Englund

Gillian Tett - en av mina Gurus Tett’s past roles at the FT have included US managing editor, assistant editor, capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief, and a reporter in Russia and Brussels. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2020/07/gillian-tett-en-av-mina-gurus.html Gillian Tett hos Internetional https://internetional.se/tett.htm Two decades ago, I discovered the signalling power of credit default swaps. When the price of derivatives rises, this shows that investors are worrying that borrowers will go bust. Back then, one hint of the trouble to come was that CDS prices for mortgage bonds and banks rose — despite the cheer in equity markets. That was a proverbial canary in the coal mine. Is the same thing happening again today? Quite possibly. On Thursday August 9 2007, financial markets suddenly seized up. Since I was running the Financial Times markets team, I spent two days frantically trying to identify the reason for the panic. Nobody knew. But...

Mohammed bin Salman has led Saudi Arabia for about a decade, but the next few months will be his greatest challenge yet. The airport attack by the Houthis undercut one of the pillars of the bargain that MBS has offered his people, which includes security, prosperity and reform. MBS must somehow shore up faith in his promise to build a modern, secure and respected nation, as delivering security and prosperity is getting more difficult. Bloomberg 16 October 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-10-16/saudi-arabia-mohammed-bin-salman-is-facing-his-greatest-challenge Houthis https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/10/houthis.html

The cash flow return numbers we see from the AI companies in their investment presentations as they seek literally hundreds of billions of dollars of financing are possible for any one given company, but they are not possible in the aggregate. There will be losers. At some point, the market is going to realize that those outsized investments have to have outsized returns in order to be able to justify them. The Internet changed things far more than even most of the most enthusiastic proponents believed. I remember being skeptical of Amazon in the early 2000s. I was clearly wrong, but it took the stock price a little while to demonstrate the potential growth.  And nobody was talking about a company that would be worth $2.7 trillion in 25 years. I do believe that there will be companies in 25 years that will see a 300,000% increase. We just don’t know which ones, and it wouldn’t surprise me for it to be a new startup company that is not yet on our collective radar. Open AI, whose IPO...

In the famous televised confrontation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February 2025, Donald Trump accused the Ukrainian president of “gambling with World War III”.  Trump believed then — and probably still believes now — that western support for Ukraine risked dragging the US into a war with Russia.   Gideon Rachman Financial Times The Weekend Essay 17 October 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/3a56575e-ecfb-4fa9-af70-01aebd869729?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator.  How Cold War II Could Turn Into World War III The Persian empire is now the Islamic Republic of Iran; one might say the Holy Roman Empire has been reincarnated in the form of the European Union, at once extensive, German-centered and weak. It is not civilizations that clash, but empires. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2022/10/how-cold-war-ii-could-turn-into-world.html Det österrikisk-ungerska ultimatumet formulerades av baron Musulin von Gurmirje, en jämförelsevis jun...

  Probably not everywhere, and not as fast as the industry wants. Power is already the main constraint on AI buildout. Demand is surging. Gartner projects global data center electricity use will reach 565 TWh in 2026, up 26% from 447 TWh in 2025. It expects power demand to climb from 132 GW this year to about 290 GW by 2030. Supply plans fall short. Gartner says current utility grid supply plans are insufficient for the projected data center construction. Its analyst says AI capacity is now constrained by power availability. The bottleneck is delivery, not generation. S&P Global argues that the biggest barrier is a lack of transmission and substation capacity, not a shortage of power generation. Transformers, lines, and permitting move far slower than chip production. Costs and politics. Uptime Institute expects power costs to rise in tier-one markets, developers to move to second-tier locations, and data centers possibly to be required to join demand-response programs...

That bet has paid off handsomely so far. But the scale of the boom—and its expanding reach into more economies—is seeding new worries about the global consequences if the AI mania ends.  It probably won’t just be stock investors that get burned if boom turns to bust, the International Monetary Fund said. The world could be looking at a sharp pullback in growth that hits both rich and poor countries alike,  according to one scenario included in the fund’s fall projections. The scenario wasn’t a forecast.  Even if a crash can be avoided or managed, powerful AI-assisted cyberattacks on banks and other financial institutions represent a new threat to the stability of the global financial system, the IMF warned. In the U.S., the money spent on data centers and related infrastructure is expected to top more than $10 trillion in the seven years through 2032. “I’d say the advent of this new technology is probably the most consequential change to the U.S. and the global economy in...

Germany and France are joining forces to scrap a landmark European Union goal to reach climate neutrality for cars by 2035 to protect their domestic industries. The two countries will lobby for a significant watering down of a key pillar of the EU’s green deal to reach net-zero by 2050, including lowering overall emissions cuts for autos to 90% by 2035. Paris and Berlin will push to lower overall emissions cuts for autos to 90% by 2035, without having to compensate the remaining 10% through offsets via green steel and renewable fuels If agreed by EU legislators, the Franco-German deal would mean the goal of reaching climate neutrality in cars no longer exists. Bloomberg 16 October 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-16/france-germany-reach-deal-on-future-of-european-auto-industry EUs dråpslag mot Stegra och SSAB  Stegra och SSAB har satsat hundratals miljarder på att kol ska bli dyrt och fossilfritt stål lönsamt. Nu pekar mycket på att EU mildrar utsläppskraven för...

Abdulmalik  al-Houthi saying that Riyadh’s ties with Washington — and by extension Israel — made it an unworthy custodian of Mecca, suggesting Yemenis would be better placed to guard Islam’s holiest city. “We are also the most devoted to Mecca and the Ka’bah, and the ones most entitled to support and defend them, rather than the treacherous, proxy Saudi regime,” he said. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/10/houthis.html IMF: The global economy is betting the house on artificial intelligence. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/10/imf-global-economy-is-betting-house-on.htm l De amerikanska börserna avslutade veckan tungt nedåt efter fortsatt AI-oro och ett stigande oljepris. Oljepriset steg med närmare 4 procent under fredagskvällen och Brentoljan handlades som högst till 109,9 dollar per fat – vilket innebar den högsta nivån sedan i maj. https://www.di.se/live/hogt-oljepris-och-ai-oro-sankte-wall-street/ The stock market has already crashed Even with the S&P 500  r...

The Cleveland Fed’s trimmed mean (stripping out the greatest outliers in either direction) is stuck above 2% and is moving in the wrong direction. Try my colleague Justin Fox’s revised and re-released The Myth of the Rational Market. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060598999?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback This is my review of the book from 2009, before we were colleagues.  https://www.ft.com/content/08bc21d8-5395-11de-be08-00144feabdc0 John Authers Bloomberg 15 October 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-10-15/hot-inflation-isn-t-playing-along-with-trump

  Shares of Bank of America sank into a bear market Wednesday, as the banking giant followed news of a massive government fine with earnings that missed expectations, citing weakness in its investment banking and trading businesses. Investors had already braced for the worst, after the U.S. Treasury Department said late Tuesday it was imposing penalties of more than $1.21 billion against Bank of America for violations of anti-money-laundering laws. MarketWatch 14 October 2026 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-of-america-adds-a-profit-miss-to-the-misery-of-a-1-2-billion-government-fine-d4420bfa RE: 12 miljarder kronor i böter är mycket.  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-15/zara-billionaire-owner-ortega-buys-550-million-chicago-tower De amerikanska börserna vände upp över nollstrecket. https://www.di.se/live/ai-frossan-lindrades-wall-street-vande-till-gront/ Stockholmsbörsen stängde ned på torsdagen. Rapporterande Nordea föll kraftigt medan Ericssons rapport ...

 “The cloud” is a marketing term. In real life it is a warehouse of expensive computers, a power line, a cooling plant and a cable. Every one of those can be hit. Some already have been. In March, Amazon Web Services, cloud arm, said two of its facilities in the U.A.E. had been “directly struck” by drones.  In September, AWS said it could not restore several sites in Bahrain and one in the U.A.E., and that it had “exhausted every option” to restore some data hosted in Bahrain. The data was not in the cloud. It was in Bahrain. Then there is the plumbing. More than 90% of data capacity between Europe and Asia runs through cables under the Red Sea, which enter through Bab al-Mandeb, a strait about 16 miles wide. Charlie Garcia MarketWatch 14 October 2026 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-irans-2-trillion-threat-puts-your-ai-stocks-at-risk-2721af43 https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/10/houthis.html

  Tunga fall bland teknik- och AI-bolag. https://www.di.se/live/rod-stangning-i-usa-tekniksektorn-pressades/ Finansinspektionens nya pålaga på SEB väcker frågor om det allra heligaste på en bank. Aktien faller tungt. I ett skräckscenario finns det risk för att såväl återköp som extrautdelning ryker – och då är även börsindex hotat. Tillsynsmyndigheten Finansinspektionen, FI, har beslutat att ålägga SEB ett ”tillfälligt påslag på bankens kapitalkrav” efter ”omfattande brister” i dess interna kreditriskmodeller.  Johan Wendel DI 14 oktober 2026 https://www.di.se/analys/stjarnsmall-for-wallenbergs-bank/ Ljusgrön börsstängning – stort fall i SEB Det breda OMXSPI avslutade dagen upp 0,2 procent medan storbolagsindexet OMXS30 avslutade dagen oförändrat. Indexen tappade runt 0,5 procentenheter vardera efter att de amerikanska inflationssiffrorna kommit in något högre än väntat. Bland storbolagen gick dagen klart sämst för SEB, som föll 4,6 procent. Banken, vars vd Johan Torgeby avgic...

Nu vet jag det, genom en artikel i Dagens industri av Magnus Dagel. - Flera ekonomer / Ruchir Sharma FT 1 Juni 202 6/ för fram den så kallade ”Kalecki-Levy ekvationen” för att förklara vinstexplosionen.  Det är en makroekonomisk formel som förenklat säger att statens underskott är näringslivets överskott. Kalecki-Levy-ekvationen är en makroekonomisk teori som arbetades fram under 1930- och 1940-talet av den polske ekonomen Michał Kalecki och den franske ekonomen Jerome Levy oberoende av varandra. Bakgrunden till deras teoretiska arbete var att förstå vad som skapar ekonomiska kriser men också vad som driver tillväxt och vinster i en ekonomi. Enligt deras teori är statens underskott en spegelbild av det privata näringslivets överskott. Budgetunderskott med stora stimulanspaket och låga skatter sipprar ut i ekonomin och skapar i slutänden vinster i näringslivet. Omvänt leder minskade budgetunderskott till att pengar dras tillbaka från ekonomin och att vinsterna därmed riskerar att ...

Aktuellt 13 oktober 2026 https://www.svtplay.se/video/KN33RgQ/aktuellt/misslyckandet?video=visa&position=1722

Det enda som verkligen intresserar folk är vad som händer och skall hända med räntan på bolånen. Detta på goda grunder eftersom de svenska hushållens bolåneskulder ligger i världstopp, liksom bopriserna. Den som har ett bolån bör vara glada över att Riksbanken på något vis har sett till att räntorna är låga vid en internationell jämförelse.  Riksbanken vet nämligen att många villaägare och bostadsrättshavare skulle råka i svårighter om räntan gick upp. Då skulle bankerna, tidigare affärsbanker, numera bolånebanker, få problem, som 1992. Europeiska Central Banken, ECB, måste dock tänka på många andra saker när de sätter räntan för hela Euroland.  Alla som säger att vi bör gå med i euron - man vill ju vara modern - borde tänka en gång till.   Det tråkiga för länder som är med i EMU är att hela deras statsskuld, liksom alla privata skulder, är i euros, vilket för dem är en utländsk valuta, i meningen att landets centralbank inte kan framställa mer av den med viljekraft. http...

Det tråkiga för länder som är med i EMU är att hela deras statsskuld, liksom alla privata skulder, är i euros, vilket för dem är en utländsk valuta, i meningen att landets centralbank inte kan framställa mer av den med viljekraft. Ett vanligt land, som Sverige, som inte är med i någon valutaunion, har skulder, privata och offentliga. En del skulder är i kronor, andra är i utländsk valuta. En viktig skillnad är att den del av statsskulden som är denominerad, som det heter, i svenska kronor alltid kan betalas. Nuförtiden behövs det inte ens en sedelpress. Det räcker med att någon på riksbanken skriver in ett belopp och trycker på enter. Värre är det med skulder i utländsk valuta. De lån som är denominerade i euro måste betalas med euros. Riksbanken kan inte klicka fram euros, inte ens om Riksbanken efter ett EMU-inträde blir en underavdelning av ECB. Det tråkiga för länder som är med i EMU, som t ex Grekland, Spanien, Italien, Irland och Portugal är att hela deras statsskuld, liksom alla...

A circular funding model is accelerating the AI boom, but also amplifying imbalances — reviving memories of the global financial crisis. Investors and economists asking whether the artificial intelligence boom is being financed in the same unstable way that unraveled in the 2007-08 subprime crisis, and what happens if the promised profits are slow to arrive. An AI boom creating massive demand for high-end chips and new pools of savings in places that make them like South Korea and Taiwan which are flowing to fund American tech companies and their $9 trillion AI build out. In an October paper, economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of the Columbia Business School calculated that by 2032 the cumulative investment in AI-related infrastructure would reach nearly $9 trillion, which would see it significantly outstrip the 19th century railroad boom as the largest capital expenditure spree in US history as a share of GDP. Debts and obligations to finance that are piling up. Amazon.com Inc., Microso...