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Ebola Bundibugyo  The Democratic Republic of the Congo is gearing up to roll out an Ebola vaccine with some doses being used as part of a trial to see if it is effective against the Bundibugyo species of the virus that is currently circulating in the country. The Ervebo vaccine does help protect against the Zaïre species of Ebola but currently there are no proven vaccines or treatments for Bundibugyo. The rollout comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a new warning that Ebola was "growing exponentially" in the north and east of DR Congo and the spread of infections now covered an area bigger than France. BBC 21August 2026 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxe9n0vxzdo Pragvåren slutade med att Warszawapaktens makter invaderade Prag den 21 augusti 1968 https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragv%C3%A5ren Pragvåren och invasionen var det viktigaste och mest bestående av allt som brukar betecknas som "68". Det som då hände visade att kommunismen inte lät sig refor...

Att USA säljer euro för att stötta den japanska yenen riktar fokus mot landets egna förment riskfria obligationer. USA:s och Japans gemensamma insats för att skicka upp värdet på den japanska yenen.  1985 Plaza Accord. Detta avtal undertecknades på Plaza Hotel i New York efter att USA drivit på för att försvaga dollarn genom att hota med kraftiga importtullar efter att bytesbalansen hade blivit kraftigt negativ och den amerikanska globala konkurrenskraften försvagats. USA fick då igenom en kraftig revalvering av framför allt den japanska yenen och den västtyska D-marken.  På tre år sjönk den amerikanska dollarn med nästan 50 procent mot en handelsvägs korg av andra valutor. RE: När dollarn försvagas går kronan upp. Dollarn kostade drygt fem kronor 1992. Men den kursen skulle försvaras, ansåg Carl Bildt som ville avskaffa kronan och ansluta oss till euron.  Något har hänt med de amerikanska statsobligationerna. Räntan har stadigt tickat uppåt relativt inflationen under lån...

Wall Street vänder till rött medan oljepriserna tar fart uppåt.   Iran kommer inte låta fartyg kopplade till USA eller Israel få passera Hormuzsundet i det kommande avtalet med Oman. DI 6 augusti 2026, 19:22 https://www.di.se/live/iranutspel-far-wall-street-att-vanda-ned/ Iran will seek to bar US and Israeli ships from the Strait of Hormuz  and require compensation from hostile countries before they’re allowed to use it, according to local media reports on a proposed Iran-Oman deal to manage the crucial waterway. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-06/iran-seeks-bar-on-us-ships-in-hormuz-as-deal-with-oman-advances Iran has said a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is in its "final stage" if the US doesn't obstruct it.  https://www.dw.com/en/middle-east-hormuz-deal-near-idf-soldiers-dead-in-lebanon/live-78263014 Indexen vände ned under dagen efter utspel från Iran om Hormuzsundet. https://www.di.se/live/lang-rad-rapportforlorare-pa-rott-wall-street/ Nu ho...

  The US and Iran engaged in another wave of tit-for-tat attacks, with US forces hitting Qeshm Island and southern cities in Iran, and Iran retaliating with drone strikes targeting US forces in Kuwait. The US embassy in Jordan said the airport and sea port at Aqaba had been evacuated due to a "specific and credible threat", but Jordanian authorities denied this and said operations continued as normal. The targeting of civilian infrastructure, including bridges, utilities and port facilities, has expanded beyond strictly military targets, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar expressing concern over the latest escalation. Bloomberg 19 July 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-19/us-iran-trade-more-attacks-after-two-troops-killed-in-jordan US troop deaths raise fears of a wider war as Iran hit by new strikes Jordanian airport and seaport were evacuated due to a 'specific threat,' as Kuwait and Bahrain intercept Iranian attacks. CNN 19 Jul...

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...

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...

 “Again? Didn’t we just have this debate?” This is how the opening chapter of a collection of essays published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research , on “The New Global Imbalances” , starts.  Yes, we did. We did so in the 1980s, in the 2000s and now, once again, in the 2020s. Once roughly every 20 years, it appears, the issue comes to the fore. The view of many economists today is that if a crisis is going to strike, it is likely to be triggered in the US. So, how similar are today’s conditions to those of two decades ago? What might go wrong? What should be done? How might today’s situation end? Martin Wolf Financial Times 6 May 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/72ab51ed-8dcc-46c5-8457-6944d98bf280?syn-25a6b1a6=1 US trade deficit - In March - $60 billion https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/us-trade-deficit-in-march-60-billion.html America’s investment position with the rest of the world Is the world running away from American assets? Gillian Tett 20 February 2026 ht...

Det är många PK-människor, alltför många, som genom tal och åtbörder visar att de inte skulle bli särskilt ledsna om Iran skulle gå segrande ur striden mot "Trumps USA". Men har de inte tänkt längre än deras näsor räcker?  Har de inte reflekterat över hur världen skulle se ut om ett islamistiskt Iran skulle ha besegrat USA? Vill de leva i en sådan värld? Nää, det vill dom väl inte.  Men de känner att de måste signalera att de verkligen avskyr Trump.  Låt oss för ett ögonblick ponera seger för Iran Med seger menas här ett Iran som kontrollerar Hormuzsundet och kan fortsätta att skaffa sig kärnvapen. Irans hot mot Gulfstaterna skulle tvinga dem att anpassa sig till Iran.  Det är svårt att föreställa sig vidden av den katastrof detta skulle innebära. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/04/lat-oss-for-ett-ogonblick-ponera-seger.html   Olof Ehrenkrona, Den högste ledaren Khamenei och Ronald Reagan Olof Ehrenkrona ställer frågan: Vem minns världen av igår som den s...

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warns U.S. needs an emergency ‘break-the-glass’ plan if Treasury demand collapses The plan should be ‘ready to go’ for ‘when we hit the wall,’ Paulson said. Paulson’s warning comes as investors grow increasingly concerned about the waning appeal of U.S. Treasury debt. Persistent deficits, heavy debt issuance and inflation worries have weighed on longer-term government bonds recently. Paulson said a crisis in the Treasury market would differ in a crucial way from the 2008 financial meltdown, when the U.S. government still had enough fiscal capacity to step in and contain the damage.  This time, instead of centering around the private sector, a Treasury crisis could hamper the government’s ability to finance itself. In 2008, “as bad as it was,” the government had fiscal firepower to address the credit meltdown,”   In a statement Thursday night, the Paulson Institute clarified  that Paulson was “clear that his concerns about the ...

Those of us who have long admired America as a kindred spirit and upholder of the happiest flowering of global prosperity ever known can only watch with horror as the country hurtles towards a full-blown constitutional crisis.  The Supreme Court ruling on Donald Trump’s tariffs – or rather his reaction to it – compounds the unfolding national tragedy. The White House statement announcing the new tariffs is one of the oddest documents I have ever seen.  It proclaims in bold ink that the US has a structural trade deficit of $1.2tn. It says the US net international investment position has collapsed to minus 90pc of GDP, meaning America is in hock to the world for a net $27.6tn. Drawing further attention to this is akin to screaming “fire!” in a crowded theatre.  These figures are indeed alarming, doubly so since Trump is eroding the reputational underpinnings of both the dollar and US debt. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 24 February 2026 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/busine...

Is the world running away from American assets? This week US Treasury reported that overseas investors bought a net $1.55tn of long-term US financial assets in 2025, up — yes, up — from a net $1.18tn in 2024.  What does this imply? One obvious point is it shows that fears of a “sell America” capital flight currently are wildly overdone, whatever the world thinks of Trump. The key issue is captured in the so-called net international investment position (NIIP) data, which “measures the difference between US-owned foreign assets and foreign-owned US assets”,  to cite a handy primer from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/may/understanding-net-international-investment-position But one message to absorb from this story is that if the US tech bubble implodes, the pain will spread beyond America. Forbes calculates, for example, that if US equity prices and Foreign direct investment FDI, reverted to 2019 levels,  Norway, Canada, S...

Deutsche Bank’s global currency strategist is bearish on the dollar. If the U.S. market gets riskier, the dollar no longer works as a safe-haven. Instead of rallying during periods of risk aversion, a chart of the dollar’s relationship with equities demonstrates, according to Saravelos, this not to be true. Saravelos points out that over the past year the dollar has de-correlated from the S&P If the dollar is unattractive as a portfolio hedge, the more incentive there is to reduce dollar exposure. MarketWatch Feb. 12, 2026 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/currency-strategist-who-incurred-bessents-wrath-exposes-safe-haven-myth-of-the-dollar-b4e1125d

  As long as the US runs a trade deficit and sends dollars overseas, foreign countries must find a home for those dollar revenues, with Treasuries remaining one of the main destinations, said Jim O’Neill, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. What’s more, the actual decline in China’s holdings may be smaller than official figures suggest. Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that China’s “true” holdings of US Treasuries exceed $1 trillion, far above the $683 billion reported by the US Treasury. That’s because Beijing may have obscured its footprint by shifting assets to custodians in Europe. Belgium — whose holdings are considered to include some of those Chinese accounts — has seen its Treasury ownership quadruple since the end of 2017 to $481 billion. Bloomberg February 11, 2026   https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/china-s-years-long-retreat-from-us-treasuries-flags-bigger-risks 11 februari 2026, 08:56

A question is whether current holders of US debt would be willing or even able to bear the costs of selling it, given the logic of mutual assured destruction (MAD).  If de-dollarizing governments were to coordinate a mass sale of US Treasuries and other assets, the damage to their own central banks and private financial institutions’ balance sheets would be twofold.  A mass sale of dollar assets would drive down their price, forcing banks to take a hit; and their remaining dollar assets would also fall sharply in value. Moreover the euro to appreciate sharply, damaging eurozone member states’ substantial export sectors.  Erin Lockwood Project Syndicate Feb 9, 2026 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sell-america-future-of-dollar-hegemony-by-erin-lockwood-2026-02

 It is hard to be a safe haven when trouble starts at home The Economist 5 February 2026 https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/02/05/why-the-dollar-may-have-much-further-to-fall

The idea of the debasement trade  has taken a bit of a beating over the past few days as the prices of gold and silver (and crypto coins) have fallen. King Dollar hasn’t looked so mighty of late, it still sits firmly on the throne as the world’s reserve currency. Marcus Ashworth Bloomberg February 3, 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-03/real-nasties-lurk-behind-the-mythical-dollar-debasement-trade

  Buy the dip https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/02/buy-dip.html Dagen innan https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/01/pa-fredagen-nominerades-kevin-warsh-som.html Muntert i USA. Wall Street stänger tydligt upp. Nasdaq yfte 0,6 procent, S&P 500 0,5 procent och  Dow Jones 1,1 procent. Disney rasade 7,3 procent. Nvidia backade 2,9   https://www.di.se/live/wall-street-stanger-tydligt-upp-tungt-tapp-for-disney/ https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-02-02-2026/card/bitcoin-price-drops-under-77-000-sIPnmVA6FY30XS3LbZd4 U.S. stock futures fall after bitcoin’s weekend drop, as gold and silver’s sell-off may be bleeding into other markets.  “Given the build up of positioning and leverage involved, [Friday’s gold and silver] sell-off is bleeding into other markets,”  “Effectively, a deleveraging is happening, forcing traders to sell other assets to cover losses on their losing precious metals positions. That’s contributing to t...