In one of the online surveys, Russians named the word of 2025 as “anxiety” - and there is something to worry about. In October 2025, only 7% of Russians rated the impact of a “special military operation” on everyday life as positive, while 43% said the war had a negative impact on their lives. The economic situation is playing an increasingly important role in this pessimism.

Teams of analysts at dozens of the largest banks have released their 2026 strategies over the past weeks—thousands of pages of text. Especially for Bell.Investments subscribers, we studied the forecasts of the largest banks and prepared a two-part guide for you. In the first, we already talked about what Wall Street expects from the world's largest economies in 2026.

The AI ​​boom of 2025 has seen US tech multi-billionaires increase their estimated personal wealth by $550 billion. The total wealth of the top 10 tech billionaires reached $2.5 trillion, up from $1.9 trillion at the beginning of the year. Of these, one of the founders of Microsoft, Bill Gates, went into the red at the end of the year - and only because he continued to give away his fortune to charity.

By 2025, telephone fraud in Russia has reached epidemic proportions. The damage from it is measured in hundreds of billions of rubles and continues to grow. The anti-hero of the year was the singer Larisa Dolina, who sold an apartment and transferred more than a hundred million rubles to scammers, and then through the court tried to take the apartment back from a bona fide buyer, saving the money.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is scheduled to arrive at the Mar-a-Lago residence on Sunday, December 28, to meet with Donald Trump, Axios correspondent Barak Ravid reported , citing a senior Ukrainian official. The meeting is due to “significant progress on Trump’s peace plan,” the correspondent writes. Before this, Zelensky himself wrote that the day before he had a “very good conversation” with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Santa Claus rally in stocks has come to fruition this year, with the global MSCI ACWI index up more than 20% year-to-date. This is the biggest annual increase since 2019. Precious metals also experienced a separate rally amid growing geopolitical tensions. Moreover, gold and silver end the year with new historical records - above $4,500 and $75 per ounce, respectively. For gold, intra-annual growth will be the best in almost half a century - since 1979.

The whitewashing of trade with the EAEU countries in order to increase tax revenue has already resulted in an intensified fight against “gray” imports. The price of certain goods may rise by almost a third Unsplash