After weeks of jitters over oil and the Middle East, global markets are slowly settling into a calmer phase. Investors are shifting their gaze away from geopolitical risk toward something more predictable - corporate earnings and the decisions of the US Federal Reserve (the Fed).

The key factor behind the calm is oil. OPEC plus decided to raise production by 188,000 barrels a day starting in August, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is normalising - which cut fears of supply disruptions. The result: Brent crude held around 72 dollars a barrel, a long way from the panic projections of a few weeks ago.

When oil settles, so do the biggest stock exchanges. Attention now moves to earnings season - it kicks off in the US with companies like Delta and PepsiCo, and the big banks arrive next week. Analysts expect profit growth of around 25 percent, led by the tech and energy sectors. Samsung, for instance, is expected to report strong growth driven by demand for artificial-intelligence chips.

For the Balkans, this distant market calm is not an abstraction. The price of oil directly dictates the price of fuel at our pumps, and the Fed's rate decisions touch every loan, every instalment, every credit we take on. When the big markets breathe more easily, sooner or later it is felt in our pockets too - the only question is whether the calm will last long enough to reach us, or whether the next crisis will cut it off before then.