numbers.

Sophia Besch, senior fellow at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International, said that although the threat perception among the European public was changing rapidly, “the next step [that governments are asking citizens to make] is a huge one — I want to fight for my country and I want my children to fight for my country.”

Besch said nations including Germany lacked that deep trust and the shared understanding of threat between citizens and government that had been forged in places such as Finland, which is famed for its decades-long focus on preparedness for an attack from Russia.

Moreover, she added, in the worst-case scenario, young Germans would most likely not be asked to fight for their own country but for Latvia or another frontline nation. “We have to ask ourselves what young Germans would be willing to fight for today. Is it Germany? Is it the European project?”

Since Russia’s full-scale Ukraine invasion, Germany has had a steep rise in the number of conscientious objectors (including both regular soldiers and part-time reservists). The figure reached 2,998 last year — up from 200 in 2021.

Klaus Pfisterer, of the German Peace Society — United War Resisters, a campaign group, said many of them did military service years ago, before conscription was abolished in 2011, and had then been assigned as reservists. In previous years that had not seemed like a difficult commitment. But today, against the current global backdrop, “they see this decision in a completely different light”, he said.

Christian Mölling, Europe director at the Bertelsmann Foundation, estimates that German troop numbers need to rise from 181,000 today to 270,000 in the years ahead in order to reach Nato targets — and fill gaps left if American forces stationed in Europe withdraw.

That excludes reserve forces, which currently stand at 60,000 but defence officials have said it must rise to 260,000.

Mölling said the Bundeswehr needed to drastically improve its recruitment campaigns to compete in a tight and competitive labour market, as well as doing more to modernise the military and make it an appealing employer.

“It can’t be mimicry, where you pretend you’re a modern army,” he said. “You have to do it.”

But many young Germans may simply be fundamentally opposed to the idea of signing up. Last month’s federal elections resulted in two parties that oppose arming Ukraine — the far-right Alternative for Germany and the far-left Die Linke — claimed almost half the votes of those aged 18 to 24.

While a recent survey by the pollster YouGov found 58 per cent of Germans would support a return to conscription, only a third of those aged between 18 and 29 felt the same way.

Nymoen, himself a Die Linke voter, is deeply suspicious of Europe’s race to re-arm. It was all very well for European leaders to sound belligerent, he said. “The thing is that, in the end, it’s going to be me in the trenches.”

Adnoc chief Sultan al-Jaber: ‘It’s time to make energy great again’

The oil boss and COP28 president on what the Trump era means for his industry — and being a ‘climate realist’

It is CERAWeek, the sprawling Texas energy conference, and Sultan al-Jaber, who runs the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), one of the world’s largest oil companies, is in high demand.

Interviews with Jaber are vanishingly rare. He has been media-shy since he was named by the UAE as the president of COP28 and then flamed for holding two seemingly contradictory roles: oil boss and leader of global climate change negotiations.

And it is a good time to meet. Big Oil has got its swagger back in the Trump era. “We can all feel the winds of history in our industry’s sails again,” says Amin Nasser, head of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, on stage at the event.

As we sit down, the imposing 6ft 3in Jaber, dressed in a western suit and tie, with a large lapel badge of Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the UAE, smiles broadly. “It has been a great day, a great great day,” he says.

A few hours earlier, the new US energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former fracking tycoon, is greeted with cheers on stage as he trashes “irrational, quasi-religious” climate policies for making no dent on global warming and proclaims that “energy is life”.

I meet some European executives afterwards who fret over the ever widening gap between them and the US, but Jaber, who has always said that the world must be more realistic and less ideological about the future of oil and gas, feels vindicated.

“Energy has always been the spinal cord of our global economy. No matter how we look at it, energy will always be essential to everything we do.”

With Wright’s speech, he says, “I started seeing what we have actually been trying to position: energy realism.” Instead of trying to curb energy consumption, world leaders should recognise the right of developing countries to affordable energy that will help them reach western levels of wealth.

This, he says, is why he signed up for the trial by fire of leading the COP28 talks. The UAE volunteered because after more than a quarter of a century, the talks had made little progress. Oil and gas companies, whose behaviour will be essential in reducing the world’s carbon emissions, were not at the table, he continues.

“It [COP] needed a course correction because people were being unrealistic,” he says. “And plus there was no real progress happening. Everything was going in circles.” Instead, Jaber says, he wanted to use his relationships in the oil industry to make “the energy business part of the solution”.

Now that his year as COP president is over, Jaber is keen for the world to get to know him better.

In the UAE, whose entire economy is built on its huge reserves of fossil fuels, describing Jaber as a mere oil boss understates his stature. Running Adnoc is one of the most powerful jobs in Abu Dhabi. Jaber sits at the wellhead of the country’s wealth, making sure that the money keeps gushing, and he also directs the flow downstream, into a range of sectors that he oversees, such as renewables and AI.

He is the industry minister, the chair of the country’s development bank, and, since COP28, one of the best-known faces of the UAE, alongside Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the head of the investment fund Mubadala and chair of UAE-owned Manchester City.

Jaber, who says he is proud to be middle class, says his father was in real estate and trade and served in the UAE parliament, while his mother taught Arabic and then was a university administrator. He is the eldest of five high achievers; his two brothers are the UAE’s ambassadors to Russia and Bulgaria, one of his sisters is a doctor who manages Imperial College’s diabetes centre in Abu Dhabi, and the other works for Tawazun, which helps manage the UAE’s defence sector.

Jaber’s employees call him Dr Sultan, because he has a doctorate in business and economics from Coventry university in the UK, where he did a remote course in the mid-2000s.

I ask how he found the weather and the food while visiting Coventry and he laughs, before conceding that he enjoyed the local curry. He also admits to having been to see Coventry City, playing in the second tier of English football, a few times.

This raises the intriguing possibility that the UAE, which purchased Manchester City in 2008, might have bought a different team, who also play in sky blue. “To be honest with you, I wasn’t a big fan,” says Jaber, laughing as I suggest that if history had taken a different turn, it would be the Midlands club playing in the Champions League every year.

He wrote his PhD on how the UAE could attract foreign investment, and says it still holds up. I ask him if he could have imagined back then how quickly the tables would turn, with the UK now eagerly courting the UAE for investment.

“Did I expect that? Not in this form,” he says, before smoothly adding that the UAE is always open to relationships and building bridges. “That’s what has helped the UAE, it’s the art of the partnership,” he says. “We are a very outgoing society.”

While he was doing his PhD he wed his wife, and today they have four children aged nine to 17. He also started researching the world of renewable energy.

It is often forgotten, or perhaps brushed over, that before he became a huge figure in the oil industry, Jaber worked for nine years as the founding chief executive of Masdar, originally an effort by Mubadala to recycle some of the UAE’s oil wealth into renewable energy, and today one of the biggest players in the world in wind and solar. Ahead of COP28, Mubadala transferred nearly a quarter of Masdar to Adnoc, giving the oil company arguably more exposure to renewables than its European peers Shell and BP.

Jaber was promoted to run all of Mubadala’s energy interests, before being parachuted in as the chief executive of Adnoc nine years ago. Asked to transform the bureaucratic state giant, he quickly gained a reputation as both a workaholic and a bruiser.

“I can be seen to be tough,” he says. “I had to cut budgets and that would entail reducing headcount. Any step you take in Adnoc, or any action you take, has a ripple effect in our society and our economy. I had to calculate everything before making a decision. But I never allowed my emotions to get in the way.”

When he claims that he watches football matches, I ask him how he has the time for such non-essential activities. He concedes that he multitasks his way through. “I do [work all the time],” he says. “But that doesn’t stop me from having my iPad next to me on mute, so I can glance at the screen every once in a while.”

His fondness for multitasking saw him start travelling the world in the years ahead of COP28 “to get a deep understanding” of climate change. “I had to do it. I knew if we were able to host the world, and deliver some progress, and introduce realism into this whole process, it would always be remembered,” he says.

But after a lacklustre subsequent round of COP negotiations in Baku, I ask him if he feels the process has lost momentum. His response shows how much has changed in even the past two years, as the world’s focus has shifted from dealing with climate change to making sure that energy supplies are secure and affordable.

While he says the agreement that came out of COP28 is still a useful tool, Jaber now describes himself as a “climate realist . . . I see that energy is essential and the enabler for our prosperity and economic growth”.

The problem of global warming will be solved, he says, not by restricting energy use but with policy, technology and by managing behaviour. I point out that his home country, the UAE, will feel the extreme effects of climate change long before Europeans. “Yes, but we cannot put everything on climate, we have to think about global development first and foremost,” he says, puzzled by the question.

The following morning, Jaber is the first speaker in the main ballroom. “It is time to make energy great again,” he says, echoing the Trump line.

Western firms profited as kingdom launched ‘giga-projects’ but market is slowing as Riyadh reins in spending

A consulting boom in Saudi Arabia is slowing as Riyadh reins in spending and reassesses the vast sums being paid to outside advisers to help it pursue its gargantuan infrastructure ambitions.

The kingdom’s consultancy market exploded as it emerged from the worst days of the pandemic, with growth of 38 per cent in 2022 and 25 per cent in 2023, but is expected to expand by just 13 per cent this year after 14 per cent growth in 2024, according to industry research group Source Global.

“The days of the blank-cheque consulting projects, where they just threw money at everything, are really a thing of the past now,” said Dane Albertelli, senior research analyst at Source Global, adding that consultancy firms had felt the boom “might be sustained for a bit longer”. 

The slowdown comes as Riyadh grapples with subdued oil prices, the vast scale of its investment commitments and the need to show returns after years of frenzied expenditure, forcing it to tighten its belt and reprioritise its spending.

The kingdom’s powerful Public Investment Fund last month imposed a year-long ban on PwC being given new advisory work, a move many in the sector believe was partially linked to government frustration at the vast sums being spent on consultants to push forward Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s transformation agenda.

“The consultancy fatigue is not getting any quieter — if anything it’s getting noisier,” said one executive at a consultancy working in the kingdom who like others who spoke to the Financial Times did so on the condition of anonymity. They added that the PwC ban “feels like a very specific large-magnitude event that came out of that exact theme”.

Growth in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf has been a boon for consulting firms struggling with slack domestic markets — PwC’s Middle East revenue expanded by 26 per cent in the 12 months to June 2024, compared with just 3 per cent growth in the UK. Provisional data from Source Global estimates that the consulting market in the Gulf region reached $7bn in 2024, with Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest economy, accounting for the largest portion. 

The kingdom’s so-called giga projects, most notably new economic area Neom and its futuristic linear skyscraper city, have provided a feeding frenzy for the industry. The PIF, the sovereign wealth fund that is the dominant force behind Saudi infrastructure commitments, drove huge demand for advisory work.

The kingdom’s need for help to formulate strategies for establishing everything from new economic areas to an entertainment industry provided a steady stream of business for strategy consultants at firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain.

To move fast in setting up these projects the state, the PIF and its subsidiaries hired armies of consultants to beef up their workforces — a practice known as body-shopping — including from the so-called Big Four consultancy firms. 

But all the spending has led to “massive disquiet that Neom was spending way, way too much money on consultants,” said one person familiar with the project. Neom “was getting ripped off . . . there’s a much broader question about the consulting firms and how they’re taking advantage of the giga projects.”

The worries about how much money was flowing to consultancies come as oil production cuts and lower prices have constrained government expenditure in an economy that is diversifying but still relies on crude exports. 

National oil company Saudi Aramco this month slashed its 2025 dividends by 30 per cent after a 12 per cent drop in net income last year to $106bn. The cut in payments will hit the coffers of Saudi’s government and the PIF, which owns 16 per cent of Aramco. 

The kingdom has also struggled to attract foreign direct investment to help fund the trillions of dollars needed for bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” projects. While Saudi Arabia is targeting $100bn of annual inbound investment by 2030, it secured just $22bn worth of capital expenditure into green or brownfield projects last year, according to data from fDi Markets.

As it exercises greater restraint on costs, consultants are facing pressure on fees. 

“It’s kind of a race to the bottom on who is going to discount,” said one regional consulting boss. “That consulting market, which was flying a couple of years ago, is now a really difficult environment”. They said their margins were “half or 60 per cent” of what they made two years ago 

Not every firm is offering steep discounts, however. One executive at a boutique consultancy said it had brought prices down by less than 5 per cent because “no one has in mind what the cost should be, it should just be less”. At Saudi ministries it is “fashionable to hear that ‘the boss wants to cut costs’,” they added. 

But the price pressure is partly the result of intensified competition because of the firms’ rapid expansion in the region. Albertelli said consultancy and accounting firms piling into the Gulf had created a “buyers’ market”, where clients had greater choice and more power to dictate price.  

The Saudi market still represents a huge opportunity as the government continues to spend heavily on an array of projects, according to the industry insiders. But the type of work is changing, with the government now needing specialised expertise rather than manpower to get projects off the ground.

Consultants still expect demand to stay high, especially as Saudi Arabia has hard deadlines to meet for projects such as the 2029 Asian Winter Games, which will require man-made ski slopes, and the 2034 football World Cup.  

But many believe a slowdown was inevitable. “People within the industry have expected a reckoning on the value-for-money question for some time,” said an executive at one of the biggest consultancies. 

How Munch’s portraits provoked horror, a fist fight and a death threat

Few subjects cared for his unnerving depictions — and a show at London’s National Portrait Gallery makes clear why

‘August Strindberg’ by Edvard Munch (1892) © Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Edvard Munch learnt quickly that “when I paint a person his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. He himself believes, however, that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.” For all the pleasures of passionate eloquence and radiant colour in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition Edvard Munch Portraits, you see why few of his subjects cared for Munch’s depictions. His essential idea that personality is a battleground, created by conflicting desires and repressions, pours into each painting and makes everyone appear troubled or awkward. 

Portraying “my glorious hero”, his friend and Dagbladet’s supportive art critic Jappe Nilssen, Munch painted a towering, glumly earnest figure in expensive purple, against slashing animated green strokes. Nilssen hated it: “He has given full rein to his vicious side and could easily have painted a more beautiful portrait.” The longer you look, the more unnerving the picture becomes, the wild marks around the luxurious attire cohering into a menacing shadow.  

‘Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen’ (1925-26) © Munchmuseet

As relentless is a double portrait of the writer with his doctor, “Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen”. The sinuous, tall medic hovers gravely over the seated, defeated, now grey and furrowed Nilssen. This was nicknamed “The Death Sentence”.

Munch’s own doctor, psychiatrist Daniel Jacobson, who strutted “like a pope” among his neurotic patients, was rewarded with a portrait, legs apart, arms akimbo, subsumed in flames. “Big and dominant in a fire with all the colours of hell,” Munch gloated. Jacobson thought it “stark raving mad”. 

August Strindberg, appalled at his massive heavy head, fierce gaze and demonic air, exclaimed: “To hell with likeness! It should be a stylised portrait of a poet. Like the ones of Goethe!” When Munch made another attempt, Strindberg threatened to kill him.  

Politician Walther Rathenau, however, got the point. Confronted with his powerful presence as a life-size silken black silhouette with shiny patent shoes, grasping a cigar whose smoke becomes decorative yellow twirls, he joked: “Awful character isn’t he? That’s what you get for having your portrait done by a great artist — you look more like yourself than you really are.”

‘Seated Model on the Couch, Birgit Prestøe’ (1924) © Munch Museet

That extreme psychological truth was what Munch sought, both by depicting people as individuals and, in his 1890s symbolist pictures “The Scream”, “Vampire” and “Melancholy”, making them icons of intense emotion. He wanted to paint “living people who breathe, feel, suffer and love. People should understand the holy quality about them and bare their heads before them as if in a church.” 

Women mostly became femmes fatales — from the high-contrast lithograph “The Brooch”, vampish violinist Eva Mudocci with cascading hair and pale face in 1902, to “Seated Model on the Couch” (1924), Birgit Prestoe, whom Munch called his “Gothic Girl”, rendered in his dilute, thin late manner. Straightforward female portraits here are weakly generic, apart from his beloved sisters in the summer seaside pair “Evening” — manic depressive Laura Munch, staring vacantly yet intently, lonely in a twilit fjord landscape — and the exalted “Inger in Sunshine”, squinting at the light. 

‘Self-Portrait’ (1882-83) © Oslo Museum

The exhibition’s pulse, therefore, comes from charismatic, complex men, beginning with Munch himself: the full-frontal “Self-Portrait” at 19, expression haughty but vulnerable, face half shadowed, half in brilliant light, and the innovative lithograph; “Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm”, with disembodied head emerging from pitch darkness, a gleaming white bone in the foreground seeming to be the artist’s arm. 

Both imply a figure caught between life and death. From a childhood marked by the loss of his mother and sister, Munch explained: “As long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety . . . I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall in to the abyss.” 

‘Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy’ (1886) © Munchmuseet

A trio of sensitive early portraits, 1885-86, are perhaps alter egos. Fellow painter “Jørgen Sørensen”, head angled downward, carved from light that isolates him in a black void, is brooding, introspective. “Karl Jensen-Hjell” is a nonchalant, sickly artist-dandy, desperate to enjoy bohemian life though ill with tuberculosis. “Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy”, the artist’s brother eyed mockingly by a luminous skull, suggests similar fragility. All three men died young. 

From these sombre works, 20th-century Munch leaps into modernity: expressive and decorative colour, bright detached strokes giving verve and vitality, dashing painterliness offsetting the sober cast of characters. Living in Paris and Berlin, he absorbed the impact of Van Gogh especially: the stunning opening to this section, Jena physicist “Felix Auerbach”, comes from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and follows the Dutch master in its empathetic charge, emphatic outlines, asymmetry and sonorous orange-red background. Auerbach stands out majestic and serious. 

‘Felix Auerbach’ (1906) © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Expanding that monumentality, Munch’s tour de force between 1904-09 is a sequence of glorious, full-length, life-size male portraits, their sweep here unfortunately interrupted by a freestanding wall jutting between them. 

Munch the psychologist of unease appropriating the swagger of Sargent or Velázquez. The first, gentle Lübeck ophthalmologist “Max Linde”, looks as if he can’t flee the picture fast enough. In large black overcoat, holding hat and cane, he is about to walk out to face the world, reluctantly, steadfastly: a nervy bourgeois straight from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. 

His neighbour, Hamburg-Stockholm banker “Ernest Thiel”, stiff, arms crossed defensively, is shadowed by the outline of an eerie stoop-backed figure. This unfinished canvas so disturbed Munch that to Thiel’s shock “he suddenly put his fist straight through it, and sent the easel dancing across the floor.” 

Left, ‘Ludvig Karsten’ (1905) . Right, ‘Christian Gierlöff, Author’ (1909) © Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm/Gothenburg Museum of Art

With short-tempered artist “Ludvig Karsten”, Munch came to physical blows on Midsummer Eve 1905, when painting him, with mixed hostility/affection, as a flamboyant flâneur in a white suit against a dazzling yellow wall, smiling roguishly, “always ready for some sarcasm”. 

The group concludes with the exceptional portrait of economist “Christian Gierlöff” in 1909, the year Munch, recovering from a breakdown, left Europe’s capitals to “let the molecules settle down after all my inner turmoil” in his new home, peaceful Kragerø. A sliver of its harbour and sea is glimpsed behind the steep rock face, which bears down on Gierloff without crushing him. Blue dabs around his balding head suggest both perilous tumbling stones and a halo. 

Flurried mauve, turquoise, white, loose strokes, drips, streaks, rain down the picture; Gierloff’s hat, held in an open gesture, is an impasto lemon-blue vortex. Amid instability, Gierloff stands assured in his dashing yellow coat, looking outward. The seascape and free facture herald Munch’s later career as a fluid northern landscapist rather than primarily a figure painter. If there is an element of self-portraiture in every work here, this is a happy place to leave him.

March 13-June 15, npg.org.uk : The National Portrait Gallery :