Good morning. It’s Christmas week, and we will be devoting our last two newsletters of 2025 — we’ll be off from Christmas Eve through New Year’s— to looking back at the year that was. Today, we will reflect on the year’s big themes in markets and finance. Tomorrow, we will look back at the predictions we made at the start of 2025. Send your reflections on the year that was to unhedged@ft.com.

2025

Going through all the newsletters Unhedged — Hakyung, Aiden, and myself, plus the occasional guest writer — wrote this year, a handful of big themes emerge. Of course, there are themes we cover year in and year out: economic growth, inflation, stock market moves, interest rates, and so on. But eight 2025-specific themes dominated our coverage. They were: