Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Falls 0.77% as Energy Turns, Banks Lend a Record €2.3 Billion for Housing, Uber Cuts a Tenth of Its Staff

The Energy Trade That Rescued Lisbon on Tuesday Sank It on Wednesday

Twenty-four hours ago the PSI was one of the only European indices in the black, and the reason was oil. On Wednesday the same concentration worked in reverse. The PSI fell 0.77% to 9,405.31 points, with seven constituents down, six up and three unchanged. Lisbon opened higher and gave it all back.

The damage was done by the two energy names that had been carrying the index. EDP Renováveis was the worst performer of the session, down 3.12% at 13.34 euros, and its parent EDP fell 1.12% to 4.667 euros. Galp lost 2.36% to 21.11 euros on a day of violent swings in crude. That is the arithmetic of an index this top-heavy: when the energy complex turns, there is not enough of anything else to absorb it.

What little green there was came from retail and banking. Jerónimo Martins, which owns Pingo Doce, added 0.28% to 18.16 euros and Sonae, which owns Continente, 0.25% to 2.03 euros. BCP closed 0.22% higher at 1.1215 euros.

Crude itself did not fall. Brent was up 0.91% at 95.51 dollars a barrel late in the session and West Texas Intermediate 0.53% at 90.70 dollars, after a fresh wave of strikes in the Middle East, with prices touching levels last seen in July 2024. The conflict has now run seven months. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said two tankers hit sea mines while trying to cross the Strait of Hormuz, and preliminary Kpler shipping data showed only four cargo vessels crossed the strait on Tuesday against ten the day before and a ten-day average near thirteen. Against that, the United States energy secretary, Chris Wright, said 17 million barrels passed through on Monday, the most since the war began. Galp fell anyway, which tells you the market read the day as demand destruction rather than a supply squeeze.

Gas is where the escalation is showing most clearly. The Dutch Title Transfer Facility contract, Europe's benchmark, rose 3.04% to 74.41 euros per megawatt-hour and touched 75 euros intraday, a level beaten only by the 77 euros of 2 January 2023. It has climbed almost without interruption since 5 August. Across the Atlantic, Wall Street was mildly positive when Lisbon closed: at 14:43 Lisbon time the S&P 500 was up 0.14% at 7,644.36, the Dow Jones up 0.41% at 52,984.83 and the Nasdaq flat at 26,100.89.

Portugal's Ten-Year Yield Goes to a 2023 High, and the Spread Widens Again

The global bond sell-off that opened September did not stop. Portugal's ten-year Obrigações do Tesouro (Treasury bonds) yield rose about three basis points to 3.73%, which ECO flagged in its morning market entry as the highest reading since 2023. The twenty-year line added a little over two basis points to 4.25%, the thirty-year sat at 4.34%, the two-year at 3.01% and the one-year at 2.82%. The whole curve moved up together, which is what an inflation scare looks like rather than a credit scare.

The German ten-year Bund rose faster, up 4.4 basis points to 3.3831%, its highest since April 2011. That leaves Portugal's spread over Germany at roughly 35 basis points, against about 33 on Tuesday. The gap remains historically tiny; the point is that it widened on a day when Portugal was not the story.

The story is the European Central Bank. Money markets now price something very close to a certainty that the Governing Council raises rates at its 9 and 10 September meeting, with a strong probability of another increase before the year ends. Olli Rehn and Martin Kocher have both warned publicly that a prolonged conflict and rising inflation risk could justify further tightening. In the United States, markets put a September increase at about 66% after hawkish remarks from the Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh. The euro was slightly softer: the ECB reference rate was 1.1578 dollars, against 1.1590 on Tuesday.

Portuguese Banks Lent a Record 2.3 Billion Euros for Housing in July

The Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) published its July retail banking statistics on Wednesday, and they contain the largest month of new mortgage lending the country has ever recorded. New housing loan contracts rose by 166 million euros to more than 2.3 billion euros in the month. On top of that sat a further 491 million euros of renegotiated housing credit, which was 109 million less than in June.

Two forces produced that number, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is the public guarantee for young buyers, which launched at the end of 2024 with 1.2 billion euros behind it and has since been reinforced to 2.4 billion. It has been the main engine of mortgage demand for close to two years, and it is running hot enough that Novobanco and Montepio exhausted their allocations and needed a 100 million euro top-up gazetted this morning.

The second is a deadline. The Banco de Portugal's tighter lending rules took effect on 1 August, cutting the maximum debt-service ratio. Households and banks appear to have pulled deals forward into July to get in under the old criteria. That is a warning about how to read the record: some of it is demand, and some of it is a queue clearing before a door closed. August will be the honest month.

The cost side keeps grinding higher. The average monthly instalment across the whole stock of housing loans rose for an eleventh consecutive month to a new all-time high of 411 euros, five euros more than in June and 23 euros more than at the end of 2025. The supervisor, led by Álvaro Santos Pereira, attributed the rise both to existing contracts repricing and to new contracts arriving with higher instalments. New housing loans were granted at an average 2.96%, up 0.02 points and the fourth consecutive increase, though still well under the euro-area average of 3.52%. Portugal has the fifth lowest new-mortgage rate in the single currency area. That relative comfort is real, and it is also the reason interest now absorbs almost half the average payment.

Savers Got a Record Too, and a Sixth Straight Month of Better Rates

The same release carried the mirror image. New household term deposit operations rose 1.7 billion euros in July to more than 13.7 billion, also the highest figure on record, after banks raised the average rate for a sixth consecutive month. The average rate on new deposits added 0.04 points to 1.59%, the best since April 2025. Companies did slightly better at 1.98%, up 0.03 points, across 11.4 billion euros of new placements.

This is a genuine turn, and it is worth marking against June's reading, when the term deposit stock shrank for the first time in a year. Money is moving back into fixed terms because the price of waiting has finally changed. It has not changed enough: the euro-area average on new deposits rose 0.05 points to 2.14% in July, and Portugal again sits fifth from the bottom. Portuguese savers are paid less than the average European for the same money, which is the long-running structural complaint behind the finding that nearly half of household financial wealth still sits in low-yield products.

The driver is the same one lifting yields. The ECB has raised rates once since the war began in February, in June, is expected to move again next week, and is priced for a third increase in December. Market rates including the Euribor have followed, which is also why savings certificates stopped tracking the rise this month: their base rate is capped at 2.50% and the market has gone past it. Bank deposits are now the instrument that still moves.

Portugal's Deal Count Is Down 28% and the Money Behind It Down 59%

August is never the busy month, but this one was unusually quiet: 18 mergers, acquisitions, private equity investments, venture capital rounds and asset purchases were recorded in Portugal, fewer than half the count of August 2025. That drags the eight-month total to 327 transactions announced and completed, according to TTR Data figures sent to ECO.

Between January and August the Portuguese M&A market fell 28% by number of contracts and moved 5.4 billion euros, a 59% drop in value year on year. Of the more than 300 deals involving Portuguese companies, 287 closed and only about a third disclosed a price. Real estate led by sector, followed by technology (internet, software and technology services) and business and professional support services. The trajectory is now unmistakable across the year: the market was down 30% after the first quarter and has not recovered since.

Energy produced the largest tickets even though it did not make the sector podium. The biggest entry in the database is EDP Brasil's purchase of 100% of EDP Renováveis Brasil from EDP Renewables for about 700 million euros, a portfolio reshuffle inside a Lisbon-headquartered group rather than a genuine change of ownership, which is exactly the kind of item that irritates advisers watching the league tables. Below it sits Galp's acquisition at the end of July of a 361 megawatt Spanish wind portfolio, fifteen onshore farms, from Acciona Energía, at an enterprise value of 420 million euros.

Outside energy, the Spanish real estate group Healthcare Activos, whose largest shareholder is Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund, created a European fund and bought three hospitals in Lisbon, Porto and Albufeira for 250 million euros, all operated by Lusíadas Saúde. It now holds property leased to all three of Portugal's largest private health groups. Portuguese buyers were active too: the unicorn Sword Health bought its German rival Kaia Health for 285 million dollars (roughly 237 million euros), which Virgílio Bento framed as a route into the German prescription market, and the company has told Massachusetts health authorities it intends to acquire the mental health firm Headspace on the 14th for between 200 and 300 million dollars. The British fund ICG paid 200 million euros through Viator Invest for 33.5% of the Paulo Duarte group, the Torres Vedras logistics, fuel and road transport holding that turns over 130 million euros and employs 1,300 people. In venture capital the largest round with Portuguese money was Preply's 130 million euros, in which Indico Capital Partners took part.

Sonae Buys Into an Israeli Cybersecurity Startup as Uber Cuts a Tenth of Its Staff

Sonae's venture arm Bright Pixel Capital joined a 27 million dollar round in Huskeys, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that builds artificial intelligence agents to manage unwanted non-human web traffic. The round takes the company's valuation above 100 million dollars, according to The Wall Street Journal, and its total capital raised to 35 million. Blackstone Innovations Investments led, alongside Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures and SV Angel, plus individual investors including Eran Reshef, the inventor of the web application firewall and the CAPTCHA, and executives from Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel. Huskeys counts TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone and Hugging Face among its clients and says it analyses more than a trillion web requests a day.

Marcos de Castro Osório, a director at Bright Pixel Capital, said the appeal was that Huskeys unifies security management across technology a company already owns rather than adding another layer. It is a small cheque by Sonae's standards, and it is consistent: the group's capital arm keeps buying optionality in categories where Portugal is trying to build a cluster, which is the same logic behind Vodafone anchoring a global cybersecurity centre in Lisbon in July.

The other technology story of the day is subtraction. Uber will cut about 10% of its workforce worldwide. In a message to staff on Wednesday, the chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said the company will remove management layers, simplify team structures, redefine its global location strategy, consolidate duplicated teams and reduce the number of key hubs. Only 1% of employees will remain fully remote; most current remote workers are being asked to return to an office. Affected staff have already been notified except where local processes apply, which is the phrase that matters in Portugal.

Uber's Portuguese operation employs about 600 people, and asked by ECO whether they are affected, the company would only point back to the memo. That is a large local exposure for a company whose Portugal country manager said last summer that the plan was to keep investing and to keep upskilling staff. Uber has been unusually active here, from the 13 billion euro purchase of Glovo's owner that carved Portugal out to the rewritten ride-hailing law now in force. Khosrowshahi's own framing is worth noting: he acknowledged staff would ask why now, "especially given the good performance of the business."

Also Moving

Forum Algarve sells for about 130 million euros. The Spanish asset manager Alfana Investment Management chose Portugal for its first international acquisition, buying the Forum Algarve shopping centre in Faro, in a transaction due to be signed in Lisbon on Wednesday and first reported by Expansión. The 2001 building has 27,400 square metres, 115 shops and more than 2,200 parking spaces, and 2025 accounts show more than 7.8 million visitors and tenant sales above 120 million euros, with occupancy close to 100%. Tenants include every Inditex brand plus Mango, Tendam, Fnac, Primor, McDonald's and Starbucks. Alfana will fold it into Rivoli Retail; the money came from Banco Santander wealth-management clients, with Garrigues, KPMG, RPE, CBRE and GMD Consultoría advising. It is one of the larger retail property tickets of a thin year, and it lands on the same reasoning that has drawn Iberian capital across the border in both directions.

Portuguese household wealth per head fell while the stock market set records. The McKinsey Global Institute's The Global Balance Sheet 2026 finds that net household wealth per inhabitant in Portugal dropped 1.6% between 2024 and 2025, even as the country hit an all-time high in the ratio of market capitalisation to GDP and cut public debt by roughly four percentage points of GDP. Productive assets, meaning infrastructure, machinery, equipment and intellectual property, fell about ten percentage points of GDP. In short, household debt grew faster than household assets, and Portuguese families did not capture the stock market's gains because most of their money is in deposits and certificates. Globally, household wealth hit a record 570 trillion dollars, up 40 trillion in a year, but only 20% of that growth came from new productive capital. McKinsey warns that Europe is drifting towards secular stagnation, with flat productivity and insufficient investment despite high savings.

The economy minister sets the target at 100% of the European average. Speaking at the Repsol ceremony in Sines, where the government handed over the digital operating title for two new plants, Manuel Castro Almeida said Portugal must aim for GDP per capita equal to the European Union average. He put the current figure at about 80% and called the gap the country's central ambition, while listing growth above the European average, record employment, contained inflation and falling public debt on the credit side. He also said the stock of foreign direct investment in Portugal rose from 181 billion euros at the start of 2023 to 225 billion in June this year, with 6.7 billion of transactions in the first half. Eurostat's own reading is less flattering once the record population is counted.

Ryanair trims its winter and warns on fares. The Irish carrier will fly less this winter because of fuel costs from the Middle East war, cutting its traffic target for the year to April 2027 from 216 million passengers to 214 million. It expects the reduction to cut losses in the loss-making winter season by 70 to 100 million euros. Most of this year's fuel is hedged at around 67 dollars a barrel, far below the current price, so the airline still expects a profit in 2026/27, though below the record 2.17 billion euros of 2025/26. It warned that European short-haul fares could rise significantly if oil stays high into the summer of 2027.

American and French visitors thinned in July. Overnight stays by United States tourists fell 3.1% in July and the French market is down 8% for the year, with Greater Lisbon absorbing most of the pressure. Cristina Siza Vieira of the hotel association AHP put it plainly: "tourists go where there is air capacity." The American market is still up 3.4% for the year, but that compares with 6.7% in the same period of 2025, and July 2025 was an exceptionally strong base at 14.1% growth. The travel agents' association ANAV points to first-half data showing American overnight stays up 5.3%, tourism revenue up 8.1% and American card spending up 13.4%, and argues there is no evidence yet for a structural break. It reads as a continuation of the cooling already visible in the second quarter.

Strike notices are up almost 65%. The Direção-Geral do Emprego e das Relações de Trabalho (Directorate-General for Employment and Labour Relations) logged 739 strike notices in the first seven months of 2026, against 449 a year earlier: 661 outside the state business sector and 78 inside it. You have to go back to 2023, and its 980, to find a busier January to July, and that year also had a labour law reform running through it. Of July's notices, 122 produced minimum service requirements. The proximate cause is the labour reform that Parliament rejected, though the labour minister, Maria do Rosário Palma Ramalho, says the government has not given up on rewriting the law.

Footwear goes back to New York. APICCAPS, the shoe industry association, will run a "Portuguese Shoes Showcase New York" on 1 and 2 December alongside FFANY Market Week, pitched as a market entry programme rather than a trade fair. Portugal exported 1.8 million pairs worth 84 million euros to the United States in 2025, which the association's executive director Paulo Gonçalves calls far below what the sector should manage. It follows a first half in which Portuguese footwear exports slipped 2.1% while Italy and Spain fell far harder.

Tomorrow

The calendar is thin and the politics is not. Chega delivered a censure motion against the government on Wednesday afternoon and has said that if it fails it will push for a parliamentary inquiry. Censure motions rarely pass, and this one is not expected to, but a debate date is the kind of thing that puts a floor under yields for no fundamental reason at all.

Otherwise everything still points at Berlin. With Brent near 95 dollars, European gas at a three-and-a-half-year high and an ECB decision six days away, Portuguese yields will keep being set by the inflation the war is producing rather than by anything domestic. Watch whether August mortgage lending confirms that July's record was partly a rush to beat the new rules, and watch Galp and the EDP complex, which between them will decide whether the PSI keeps giving back its August gains. The July debt figures published this morning are a reminder that the stock is falling while the cost of carrying it is not.