That matters right now because the same ingredients are reassembling. The ceasefire's 60-day window just expired without a deal. Oil is climbing again, not falling. The naval blockade, according to US officials, could continue indefinitely. This isn't ancient history the market has safely priced through, it's a live fuse. Add to that the domestic skepticism about Germany's own fiscal story, Deutsche Bank Research and Bruegel have both flagged the spending package as a short-term "sugar rush" with slow execution, a widening deficit, and a financing gap that could force a fiscal contraction as early as 2027, and the structural case looks less like a sure thing and more like a bet that everything breaks Europe's way at once.
Why both sides can look at the same tape and disagree
There's a useful old Wall Street phrase for what's happening here: markets can "climb a wall of worry," rallying precisely because bad news keeps failing to derail them, which investors then read as confirmation that the bad news no longer matters. The bulls treat every week the war doesn't reignite into a full oil shock as evidence the fiscal story has genuinely decoupled European markets from Middle East risk. The skeptics treat the same quiet weeks as complacency accumulating, not risk disappearing, since a wall of worry only holds until the specific worry it was built on actually materializes.