Englund

i n particular by agreeing to a eurozone budget and finance minister.  The one part of the EU where Mr Macron gets full-throated support is Brussels.  In the corridors of the European Commission, the French president is regarded as a hero. Gideon Rachman FT 30 April 2018

The first quarter of 1975 saw the end of the most savage bear market for stocks since the 1930s. John Plender FT 25 April 2018

Just a few days ago the IMF warned about the risks of overheating in risky loan and bonds markets.  “Signs of late cycle credit dynamics are already emerging in the leveraged loan market,” the IMF Global Financial Stability Report observes, noting that “in some cases, [this is] reminiscent of past episodes of investor excesses”. Gillian Tett FT 26 April 2018

To be sure, Edwards will eventually get the last laugh as the constant, artificial interventions assure that the (final) crash will be unlike anything ever experienced:  "a recession delayed is ultimately a recession deepened as more and more credit excesses have built up, Minsky-like, in the system." zerohedge 25 April 2018 Minsky

By all metrics, prices are heating up. But the same can't be said for economic activity. Danielle DiMartino Booth Bloomberg 24 april 2018

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yields-pull-back-as-us-10-year-government-bond-march-to-3-stalls-2018-04-24

Where consensus did prevail, it proved to be misguided.  Economists of all ideological stripes cheered on the financial deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s. The work of thinkers like  Hyman Minsky  and  Charles Kindleberger , whose writings on financial excess were rediscovered after the financial crisis, gathered dust. In a speech in 2005 to central bankers,  Raghuram Rajan , an academic who later ran India’s central bank, warned of the risks building within the financial system. He got a chilly reception. The Economist 19 April 2018

The 10-year inflation break-even — the rate of inflation at which inflation-linked and fixed income bonds would pay the same, and hence the implicit forecast rate of inflation — is rising. It is the highest in four years, close to 2.2 per cent; low in historical terms, but above the Fed’s target. FT 21 April 2018

Under the current plan, certain creditors are designated in advance to absorb a failed bank’s losses once the equity is wiped out.  Those creditors’ debts are thus riskier, and should be more expensive to the bank than the debt that is not designated to be turned into equity.  Yet the Fed economists conclude that, in the market, this is not the case. Why? Mark Roe, professor at Harvard Law School, Project Syndicate 17 April

The policy – if you can call it that – puts the US on an untenable debt trajectory.  It smacks of Latin American caudillo populism, a Peronist contagion that threatens to destroy the moral foundations of the Great Republic. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 18 April 2018

För att få en skymt av inblick i "det djupa EU" rekommenderar jag en krävande bok: "Adults in the Room" av Yanis Varoufakis, som under en kort tid var Greklands finansminister.  Dess knappt 500 sidor borde vara obligatorisk läsning, icke minst för alla oss som gillar EU-tanken. Den allra viktigaste lärdomen är att EU:s helt avgörande maktcentrum ligger i Berlin. Varoufakis redogör för sina samtal och förhandlingar med Schäuble. De båda var överens på en bestämd punkt; att Grekland var statsfinansiellt bankrutt. Varoufakis sökte förgäves räddningen i en skuldavskrivning. Schäuble ville rädda tyska och franska banker undan kreditförluster och undvika spridningseffekter till andra länder. SvD 10 februari 2018 - Den stora risken var att Grekland skulle utlösa en kris i italienska, franska och tyska banker.  Nu finns i praktiken en EU-garanti för de utestående grekiska statsobligationerna. Anders Borg, TT, SvD papper 22 februari 2012

Ms Merkel endorsed the idea of turning the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s financial rescue fund, into a regional version of the IMF. But she said it would have to be created through treaty change. FT 17 April 2018 Ms Merkel does not say “no” to eurozone bonds. She says: “Not without treaty change.”  The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe would never allow Germany’s sovereign guarantee to be given to its eurozone partners without them submitting to effective and centrally budgeted discipline. Financial Times 31 May 2012 Read more here

As soon as people start to think a bank is going bust, it’s doomed.  So it needs enough equity to absorb severe losses and continue operating.  Bloomberg Editorial 16 April 2018

It looks very simple, but looks can be deceiving. The lines on the graph are totally hypothetical!  We can’t actually observe how much people would buy and sell at hypothetical prices.  All we can see is how much people do buy and sell in the real world.  According to the theory, that’s the point where the supply and demand curves meet.  That’s very little information. Noah Smith Bloomberg 13 april 2018

World War I was coming to a close, millions of soldiers were still traveling across the globe, aiding the spread of the disease.  While its exact origins are still debated, it’s understood that the “Spanish Flu” did not come from Spain. The Atlantic 10 April 2018

Matthew C Klein FT Alphaville 6 March 2018 https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/06/2199378/benn-steil-explains-the-marshall-plan/ https://www.cfr.org/book/marshall-plan Enligt Riksbanken uppgick den 31 december 1991 svenska företags och hushålls utlandsskuld till totalt 693 miljarder kr. Om man därtill lägger att utlänningarna köpt svenska likvida SEK-obligationer för 98 miljarder blir den svenska utlandsskulden 791 miljarder kr (cirka 140 miljarder dollar, vilket är mer än Brasiliens utlandsskuld).  Den totala svenska bruttoskulden var över 1 000 miljarder, inkl. stat och kommun. Det är mycket pengar. Som jämförelse kan nämnas att Marshall-hjälpen uppgick i dagens penningvärde till dryga 400 miljarder kr och att det totala börsvärdet av de svenska företagen nu är cirka 450 miljarder kr. "Stålbadet i skuldfällan" Rolf Englund på DN Debatt 26/8 1992 http://www.internetional.se/dn92.html

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/assumptions-equal-problems

Det är den sjätte månaden i rad som USA:s handelsunderskott ökar och är det största på nio år. OBS att underskottet är på en månad. SvD/TT 5 april 2018

On January 2nd 1672 King Charles II defaulted on the collateralized treasury obligations The amount of debt on which England defaulted was approximately one year’s worth of government tax revenues Moshe A. Milevsky MarkeWatch 5 April 2018

It’s because these authorities face the wrong incentives. Nassim Taleb, via zerohedge, 4 April 2018

Years of ultra-low interest rates and low volatility have dulled sensitivity to the leverage and currency mismatch risks inherent in ever more widespread carry trading. John Plender FT 4 April 2018

Han hymlar inte heller med fakta som sätter Marcus Wallenberg i sämre ljus, då han menar att Wallenberg låg bakom politikernas uppfattning att så hårt tro på fasta växelkurser.  Kronförsvaret fungerade som en räddningsaktion för stora aktörer som SEB.  Istället vältrades kostnaderna över på svenska skattebetalare. Stora banker hann lösa in sina utlandslån innan kronkursen föll. Författaren summerar om Lars Wohlin, ”Kampen mot euron är en insats som måste skrivas in i historieböckerna, detta trots att de medier vars agenda var att driva in oss i euron, av naturliga skäl, tystnade väldigt snabbt i ämnet efter september 2003.” Dick Erixon, Samtiden, 1 april 2018

They discuss his career as a writer, networks and hierarchies, how history gets written, the similarity between the 16th century and the 21st, the role of social media in the 2016 Presidential election, the influence of advertising on the public sphere, Trump, the Russian investigation, Islamic extremism, counterfactuals, what would have happened if Clinton had won the presidency, immigration in Europe, conspiracy theories, capitalism, globalization, communism, wealth inequality, universal basic income, Henry Kissinger, the prospect of a US war with China, cyberwar, and other topics 18 February 2018

preferring backward-looking indicators such as unemployment and wage growth.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 3 April 2018