The National Bank of Hungary has published the June issue of its Financial and Economic Review, with the Our Vision section featuring analytical essays on the international role of the US dollar, the European Union’s demographic transition, geoeconomic fragmentation, household cash savings, bank lending behaviour and the financial interpretation of ESG ratings. The issue presents research findings rather than regulatory measures, focusing on how geopolitical change, labour mobility, savings choices and data quality affect financial and economic outcomes. Among the main findings, the essay on the US dollar points to a gap between weakening confidence in the institutional foundations of dollar dominance and the continued concentration of reserve portfolios in dollars, with major shifts more likely to be crisis-driven than gradual. The demographic essay argues that free movement of labour is intensifying regional inequality and brain drain within the EU, and calls for cohesion policy in the 2028–2034 multiannual financial framework to reflect member states’ demographic conditions. Other studies identify a three-bloc global economic structure centred on the United States, the European Union and a China-Russia pairing, find that Hungarian households use forint cash as a core safety-reserve savings tool, show profitability and asset quality as key drivers of bank lending behaviour in the Philippines, and warn that ESG scores are noisy, provider-dependent signals that should be used cautiously in banking risk management.

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