Oil prices surpassed $90 on Friday - prompting increasingly wild predictions about where it might end up this year.

The investment bank Goldman Sachs considers $100 a possibility.

The fund company Salytic Invest is now even talking about 150 dollars.

Above all, she cites the conflict with Vladimir Putin as the reason for the sharp rise in prices – the fear of war.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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Putin moves the financial markets.

However, in the past week America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, competed for the attention of investors with its plans to raise interest rates.

She probably dominated.

The price of gold, for example, fell noticeably over the course of the week, most recently to $1,790 per troy ounce (31 grams).

That may have been due to the Fed;

even if some commodity analysts thought that the price would have fallen even more if the geopolitical uncertainties did not make some investors reach for the precious metal.

But you don't know.

And the stock markets? The Dax approached the weekend on Friday with a weekly loss of a good 2 percent. It is not easy to separate how much of this was due to the Fed and how much to the conflict with Putin, said Jörg Kramer, chief economist at Commerzbank. But the share prices of the Dax companies are now only 13.5 compared to their expected profits for this year. The price-earnings ratio corresponds to the ten-year average, although the yield on ten-year Bunds is still negative and real alternatives to shares are therefore still rare. Krämer said: "This is an indication that the stock markets are not only suffering from the signs of higher American interest rates, but also from Putin."

Ulrich Stephan, Deutsche Bank's chief investment strategist for private and corporate customers, advises: "In particular, energy prices are likely to continue to rise - energy-intensive companies would therefore be severely affected and may even have to temporarily limit production." In return, shares in companies that supply liquid gas LNG could , benefit.

So far, the price losses in Russia and Ukraine have been particularly strong.

Shares on Moscow's stock exchange have fallen by 25 percent since mid-November;

Financial stocks lost 35 percent, energy stocks 17 percent.

"The conflict undoubtedly falls into a phase in which the markets are unsettled anyway because of Omicron and the supply chains as well as inflation and central banks," says Stephan: "All further conclusions depend on the question of whether diplomatic solutions can be found - an escalation would lead to volatility in the markets.”