European assets face a more challenging backdrop

While European prices for natural gas have retreated in recent days, the widely tracked TTF benchmark has still risen by more than 20% in August, and remains at a level about ten times higher than was typical prior to last year. Europe’s energy crisis has also been reflected in the returns from many of the headline indices that we track, as European currencies have weakened further against the US dollar; bond yields have surged; and European equities have underperformed those elsewhere, at least in common-currency terms.