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Panmure Liberum analysts said the S&P 500 is valued at 41 times earnings under the Shiller CAPE ratio, near the record high of the dot-com era. BCA Research chief strategist Peter Berezin warned that once an earnings bubble peaks, stocks could fall between 30% and 50%. If you ask a bull to list three reasons why stocks aren’t in a bubble right now, they’re bound to bring up the forward price-to-earnings ratio. Analysts like to compare the price of a stock with the amount of earnings per share the company is expected to earn over the next 12 months.  While stock prices have soared lately, Wall Street earnings estimates have been rising even more quickly. If one were to adjust recent earnings to account for a more normal pace of growth, the Shiller CAPE ratio would swell to 67.6, or 4.6 standard deviations above the long-term trend.  This would surpass the peak of every other asset bubble in U.S. history, the analysts wrote. Joseph Adinolfi MarketWatch 6 July 2026 https://ww...

The world only embarked on the experiment of fiat currencies when US President Richard Nixon took the dollar off gold in 1971. The so-called Bretton Woods 2.0 system was not planned in Washington. It was adopted in the late 1990s as a form of self-insurance by emerging markets seeking protection against the risks of financial crisis. Above all it was China that pegged its exchange rate and began large-scale official reserve accumulation in the 2000s. This conferred on the US the exorbitant privilege of stable, official funding of twin deficits — on current account and in government budgets.   Around 2015,the accumulation of new reserves plateaued. And yet America’s twin deficits continue.  But how are they funded, if not through official reserve accumulation? In part through off-the-books holding of reserves on the balance sheets of China’s state banks and, above all, through private foreign investors acquiring US assets. America’s deficits are financed by inflows from Eu...

While scientists have long braced for climate change, the growing severity of its impacts is shocking them. Everyone is shocked. Like the Police Chief in Casablanca.  “Far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges,” wrote the late Wallace Broecker in 1995, two decades after he coined the term “global warming.” As the global average temperature rises gradually, changes on the ground can be abrupt and dramatic, hurting people and damaging property. Especially during El Niño weather phases, one of which began in June and is set to bring months of misbehaving weather. Weather emergencies are local: No one experiences heat or rain as a global average.  Insurers, bankers, emergency responders, infrastructure managers, homeowners, beachgoers — all need to know which plausibly bad or worst-case scenarios to plan for, where.   Solar is the fastest-growing power source worldwide, making up 75% of new demand...

  Surt avslut i Stockholm efter ett plötsligt fall under eftermiddagen i samband med den amerikanska börsöppningen – verkstad förlorare https://www.di.se/live/surt-avslut-i-stockholm-verkstad-forlorare/ Nytt ras i Sydkorea – Kospi handelsstoppas Det lyser rött i Asien med störst nedgångar i Sydkorea som tyngs av pressade techjättar. Kospi handelsstoppas för sjätte gången i år – efter Samsungs rapportras.  Europabörserna går mot röd öppning. DI 7 juli 2026 07.16 https://www.di.se/live/nytt-ras-i-sydkorea-kospi-handelsstoppas/ Asian equities fell as renewed selling in technology stocks deepened concerns that the AI-driven rally may have run ahead of itself. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 2%, with the chip sector coming under pressure. Samsung Electronics Co., whose shares have more than doubled this year, slid 10% despite reporting a 19-fold jump in profit. SK Hynix Inc. also fell 10% after kicking off the marketing process for its US listing, pushing Korea’s Kospi Index do...

The driver of Spain's growth is population growth via immigrant labor, with about 80% of Spanish job growth since 2022 down to the increase in foreign-born hires, with measures such as mass regularization granting residency permits to more than 1 million undocumented arrivals. RE: De flesta kommer från Latinamerika och behöver inte gå på kursen Spanska för invandrare. The other boon is tourism, which accounts for almost 13% of the economy Spain’s population has jumped to almost 50 million from 36 million a half century ago. This means more workers, more spending and more tax receipts. Spanish GDP has grown less impressively on a per-capita basis than in aggregate, enough to overtake Japan’s but still firmly behind Korea’s. On a per-hour-worked basis, there’s a persistent gap with Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Lionel Laurent Bloomberg 6 July 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-06/how-spain-outgrew-south-korea

Germany to borrow €800bn for rearmament in historic shift. Germany’s defence budget is set to reach €109bn next year. Berlin also plans to provide €11.6bn in military aid to Ukraine next year. After Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won last year’s election, Berlin amended the country’s constitutional debt brake to exempt defence spending. The borrowing plans have proved contentious, including within the CDU, which long championed the so-called Schwarze Null — the balanced-budget doctrine associated with the late finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. Financial Times 6 July 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/2ceb7472-a7bc-447e-a037-7925f037b9b5?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Germany scraps plans to build its biggest warship since second world war. Shares in defence group Rheinmetall tumble as Berlin ditches F126 frigate programme after cost overruns and delays https://www.ft.com/content/2ceb7472-a7bc-447e-a037-7925f037b9b5?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Berlin set to buy 40% stake in Franco-German tank maker KNDS https://en...

  The dollar dominance. Exorbitant privilege. “Mercury” and “Mars”.  https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-conversation-around-dollar.html Allra mest steg flera AI-relaterade bolag efter att ha rasat i slutet på förra veckan. https://www.di.se/live/gron-stangning-pa-wall-street-ai-bolagen-rekylerar/ Stockholmsbörsen stängde nedåt.  Saab fortsatte uppåt medan   Sivers och Mips båda föll tvåsiffrigt. https://www.di.se/live/rod-stangning-pa-stockholmsborsen-wDPjX/ Germany to borrow - 800 miljarder, euro - for rearmament in historic shift. Ditches frigate programme. Schwarze Null. Stabilitetspakten. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/germany-to-borrow-800bn-for-rearmament.html Spanish GDP on a per-capita basis, enough to overtake Japan’s but still firmly behind Korea’s. Spain’s population has jumped to almost 50 million from 36 million a half century ago.   https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/spanish-gdp-on-per-capita-basis-enough.html ...

In a 2017 paper, Eichengreen and colleagues contrasted what they called the “Mercury” and “Mars” theories of international currencies, so named for the Roman gods of commerce and war.  In the near-decade since that paper was published, Mars-style explanations of the dollar are ascendant. The Roman denarius, for example, spread — as we would say now — at the barrel of a gun. “Roman money was used to pay Roman soldiers,” writes Eichengreen. “It traveled with Roman armies.  Dollar dominance is “late middle-aged,” writes Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff  Walter Frick Bloomberg 2 July 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-02/can-the-us-dollar-remain-the-world-s-reserve-currency In the first Century, a merchant setting off from Rome on a journey to Cologne was able to pay his bills with the same coin, the denarius, over his entire journey. Initially, Rome safeguarded cohesion of its large empire by fire and sword, then increasingly by placing even the most remote...

A Gallup survey last fall found that 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably and only 42% say the same of capitalism. American wealth is concentrated at the top. On this narrow point, the socialists are correct.  The top 1% now holds roughly 30% of the nation’s net worth, and the bottom half holds about 2.5%. But the greatest driver of inequality over the past five years was exactly what the socialists now demand more of: large-scale government spending. When Washington floods the economy with borrowed and freshly printed dollars, the money flows first into assets owned by the wealthiest Americans—stocks, bonds, real estate.  The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero and more than doubled its balance sheet, from about $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion. As big government pumped money into the economy, assets boomed: The stock market has roughly tripled from its March 2020 low.  The wealthiest 10% of households own 89% of all stocks, according to 2021 Federal Reserve...

Iran's new regime is very different. When US President Donald Trump signed a ceasefire agreement with Iran during dinner at the Palace of Versailles last month. The 1919 treaty reshaped Europe, but its demands for huge reparations left an angry and embittered Germany and helped to set the stage for another global conflagration just 20 years later. Spegelsalen i Versailles den 18 januari 1871, när Vilhelm I utropas till tysk kejsare efter segern i fransk-tyska kriget. Dumt nog hade Napoleon III förklarat krig och förlorat. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/06/spegelsalen-i-versailles-den-18-januari.html Might the Iran deal, different in so many ways, nevertheless come to be seen as similarly fateful? The US and Israel may have sent many of the country's former leaders to early graves, but have they been replaced by even more formidable foes? Two key figures, the parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and the commander-in-chief of the Revolutiona...

I dag hittade jag ånyo något på min blogg/site när jag letade efter något annat. Lars Gustafsson och kommunismen - När Jan Myrdal och jag diskuterade, år 1973 i "Den onödiga samtiden", hade jag ännu inte alls klart för mig den oerhörda omfattningen av Sovjetkommunismens och de andra kommunismernas brott, deras fundamentalt destruktiga karaktär." https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2010/09/lars-gustafsson-och-kommunismen.html 1972 var det 11 år efter Murens byggande och 19 år efter Stalins död.  Det var 36 år sedan Moskva-rättegångarna. https://www.internetional.se/rummel72.htm Det var 32 år efter Darkness at Noon, Novel by Arthur Koestler, published in 1940. The action is set during Stalin's purge trials of the 1930s and concerns Nicholas Rubashov, an old-guard Bolshevik who at first denies, then confesses to, crimes that he has not committed.  Reflecting Koestler's own disenchantment with communism, the plot examines the dilemma of an aging revolutionary who can n...

  Ön Ithaka Foto: Nasa Johnson Space Center Homeros hjälteepos ”Odysséen” är ett av världslitteraturens mest inflytelserika litterära verk och har i snart 3 000 år gjort sig påmint i kulturen på olika sätt. I Margaret Atwoods roman ”Penelopiaden” (2005) blir hjälten Odysseus utsatt för en mycket hård kritisk granskning. Perspektivet är Odysseus fru Penelopes, och i långa utgjutelser berättar hon om sin makes lögner, hans otrohetsaffärer och inte minst hans frånvaro som make och far. Att vi fortfarande fascineras av originalet är för att vi läser berättelsen om Odysseus som ett äventyr. Som mytisk berättelse har ”Odysséen” vidare en djupt existentiell mening, då den berättar om vägen från kaos till ordning, från villfarelse till insikt och på så vis talar till oss genom årtusendena. Odysseus strävan efter att återvända till Ithaka handlar om sökande efter ursprung och identitet och om att hitta en meningsfull plats i tillvaron. Tyvärr reduceras detta ofta till social eller politisk ...

What has America ever done for us? On this anniversary, it seems only right to think about this question. There are some very easy answers.  Cutting-edge technological advances, the American dream and the generation that fought for freedom in the second world war.  But if it weren’t for the greatest generation, we’d all be speaking German now. Well, not the British obviously. We’ve always been hopeless with languages.  So, 250 years on, what are America’s greatest hits?  Robert Shrimsley Financial Times 3 July 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/f61eb897-ff73-4943-ae5e-9d96c61ee3b8?syn-25a6b1a6=1 What has Rome ever done for us That line is from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the joke answer is: quite a lot — aqueducts, sanitation, roads, education, wine, public order, irrigation, fresh water, public health, and peace. There are strong similarities between Rome and many later political systems, not only the modern United States.  The emperor has to be seen, has to...

  Länge hade uppsägningar på Volkswagen betraktats som otänkbara. Europas största industribolag vilade på ett 30-årigt samhällskontrakt: ingen skulle bort. Reuters kunde i veckan berätta att 100 000 VW-jobb nu ska bort.  Första halvåret skakar också Tysklands två andra kronjuveler: Mercedes-Benz och BMW, i ett EU som nyss såg sig som världsledande i spjutspetsteknik https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/bilindustrin-med-138-miljoner-anstallda.html Nytt indexrekord på Stockholmsbörsen DI 3 juli 2026, 09:15 https://www.di.se/live/nytt-indexrekord-pa-stockholmsborsen/ Veckan bjöd på gröna siffror och avslutades med stängningar på nya rekordnivåer för de viktigaste indexen på Stockholmsbörsen. Breda OMXSPI hade stigit med 3,3 procent när veckan summerades. https://www.di.se/nyheter/veckans-vinnare-och-forlorare-pa-rekordsborsen/ If you thought the global financial crisis was bad… https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/if-you-thought-global-financial-crisis.html Dagen innan ...

Within a few, artificial intelligence will displace a significant portion of the world’s highly paid knowledge workers. Flows into retirement investment accounts will turn net-negative: workers won’t just stop paying in, they will need to withdraw funds.  These outflows will come largely from passive investment funds, particularly S&P 500 index trackers. “Jevons paradox”—the historical experience that new technology that increases efficiency also increases demand, thereby creating new jobs that offset losses. Even if demand for services and products increases because of falling costs and prices, many displaced workers will still be obsolete The job displacement will fall disproportionately on highly educated, well-paid workers whose retirement savings drive America’s stock markets.  The resulting crash in equity prices, particularly combined with falling aggregate demand, will itself be enough to cause a financial crisis on the scale of the global one of 2007-09, if not la...

När var samhället mest moraliskt, gemenskaperna mest sammansvetsade, familjerna lyckligast, ekonomin starkast, nyheterna mest pålitliga och modet, musiken, filmerna och idrottsprestationerna bäst?   När du själv stod på topp. Studier visar att allt detta faktiskt var bäst ungefär samtidigt: någon gång mellan din första och 30:e födelsedag.  Visst är det underbart med sommarlov? Fast det är ju inte som när man var barn direkt. Du vet, solen och baden. Planlösa äventyr och kvällar som aldrig tog slut. Lust och fägring stor. Inget sommarlov i dag kan konkurrera med det – för det är en idealiserad bild skapad av vårt opålitliga minne. Psykologen Clay Routledge menar att nostalgi inte alls är en passiv blick bakåt, utan en effektiv överlevnadsmekanism. Vårt minne har inte utvecklats för att ge oss en detaljerad bild av det förflutna som det faktiskt var, utan för att hjälpa oss i stunden och peka oss i rätt riktning.  Vi romantiserar det förflutna för att det hjälper oss ...

USA-börserna väntas inleda torsdagen med uppgångar. Jobbrapporten för juli visade på färre nya jobb  DI 2 juli 2026   https://www.di.se/live/klart-farre-nya-jobb-an-vantat-i-usa-Wpvy7/ Återigen sålde investerare av teknikaktier. Investerare oroas över teknikaktiers utsikter efter de stora uppgångarna tidigare i år, med tvivel kring om AI-investeringarna kommer att löna sig.  Oron driver kraftiga svängningar när handlare växelvis minskar riskerna och köper i dippar, skriver Bloomberg. https://www.di.se/live/blandat-pa-wall-street-teknikaktier-foll/ Börsen stänger upp – Saab rusade Nato planerar att ersätta sin flotta av Awacs-plan med Global Eye-övervakningsplan från Saab.  https://www.di.se/live/borsen-stanger-upp-saab-rusade/ Hur länge kan festen fortsätta? ”Ett bra tag till”, svarar Handelsbanken Global Digitals förvaltare Niklas Lundin samtidigt som han pekar ut en tydlig säljsignal.  I det stora hela ser han de senaste dagarnas nedgångar i sektorn som e...

The current bull market has seen outsized returns for many years, with US equities having gained more than 100 per cent since October 2022.  While there were shortlived pullbacks in 2022 and in the pandemic, there has been an overall 10-fold increase since the end of the financial crisis in 2009. The enthusiasm for US equities has pushed valuations into extreme territory. The market is valued on 28.4 times trailing earnings, 40 per cent above the average of the past 40 years.  Every major bull market peak of the past 125 years was preceded by a sharp rise in policy rates.  For this bull market to come to an end, the momentum of the AI “bubble” will have to burst.  For now, it is likely that this AI-driven bull market will probably persist.  Ian Harnett Financial Times 1 July 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/19fa80bb-1c8e-44ac-bfba-ba8da321be6d?syn-25a6b1a6=1 The writer is co-founder and chief investment strategist at Absolute Strategy Research   When the tim...

Regeringen för nu en finanspolitik som är kraftigt expansiv. Enligt Riksgäldens senaste prognos blir underskottet nära 200 miljarder kronor i år och drygt 200 miljarder kronor nästa år.  Detta är långt från det överskott på cirka 25 miljarder som ramverket föreskriver. Enligt LO-ekonomernas bedömning motiverar den höga arbetslösheten stora ekonomiska stimulanser för att få fart på tillväxten och sätta folk i arbete. Men då krävs också att resurserna används på ett sätt som effektivt bidrar till detta. Offentliga investeringar har en hög multiplikatoreffekt I stället har tiotals miljarder adderats till den svenska statsskulden genom sänkta konsumtionsskatter men också skattesänkningar som i hög utsträckning riktas till höginkomsttagare. Några tydliga exempel är förstärkningarna av jobbskatteavdraget på inkomster över 60 000 kr/mån, slopad flygskatt och sänkt skatt på (redan lågt beskattade) investeringssparkonton.  Inför nästa år lovar nu statsministern att staten ska låna ännu...