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20.47 Powell Means September, Whatever He Doesn’t Say The Fed is hinting at a rate cut as strongly as it can, while leaving wiggle room if inflation or the jobs market pull a surprise John Authers Bloomberg 1 augusti 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-01/rate-cut-powell-means-september-whatever-he-doesn-t-say Fed statement https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20240731a.htm Börsen på grönt  för fjärde dagen i rad – längsta uppgångssviten sedan mars https://www.di.se/live/borsen-stanger-pa-gront-langsta-uppgangssviten-sedan-mars/ The Case Against Low Interest Rates https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-case-against-low-interest-rates.html

 ”Frans G Bengtsson. Nya perspektiv på författaren till Röde Orm” (red: Svante Nordin; Bokförlaget Stolpe)  Kristoffer Leandoer Understreckare SvD 30 juli 2024 https://www.svd.se/a/1M5MqB/hopplost-forlegad-och-standigt-aktuell

One of the least-recognized consequences of the low-rate regime is the way it undermined social cohesion by facilitating what may well be the largest wealth transfer in history, from the middle class to the highly affluent who own stocks, bonds and real estate.  Low rates might have made mortgages more affordable, but supply constraints translated cheap borrowing into higher home prices, punishing the aspiring young. Chairman Powell said recently that the Fed is convinced inflation is headed back to 2%—which means the central bank is likely to cut interest rates soon. This would be a mistake.  The most inappropriate thing imaginable for the central bank to do would be cutting its rates now. By obvious measurements, the economy is all right. Even with short-term rates stuck at roughly 5%, where they approximate something like a historical norm, America is essentially at full employment.  The economy is growing, but not so fast as to raise further inflation alarms. The stoc...

The stock market is soaring, household wealth is at record levels and investment income has never been greater.  At the same time, some families’ pandemic-era savings are running dry, and delinquencies on credit card and auto-loan payments have jumped. Warning signals are flashing for more low- and middle-income Americans, exposing a division between people whose gains are being whittled down by elevated inflation and borrowing costs and those who are benefiting from high asset prices and bond returns. Wall Street Journal 30 July 2024 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/inflation-interest-rates-wealth-loans-51d4276e Economic Data Paint a Picture of Two Americas Aaron Back Wall Street Journal 8 June 2024 https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/06/economic-data-paint-picture-of-two.html U.S. Home Prices Hit Record in June  https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/us-home-prices-hit-record-in-june.html

  Microsoft's stock takes a dive after earnings, even as earnings beat estimates Shares of Microsoft Corp. sank 7.7% in Tuesday’s after-hours session  Kronan stärktes med 7 öre  mot euron och med  5 öre till mot  dollarn. zczc

... i historia, litteratur, konst, arkitektur, folkliv och så vidare som omhuldas av specia­lister på respektive område. Eller där de finns arbetar de under en skugga. Slutligen har vi trätt in i en posthistorisk tillvaro av förmodat överhistoriska moraliska, juridiska och politiska normer. Historia som förståelseform är borta.  Den historiska förståelsen har förvandlats till en nutid som sitter till doms över det förflutna i kraft av vad man uppfattar som evigt giltiga normer.  Det betyder att humaniora som kunskapsform, byggd på ”historiskt sinne” är borta. Detta präglar världspolitiken, men också universitetsforskningen och skolutbildningen. Svante Nordin Axess 2024/5 Den snabba kunskapen – Axess Svante Nordin: Men historien fortgår Texten publiceras också i den kommande antologin Ikonoklasm: förkastandet av det förflutna / Iconoclasm: Rejecting the Past (Bokförlaget Stolpe). https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/03/men-historien-fortgar-svante-nordin.html Iconoclasm: Reje...

 Fuel poverty – it’s a term we in Britain are familiar with. It conjures up images of pensioners struggling to stay warm in winter, or families huddled under blankets, forced to choose between heating and eating. Now, as temperatures soar across the planet, billions of people in cities from Bogota to Bangkok are dealing with the same but opposite problem: they can’t afford to keep cool. The world has never been hotter – just this week, the record for the hottest day was broken for the second day in a row, when the world average surface temperature reached 17.15 degrees.  That might not sound particularly high – but the global average has been pushed up by lethal 40 and 50 degree heat waves in places like India, Pakistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa. There is a solution: air conditioning.  But for poor families in Africa and Asia who suffer the burden of the world’s hottest climates, the price tag for air conditioning is often just too high. Even the smallest units cost a minim...

  What’s to be done about Germany's inability to pull itself out of its economic mire?  Europe's largest economy has been flatlining at best for much of the past two years  Bloomberg Economics analysis estimates that half of the near 7% drop in trend growth since 2019 has been cyclical, and could recover over time.  Unfortunately, at least half of the decline is structural and may never bounce back. The German auto industry has the added conundrum of having to shapeshift from its familiar domination of the internal combustion engine toward electric vehicle manufacturing, just as China is set to flood the global market. Meantime, the southern economies of Spain, Portugal and Greece are displaying promising signs of growth. Setting monetary policy for 20 separate nations is hard enough at the best of times; when there’s such a wide economic divergence it's a recipe for disunity. The German government has deliberately written into law the Schwarze Null (black zero) rule...

Nästa sommar ska skybaren på 69:e våningen i Karlatornet på Hisingen i Göteborg vara helt klar.  Balders vd Erik Selin och Karlatornets initiativtagare Ola Serneke. Balder blev delägare 2020 när bolaget som byggde Karlatornet var rejält finansiellt pressat. Oscar Engelbert och börsbolaget Oscar Properties Kronprinsen i Malmö, som i 40 år var Sveriges högsta bostadshus, var pärlan i det bestånd som Heimstaden 2021 köpte från Akelius för rekordsumman 93 miljarder kronor. Torbjörn Isacson DI 30 juli 2024 https://www.di.se/analys/skrytbyggen-blir-finansiella-mardrommar/ Fastighetsmiljardären Erik Selin, Balder, Ola Serneke och räntan https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2022/09/fastighetsmiljardaren-erik-selin-balder.html Ola Serneke säger att han inte oroar sig - Karlatornet https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/08/ola-serneke-sager-att-han-inte-oroar.html Bostadsrättsförening vill att Oscar Properties försätts i konkurs https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/01/bostadsrattsforening-vil...

 Svenskarnas miljarder flödar in i aktiefonder. Första halvåret 2024 var fondsparandet rekordhögt. För att minimera risken väljer många att placera sina pengar i globala fonder, som brukar ses som det mest spridda fondalternativet. Men fonderna är inte så globala som de låter. – Den som går in i en globalfond har i grunden placerat en väldigt stor del av sitt kapital på den amerikanska marknaden, säger Peter Malmqvist som är oberoende börsanalytiker. Inte nog med det. I dag domineras den amerikanska aktiemarknaden nästan helt av ett fåtal bolag. Bland de svenska storbankernas globala aktiefonder har samtliga över en fjärdedel av sitt innehav i techsektorn och är tungt exponerade mot den amerikanska börsen. Detsamma gäller statliga AP7 som förvaltar premiepensionen åt fem miljoner svenskar. AP7:s aktiefond är tungt viktad mot teknik – trots att aktierna ska ha ”bred geografisk och branschmässig spridning”. Amerikanska börsen drivs i dag i stor utsträckning av techjättarna. ”Den magn...

  Amundi is an owner of the Coeur Defense project in Paris. Photographer: Zula Rabikowska/Bloomberg An increasingly critical dilemma for open-ended property funds in Europe, investment vehicles that oversee some €166 billion in assets.  I n a world where office buildings are out of favor, one of the few ways to meet redemptions is to sell other, more attractive assets, such as residential buildings, warehouses or properties than can be transformed for such uses. Funds may soon have no choice but to sell office buildings -- triggering a wave of revaluations that threaten any market recovery. Open-ended property funds in Europe have seen six consecutive quarters of outflows, according to Morningstar Inc. The data showed investors have pulled more than €12 billion since the European Central Bank began raising interest rates in July 2022, leaving net assets at the lowest level in five years. Bloomberg 30 July 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-30/europe-open-ende...

  The national median existing-home price in June rose to $426,900, a record in data going back to 1999 and a 4.1% increase from a year earlier Prices aren’t adjusted for inflation. Wall Street Journal Updated July 23 2024 https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/u-s-home-prices-hit-record-in-june-for-second-consecutive-month-cbe00c76 https://www.ekonomifakta.se/sakomraden/makroekonomi/bostader/bostadspriser_1208975.html

  U.S. Home Prices Hit Record in June https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/us-home-prices-hit-record-in-june.html OBS Ränta 10 år Sverige 2,0 USA 4,14 Fastator står fortfarande utan revisor och bryter därmed mot aktiebolagslagen.  Förblir investmentbolaget utan revisor riskerar det att försättas i likvidation av Bolagsverket. DI 29 juli 2024 https://www.di.se/nyheter/40-tillfragade-men-ingen-vill-vara-fastators-revisor/   Fastator Björn Rosengren och Carl Bildt https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/02/fastator-bjorn-rosengren-och-carl-bildt.html Ambrose: The eurozone has stagflation https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/ambrose-eurozone-has-stagflation.html

Energy companies are working to adapt to record-setting temperatures, floods and windstorms, as climate models forecast the weather will keep getting wilder.  But researchers caution that the effects of global warming and current extreme-heat conditions still aren’t well understood, making solutions hard to come by. Over the past five years, the U.S. has seen an average of 20 weather-related disasters a year with a price tag of $1 billion or more, adjusted for inflation, compared with a 43-year average of 8.5, according to data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  There have already been 15 such disasters this year through June. Wall Street Journal 29 June 2024 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/extreme-weather-climate-change-power-grids-5df41b9c?mod=hp_lead_pos10 What happens when the AI revolution meets the energy transition? A search by Chatgpt may consume ten times the electricity of googling. International Energy Agency says that by 2026...

Germany never ceases to disappoint, held back by ordoliberal ideology and by a dysfunctional coalition that can agree on nothing. Germany has shed more than half a million jobs since early 2022 and the unemployment rate has ratcheted up to 6pc.  It is tightening fiscal policy by 1pc of GDP this year to comply with the country’s debt-brake and an austerity ruling by the constitutional court.  It has slashed public investment to the bone even though Germany’s infrastructure is famously disintegrating.   The euro bloc is in scarcely better cyclical shape  cost inflation picked up at the same time. This nasty mix has a whiff of 1970s stagflation New export orders fell for the 29th successive month, exposing euroland’s second Achilles’ heel: the region is paying the price for a chronic dependency on foreign demand to keep growth alive.  That is a risky formula in a world where China is playing the same game on a galactic scale, flooding markets with exports at c...

The odds of an all-out war between North and South Korea are very low, but they aren’t zero.  The Seoul metropolitan region — within range of Kim’s artillery — is home to about 26 million people, roughly half of South Korea’s population. The capital and surrounding areas account for 81% of South Korea’s chip production and 34% of its total manufacturing output. Like Taiwan, South Korea’s role as a major chip producer means its importance to the global economy goes beyond the size of its GDP. Samsung Electronics — among the world’s top 30 firms by market capitalization — produces 41% of the world’s DRAM chips and 33% of NAND memory chips. Its products are crucial inputs for companies from Apple Inc. to the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. Bloomberg 28 July 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-korea-war-threatens-trillions-for-global-economy/

Fondbolagen höjer sin lönsamhet när kapitalet ökar. Swedbanks fondbolag Robur, noterade en vinst på drygt 2,4 miljarder kronor.  I sin årsredovisning skriver Robur att det framför allt är utvecklingen på världens börser som bidragit till att det förvaltade fondkapitalet ökade med hela 17 procent jämfört med 2022.  SEB kan visa upp ett resultat på närmare 1,4 miljarder kronor för sin verksamhet i SEB Investment Management  Fondbolagens goda lönsamhet baseras på att fondspararna fortfarande är villiga att betala relativt höga avgifter. Den genomsnittliga fondavgiften ligger nu på 1,3 procent enligt en rapport från AMF. I kategorin aktiefonder är snittavgiften 1,45 procent av kapitalet. Svenskarnas samlade fondförmögenhet rekordhöga 7.900 miljarder kronor. Under årets första sex månader tog den svenska fondbranschen emot 103,7 miljarder kronor i nysparande, den högsta halvårssiffran någonsin.  Hans Bolander DI 29 juli 2024 https://www.di.se/nyheter/jattarnas-miljardvins...

  “I had one concern,” Scholz told reporters in June, after meeting fellow European leaders.  “Do I want to accept that we issue sovereign bonds, so-called eurobonds, for defense financing? The answer is no.” The federal constitutional court in Karlsruhe has a long tradition of policing the limits of Germany’s contributions to multinational debt raises. While Spain’s economy minister Carlos Cuerpo told Bloomberg earlier this year that the EU ought to be able to find a mechanism that’s acceptable to the red-robed judges in Karlsruhe, legal experts from inside the country aren’t so sure. Lindner, Germany’s finance minister,  has said he’s opposing joint debt for both, political and legal reasons. “Communitization of risks, liabilities and debt doesn’t contribute to stability and therefore Germany won’t support it,” he told reporters in Brussels last week. Other funding mechanisms that don’t rely on debt could be faster: like the European Peace Facility, an instrument into w...

http://www.biggles.info/ Biggles Home Page at IntCom,Internetional Communications The logic of constructing an entire financial order around one arbitrary variable such as inflation was never compelling.  This technocrat urge to fine-tune prices is a radical departure from their historic role of central banks: to ensure financial stability and act as a lender-of-last resort in a crisis.  Ambrose 1 November 2017 Riksbankens mål om 2,0 procents inflation tillkom i all hast för litet mer än 20 år sedan Inflationsmålet skulle inte ha funnits där, om Sverige hade klarat att hålla fast växelkurs.  Johan Schück, DN 2015-05-08 https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2017/11/ambrose-wolf-och-johan-schuck-om.html När man ställs inför livets svåra frågor bör man ställa sig frågan: Vad hade Biggles gjort? Så även inom nationalekonomin. De flesta Biggles-böcker börjar ungefär så här: Flygbåtens motorer brummade entonigt och Biggles lät blicken glida över instrumentbrädan.  Han kollade ...

Det säger EU-kommissionens ordförande Ursula von der Leyen Pengarna är en del av det lån om 50 miljarder dollar som G7-länderna enats om att ge till Ukraina. https://www.di.se/live/eu-overfor-1-5-miljarder-euro-i-vinst-fran-frysta-ryska-tillgangar-till-ukraina/

OpenAI, Perplexity, Suno and more—Bloomberg’s second-annual leaderboard of AI upstarts. Founded in 2022, Perplexity has speed-run the journey from tiny upstart to one of the most closely watched startups in Silicon Valley, stirring up fierce controversy along the way.  Hailed as a Google-disruptor, the company offers an AI-powered search engine and is in late-stage talks for new funding that would value it at $3 billion, making the startup the poster child for AI tools that rethink internet services as basic as search. Perplexity’s investors include big names in tech such as Jeff Bezos, SoftBank and Nvidia. Bloomberg 24 July 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-top-ai-startups/ Perplexity: Snillrik AI-sökmotor https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/perplexity-snillrik-ai-sokmotor.html

Conservatives suffered an electoral shellacking when party elites chose a leader the voters didn’t like. Consider Britain’s Conservative Party, which burned through five prime ministers in eight years and recently lost an election in crushing fashion.  Liz Truss won overwhelming support from the party membership but not lawmakers, and those lawmakers eagerly ousted her as soon as her economic-reform agenda hit political and market turbulence.  Dispiritingly for Ms. Harris, the closest analog to her situation may be Rishi Sunak.  The main feature of his career was a meteoric rise unrelated to any obvious aptitude for government or politics other than a talent for appealing to party elites. America’s genius should be its ability to do better than the democracies across the Atlantic.  We boast a highly developed primary system to vet candidates independent of elite opinion, and a boisterous federalism that allows voters to test a wide range of talents in lower offices b...

is when people put money into assets that they think are safe, and those safe assets turn out to be correlated and risky.  The more sorts of safe tranches you manufacture out of the basic raw materials of business cash flows, the more ways some of them could go wrong. Private Equity  You take a thing with some risk, you divide it into a risky first-loss piece (the equity) and a safer second-loss piece (the debt), you sell the risky piece to people who want high returns and the safe piece to people who want safety.  Matt Levine Bloomberg 24 July 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-24/private-equity-puts-debt-everywhere Private Equity   https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/search?q=Private+Equity++

  Mattias Isakson, chefsstrateg på Swedbank, kallar fallet en naturlig reaktion på att aktierna utvecklats extremt bra under lång tid på grund av en mycket stark vinstutveckling. – När det kommer lite besvikelse i siffrorna passar investerare på att ta hem en del av vinsten, säger han. Den kraftiga börsuppgången har fått en del att oroa sig för en AI–bubbla som slutar i en stor börskrasch. Trots uppgången tror Mattias Isakson tror att Magnificent seven-aktierna har mer att ge . https://www.svd.se/a/Ooo4Vw/oro-for-ai-bubbla-i-magnificent-seven-efter-borsens-fall In the perennial tussle between fear and greed, the former has seized the upper hand  Assumptions on Fed rate cuts, AI, earnings have been upended The assumptions that have driven this year’s global financial markets are being rapidly rethought. Stockholders have suddenly grown skeptical that technology companies’ massive investments in artificial intelligence will pay off any time soon.  Investors were taken aback...

  26 Dow Jones steg 1,6 procent med draghjälp från 3M, som rusade nästan 23 procent https://www.di.se/live/new-york-borsen-slutade-veckan-pa-plus-3m-rusade/ 25 Svängig dag på Wall Street slutade blandat – Ford rasade (di.se) The U.S. economy accelerated in the second quarter as consumers increased their spending, businesses invested more in equipment and stocked inventories, and inflation cooled. GDP rose at an annual rate of 2.8% for April through June  https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-economy-second-quarter-2024-485df1dc The new trend is bearish — at least for the short term A pattern of lower highs and lower lows has already emerged, which is quite bearish.  How did this happen so quickly? SPX bounced off of support at 5,500 on July 19.  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-stock-markets-cruel-summer-is-about-to-get-much-worse-75afc885 Dow Jones backade omkring 1 procent, 19 juli https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/dow-jones-industriindex-backade-omkring....

The first China shock in the 1990s and early 2000s flooded the world with cheap goods and redrew the contours of the global economy. It let multinationals exploit labour arbitrage, playing off Chinese wages against the wages of blue-collar workers in America and Europe. It lifted both the profit share of GDP and the Gini coefficient of inequality to the highest levels since the Second World War It rewarded capital while the West’s bottom half was left behind, poisoning our democracies. The emerging China shock 2.0 is even larger. The Chinese economy is today twice as big as a beast on the global stage as it was in 2007 before the global financial crisis. It is the mechanical result of structural policies pursued by the Communist Party with the stubbornness of the Ming dynasty at its worst.  This has pushed China’s trade surplus to a record $100bn a month, surpassing the total share of global GDP reached at the peak of the China shock 1.0. China is the victim of its own strategy. It...

Den som det visste.  

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-deficit-in-goods-narrows-in-june-on-surge-of-exports-9ffa5c54 RE: Det är alltså typ 100 miljarder dollar i månaden. China’s trade surplus $100bn a month  https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-us-trade-deficit-in-goods-narrowed.html

  Under de senaste 15 åren har vi genomlidit en finanskris, en europeisk skuldkris, Brexit, en stökig president i USA, ett elakt virus och en inflationschock.  Ändå står Stockholmsbörsen tre gånger högre.  Strax efter finanskrisen skrev jag min första krönika i Di. I dag skriver jag den sista.  Lehmankraschen och efterspelet av den blev också förspelet till den europeiska skuldkrisen som eskalerade med Grekland Slutpunkten för skuldkrisen blev den 26 juli år 2012 när dåvarande ECB-chefen Mario Draghi kallade till en presskonferens och bedyrade att ECB kommer att göra ”whatever it takes” för att säkerställa att valutaunionen håller och att inget land tvingas ställa in sina betalningar (finare ord för att gå i konkurs). Så löstes, som bekant, skuldkrisen genom att den offentliga sektorn på överstatlig nivå lånade ut mer pengar till de länder som hade fallit ner i skuldfällan.  Det visade sig vara ett korkat beslut av Storbritannien att gå ur EU, men både unionen o...