2025 will be remembered as the year when the world finally sobered up. After a decade spent assuming technology would solve everything, central banks would underwrite anything, and immigration could paper over every structural weakness, reality finally cleared its throat. The global economy rediscovered constraints (energy, labour, capital, geopolitics) and the markets followed.
At Moneta, we walked into 2025 with a clear view: the old narratives were finished, and a new era of capital allocation was taking shape. We argued that North America was entering a multi-year industrial, energy, and security renaissance; that capital would migrate aggressively toward real assets; and that government industrial strategy, not venture-funded storytelling, would define the next cycle.
We were early. We were loud. And we were largely right.
But markets rarely move on the schedule of the people who anticipate them. Bureaucracy intervened. Politics dragged its feet. Regulators demonstrated as always that they are undefeated in the sport of delay. So while we nailed the big arcs, we had to tolerate the usual frustrations of being early in a world that consistently rewards being late.
Still, 2025 marked something unmistakable: the structural turn. Capital stopped circling the drain of megacap tech and unprofitable growth and went looking for yield, cash flow, and certainty. It found these in energy, industrials, manufacturing, defence, data infrastructure, and private markets. And after a decade of being dismissed as unfashionable, these sectors are now the backbone of global capital returns and will be again in 2026.What follows is the story of the year as Moneta saw it, called it, and positioned for it along with a clear view of what lies ahead.
2025: The Year Reality Reasserted Itself
The defining trend of 2025 was the restoration of fundamentals. It became impossible to ignore that the global economy was short of three things simultaneously: energy, labour, and financing capacity.
Energy demand surged despite every prediction to the contrary. Data-centre construction exploded as AI and defence computing workloads became the backbone of national strategy. Labour markets remained structurally tight, particularly in skilled trades and engineering. And the debt-soaked global financial system began quietly bumping into the limits of its own leverage.
This confluence reminded investors that the intangible boom of the past decade did not eliminate the physical world; it merely obscured it. AI still runs on electrons. Supply chains still run on fuel. Nations still run on credible monetary and industrial strategies.
The world rediscovered all three in 2025.
Moneta’s calls reflected this. We positioned early for the revival of private oil & gas production, the political turn toward reshoring and friendshoring, the re-acceleration of U.S. industrial policy, and the widening divergence between headline GDP and the far more telling metric: GDP per capita. We argued repeatedly that this divergence would soon force political recalibration in the West, particularly in Canada and Europe, and by year-end that recalibration was underway.
Were we perfect? Not even close. But our errors were timing errors, not thesis errors and the humour writes itself. When several projects we expected for Q2 slipped into Q4 because permitting offices were, in their words, “short staffed,” we were reminded that no force in nature is more powerful than a government employee going on vacation. When U.S. lawmakers took three months to agree on something already popular with voters, we were reminded that politics is the art of delaying the inevitable.But the big calls, the ones that matter, came through.
Capital Rotation: The Call of the Year
If there was a single theme that defined 2025 and validated Moneta’s worldview, it was the great capital rotation. The exodus from narrative-driven growth into productive assets began slowly in early 2025 and accelerated relentlessly as the year unfolded.
Large allocators, pensions, sovereign funds, and family offices all moved in the same direction: out of “concept” assets and into energy, industrials, logistics, defence, and infrastructure. Private credit flows hit record highs. Midstream pipelines outperformed megacap tech. Energy services finally clawed their way back into institutional models.
This was not a short-term trade. It was the start of a structural repricing of the real economy after a decade in which it was wrongly treated as a rounding error.
We said early in 2025 that capital would no longer subsidize the pretending part of the economy: the parts that don’t produce, don’t generate returns, don’t build anything, and don’t solve problems.
Instead, capital would follow productivity, cash flow, and strategic necessity.
That shift is now fully underway. And in 2026, it accelerates.y.
Energy, Industrial Policy, and the Rise of Hard Capacity
One of Moneta’s earliest and most consistent calls has been that energy abundance, not energy scarcity, will define national competitiveness in the AI era. That call aged exceptionally well.
AI workloads exploded. Model training costs increased. Data-centre power draw estimates were revised upward five times in one year. Suddenly, energy security wasn’t a niche concern, it became a national priority.
North America’s advantage became undeniable. Cheap natural gas, enormous land availability, stable property rights, and well-developed transmission infrastructure positioned the U.S. and Canada as the only markets capable of supporting hyperscale data-centre buildout at the speed required.
Private oil & gas producers, long ignored, found themselves in the perfect position: under-levered, efficient, and critical to national policy goals. Large buyers wanted long-duration contracts. Midstream came back into fashion. And capital flows into gas-fired generation surged as governments realized renewables alone cannot support the AI era.
Moneta was early to all of this. And 2026 will be the year these themes compound.
Agentic AI and the Repricing of Software
The structural turn toward real assets in 2025 did not spare software; it forced a reckoning within it. As capital demanded productivity and cash flow rather than narrative growth, the software sector began to split along a new fault line: tools that merely support workflows versus systems that replace them.
Agentic AI sits at the centre of this shift. As autonomous systems move from assisting tasks to executing entire processes end-to-end, the traditional SaaS model is breaking down. Interface-driven software, built around human users and seat-based pricing, is steadily losing relevance as enterprises increasingly interact with AI platforms rather than applications.
This transition is reshaping software economics. Pricing is moving away from seats and subscriptions toward usage, outcomes, and margin participation. Vendors are being valued not on feature sets, but on workflow ownership, proprietary data, and measurable P&L impact. At the same time, margins are compressing as agentic systems require continuous compute, memory, and energy; costs that were marginal in the old SaaS world but unavoidable in the new one.
The result is consolidation. Multi-agent platforms are collapsing stacks of point solutions, while horizontal tools and thin AI wrappers are being repriced aggressively lower. Investors have begun to reflect this reality: EV/Revenue multiples are drifting downward for software companies that lack infrastructure control, differentiated data, or true agentic capability.
Agentic AI, like the broader 2025 reassertion of fundamentals, is stripping away abstractions. Software that does not directly anchor itself to mission-critical workflows is being treated the same way capital treated unproductive growth elsewhere in the economy; with declining tolerance and shrinking valuations. This is not a cyclical adjustment; it is a structural rewrite of how enterprise technology is built, bought, and valued.
Where We Were Early—and What We Learned
A few of our calls were early enough that even we laughed. We assumed some provincial and federal governments would act with urgency once the economic data turned, but many stuck admirably to their tradition of moving only when forced by crisis. We also expected some regulatory accelerations that never arrived. If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that permitting offices have proudly resisted modernization since the 1970s.
But none of these misses changed the trajectory. In fact, they reinforced it. When structural themes are this powerful, bureaucratic delay doesn’t invalidate them, it amplifies the eventual response.
We take the humour in stride. Being early is part of the business. Being wrong is not and the data vindicated us.
Canada Under Carney: A Country Forced Into Reality
Mark Carney’s arrival as Prime Minister was less a political accident than an economic inevitability. Canada’s GDP per capita decline finally became impossible to ignore. Productivity stagnated. Immigration policy ran into its limits. Fiscal pressure intensified. And the U.S. began quietly signalling that Canada would need to tighten immigration, address cross-border crime flows, and present a credible negotiating posture for CUSMA renewal.
Carney inherited an economy that was not failing, but drifting. He also inherited a public that no longer bought the old narratives. Canadians, politely, but firmly, decided they wanted competence again.
Carney’s early moves were predictable: stabilization of immigration inflows, tightening on temporary residents, accelerated restrictions on non-productive housing demand, and a pivot toward industrial strategy aligned with U.S. priorities. Ottawa’s language shifted toward productivity, competitiveness, and per-capita metrics instead of aggregate headline numbers.
The U.S. applied significant pressure behind the scenes. Washington wants secure supply chains, coordinated labour rules, harmonized migration frameworks, and joint enforcement of border crime. Canada is complying, not because it wants to, but because it must.
Venezuela’s oil outflow into the Americas is an unspoken part of this dynamic. The U.S. has made it clear that uncontrolled secondary migration flows through Canada will not be tolerated, and Carney has adjusted policy accordingly.
Canada enters 2026 in a more grounded stance than at any point in the last decade.
2026: The Year the Cycle Tightens
If 2025 was the year of recognition, 2026 is the year of restructuring. The themes that dominated this year will not fade, they will harden.
The Defence–AI–Data Centre Axis Will Drive a Global Mining Supercycle
The biggest underappreciated driver of 2026 will be the convergence of:
- defence modernization
- AI compute escalation
- hyperscale and sovereign data-centre buildout
- grid expansion
- transmission overhaul
- industrial reshoring
Every one of these sectors is resource-intensive. Copper, nickel, cobalt, rare earths, aluminium, steel, and industrial materials are entering a period of coordinated supply-demand tightening not seen since the early 2000s.
Defence budgets have already shifted from procurement to capacity. AI compute requires unprecedented physical infrastructure. Sovereign data-centre programs in the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and the Gulf are scaling. And all of it funnels into mining.
The next commodity supercycle will not be driven by China’s property sector; it will be driven by AI, defence, and grid expansion.
Remigration: A 2026 Theme, Not a 2025 Story
Moneta avoided discussing “remigration” in 2025 because it was not yet a policy concept, it was an undercurrent. By mid-2026, this changes.
The U.S. made it official in 2025. Canada will be compelled to follow, not by ideology but by economic arithmetic. Europe is heading there even faster as electoral pressure boils over. Western governments cannot support declining productivity, stagnant wages, and rising social pressure while simultaneously adding record numbers of dependents.
2026 will not be the year mass remigration programs begin, but it will be the year the political ground shifts decisively in that direction. Capital must price this.
The Quiet Risk: Debt, Banking Stress, and the End of Free Leverage
The world is entering a phase in which financial structure catches up with economic reality.
Global debt levels (public and private) are incompatible with higher-for-longer rates, slowing labour force growth, and capital-intensive industrial policy. Banks are being forced to carry long-duration assets financed with short-duration liabilities in an environment where deposit stability is no longer guaranteed.
This alone would be destabilizing. But the structural shifts underway (energy realignment, migration tightening, reshoring, commodity tokenization) will place additional pressure on sovereign borrowing needs.
The biggest unpriced risk is simple: the world has too much debt for the growth it is generating. And one country is now the fulcrum of that risk.
Japan: The Ignition Point for a Global Event
Japan’s debt dynamics finally matter. The market has ignored them for 20 years. It will not ignore them in 2026.
As Japan normalizes policy, even slightly, the cost of servicing its debt stock will rise beyond its fiscal capacity. Yield curve control can only stretch so far before capital outflows become disorderly. When Japanese investors repatriate capital, global markets will feel it immediately: U.S. Treasuries, European bonds, and EM financing all depend on Japan’s outbound flows.
A Japanese debt event need not be a crisis; it can be a controlled restructuring of monetary regime. But it will send shockwaves. It will force a repricing of global rates, accelerate the commodity cycle, and expose over-levered banking systems.
Japan is not the problem. Japan is the trigger.
Tokenization: The New Plumbing of Global Trade
Moneta flagged early signs in 2025 that commodities were quietly being integrated into tokenized settlement systems. It wasn’t a headline theme, but it should have been.
Tokenized commodities will not replace the dollar. They will reinforce it by providing better collateral, more transparent settlement, and more efficient supply-chain financing.
2026 will be the first year these systems begin to influence capital flows in a way investors can see. This will matter for energy, metals, midstream, and industrial finance. It will matter for sovereign risk. And it will matter for banks whose business models rely on opacity and legacy settlement delays.
In a world moving toward real-asset collateral, poorly collateralized institutions will suffer.
The Moneta View for 2026
2026 is not another year in the cycle. It is the year the cycle itself changes.
Energy demand accelerates. Mining enters a renaissance. Industrial strategy becomes national security. Carney begins Canada’s long-overdue productivity reset. CUSMA negotiations push Canada toward U.S. alignment. Europe confronts migration head-on. Japan delivers the global shock. Commodity tokenization tightens financial markets. And banks begin quietly adapting to a world where leverage is no longer free.
Capital rotation continues – harder, faster, and more decisively.
Those positioned for cash flow, resources, energy, industrials, data infrastructure, and defence will outperform not because the market is chasing returns, but because the real economy is finally setting the price of capital again.
Moneta called the turn early in 2025. The turn arrives fully in 2026.
About Moneta
Moneta is an investment banking firm that specializes in advising growth stage companies through transformational changes including major transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, private placements, public offerings, obtaining debt, structure optimization, and other capital markets and divestiture / liquidity events. Additionally, and on a selective basis, we support pre-cash-flow companies to fulfill their project finance needs.
We are proud to be a female-founded and led Canadian firm. Our head office is located in Vancouver, and we have presence in Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto, as well as representation in Europe and the Middle East. Our partners bring decades of experience across a wide variety of sectors which enables us to deliver exceptional results for our clients in realizing their capital markets and strategic goals. Our partners are supported by a team of some of Canada’s most qualified associates, analysts, and admin personnel.