Englund

Why Taiwan Is Such a Thorny Issue Between the US and China. Bloomberg 25 September 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-25/why-taiwan-is-the-most-volatile-issue-for-us- china-relations In April, the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party traveled to mainland China for a red-carpet six-day tour, the first such visit in nearly a decade. Officials treated Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of the Kuomintang, or KMT, to high-level meetings and a Shanghai river cruise. Beijing is trying to exert more influence on the ground in Taiwan. One way it hopes to do that is by working with Cheng, a 56-year-old former legislator and TV talk-show host who emerged unexpectedly last year as the head of the opposition in Taiwan and a possible future presidential candidate. Tall and telegenic, with smartly tailored suits, she has a delivery so forceful that organizers of a press briefing late last year stopped to re-test three microphones before concluding she simply speaks at what local journalis...

China is on track for another record trade surplus this year   –  cluding against the US and the EU, the very countries supposedly waging a trade war against it Focusing on China’s favoured, heavily subsidised industries risks missing something much bigger going on underneath. We still think of what’s going on as a trade war between Beijing and the West.  On one side is the China that sits in the middle of global value chains (GVCs) that are owned and influenced by foreign hands. I call this GVC China. This is the China that looks incredibly powerful on paper because standard data practices treat the goods leaving it as the country’s exports. What the data often fail to capture, however, is that the factories making the goods are foreign-owned, use imported components or technology and don’t share in any of the upside from brand and distribution On the other side sits what I would call “emancipated China”, aka the Sinochain.  This is the China working hard to ow...

When Mao died, China was still a poor and relatively isolated communist state.  Today, it is the world's second-largest economy, deeply embedded in the supply and value chains of global capitalism, with a vast private sector, a large urban middle class and a highly digitalized society.  "What Xi learned from the Cultural Revolution was not the lesson of a victim, but the lesson of power," Chang told DW.   The lesson was not that "such a system must never exist again," but rather that "whoever loses power is at the mercy of others," he added. "The conclusion Xi appears to have drawn from his own experience of the Cultural Revolution was clearly not that Mao should be completely abandoned," he told DW, "but rather that, for political reasons, Mao's historical status as the founder of the state, the military and the party must be upheld."  Wemheuer views the current CCP leadership's approach to Mao as "fundamentally Machia...

Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is a term used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) to encompass its political theories and policies. The term was first established by Deng Xiaoping in 1982. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_characteristics Deng visited Singapore in November 1978. Lee Kuan Yew told him that if Singapore Chinese who were the descendants of poorly-educated coolies could make good, how much better mainland China could be if the right policies were adopted. Besöket skulle i grunden rita om världsekonomin. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/06/deng-xiaoping-ran-china-despite-having.html "Your gateway to trusted insight and commentary from China's most influential voices – straight from the heart of Shanghai." "We will support foreign-invested enterprises to become more effectively integrated into China's vast market and encourage them to ...

  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i-looked-into-buying-a-house-in-singapore-as-an-investment-heres-why-i-didnt-despite-the-2-mortgage-rate-50c79bcf Grevgatan 26 18 500 000 kr https://www.hemnet.se/bostad/lagenhet-4rum-ostermalm-stockholms-kommun-grevgatan-26-21710945 60 miljoner kr för en villa på Bragevägen, Lidingö Singapore is positioning itself to be a major AI hub  © Lauryn Ishak/Bloomberg Singapore shrugs off Iran war https://www.ft.com/content/7c738ae1-39e5-4094-b224-605dcddaa4e0?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Deng visited Singapore in November 1978.  Lee Kuan Yew told him that if Singapore Chinese who were the descendants of poorly-educated coolies could make good, how much better mainland China could be if the right policies were adopted. Besöket skulle i grunden rita om världsekonomin. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/06/deng-xiaoping-ran-china-despite-having.html

Mercedes sold only 1,153 units in China in the first half, a fraction of the more than 80,000 similarly priced SU7 sedans Xiaomi Corp. delivered in the period.  The performance echoes the challenges BMW, Volkswagen and Porsche face in China, where they all reported second-quarter sales declines of at least 30%, worse than the overall market’s drop.  Meanwhile, the likes of Xiaomi and BYD. are taking customers from them, depriving the Germans of a key growth and profit driver.  So far, none of them has found a way to arrest the downward spiral. Bloomberg 11 August 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-08-11/mercedes-bmw-vw-struggle-in-china-with-new-evs-selling-poorly https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/10/make-mercedes-and-volkswagen-great-again.html Xiaomi SU7 https://mistore.se/pages/xiaomi-su7 Xiaomi https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/xiaomi.html

  USA-börserna nedåt – oljepriset rusar Oljepriset har successivt klättrat uppåt under kvällen sedan ett avtal mellan Iran och Oman för att öppna Hormuzsundet, uteblivit. Iran hade tidigare uppgett att ett avtal var på gång och skulle kunna bli klart under dagen. Brentoljan lyfter 6,6 procent till 87,60 dollar,  USA:s oljereserver lägsta nivån sedan 1983.  https://www.di.se/live/usa-borserna-stanger-nedat-oljepriset-rusar/ Mohsen Rezaee the new leader of the Supreme National Security Council. He replaces Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a fellow hard-liner who accepted a new position as political adviser to the supreme leader. Iran has demanded the US lift its naval blockade, withdraw forces, remove sanctions, release frozen assets and pay compensation for war damage as conditions for fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Bloomberg 9 August 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-09/wait-for-hormuz-deal-stretches-on-as-iran-says-terms-must-be-met Like all transforma...

En stor förklaring till återhämtningen på tisdagen var att flera indextunga aktier som Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft och Apple stängde på plus. https://www.di.se/live/breda-uppgangar-kompenserade-ai-raset-i-usa/ China river back from the brink.  Yangtze, running 6,300km from the Tibetan plateau to Shanghai. The heart of the Yangtze’s rescue package was a ten-year commercial fishing ban. Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, personally champions it, and in recent years local officials’ promotion prospects have been tied to environmental metrics. Officials closed or relocated thousands of chemical factories near its banks. They planted forests on its upper reaches to bind the soil together, so less slipped into the water. Ever since the 1950s the government has had a love of dams, to control floods and generate hydroelectricity. A dozen gigantic ones have been built on the Yangtze, including the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, as well as thousands of smaller ones elsewhere in the ...

  In late 1945, as the Iron Curtain was falling across Europe, a Soviet club played several British teams on a goodwill mission.  George Orwell was unimpressed. In his essay The Sporting Spirit, he argued that sport was “an unfailing cause of ill-will.” -  Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred one could deduce it from general principles… The significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. Writing when the World Cup was still a small tournament that the British teams didn’t bother to enter, he warned that you couldn’t do better to “add to the vast fund of ill-will” in the world “than by a series of...

$68bn - 656 miljarder kr - wiped off IBM on its worst day ever; more than 25pc https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/07/14/ibm-loses-68bn-in-worst-day-on-record/ ”Den första ronden i sjöslaget är slut. Nu tar vi Svarta havet” https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/den-forsta-ronden-i-sjoslaget-ar-slut.html Donald Trump’s return to war with Iran offers no clear path to victory - Behind his bravado it remains unclear how the US president will limit the economic, political and diplomatic costs of the latest escalation, particularly as the autumn midterm elections loom. Financial Times 15 July 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/7a993639-28aa-442a-8ea6-2abaa695b698 One reason prices have not risen further is that oil markets still deem it likely that, with midterm elections four months away, Mr Trump will cave. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/14/trumps-hormuz-brinkmanship-is-worsening-a-global-fuel-crunch Ja, vad kan vara viktigare än the midterm elections? T...

They worry the crackdown “is just the tip of the iceberg, and that more restrictive policies or enforcement concerning cross-border capital flows could be coming,” At stake is hundreds of billions of dollars of mainland wealth that has bolstered everything from luxury spending and real estate to the stock market. Bloomberg 23 June 2026  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-23/china-s-offshore-capital-outflow-crackdown-hits-hong-kong-wealth-boom Cayman Islands. A Sunny Place for a Shady Online Business https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-sunny-place-for-shady-online-business.html Hong Kong Overtakes Switzerland as Top Offshore Wealth Hub https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/04/mbaer-merchant-bank-liquidation-us.html

EU delays trade confrontation with China; “global macroeconomic imbalances” Leaders opt for dialogue with Beijing rather than immediate action over fears of retaliation. The EU has delayed a trade confrontation with China at a summit that exposed divisions within the bloc over how to deal with cheap imports from Beijing that have eroded European industrial output and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Despite combative rhetoric in the lead-up to the Brussels meeting, the 27 leaders opted for dialogue rather than immediate action to deal with what they called “global macroeconomic imbalances”.  Demanded the EU “stop naivety towards the long-term ambitions of China”.  Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told reporters when arriving at the summit that China is a “potential ally”. Financial Times 19 June 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/e220372c-b20e-418e-9f02-29a5aa269702?syn-25a6b1a6=1

  Risk att Space X spräcker AI-bubblan https://www.epochtimes.se/risk-att-space-x-spracker-ai-bubblan Can the stockmarket swallow SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? OpenAI Joins a Massive AI IPO Pipeline Now Worth $3.6 Trillion https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/06/9-juni-us-trade-deficit-spacex.html EU, Apple och  Digital Markets Act Eftersom EU klassificerar Iphone som en marknadsledande produkt  som omfattas av förordningen Digital Markets Act, DMA, kan Apple inte lansera appar och tjänster i EU utan att också släppa in motsvarande alternativ från andra utvecklare. I praktiken: För att få lansera nya Siri AI behöver Apple också ge andra bolag möjligheten att integrera sina motsvarande AI-tjänster lika djupt in i Iphone. Apple skriver vidare att EU-kommissionens tjänstemän gör en ”extrem tolkning” av DMA vilken skulle innebära att Apple behöver ”ge alla virtuella assistenter direkt åtkomst till användarnas privata data – och möjligheten att direktstyra andra installerade...