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 Never Have Stocks Owed So Much to So Few It’s a Churchillian moment as the market narrows with each new record. Market breadth has never been this narrow, and yet the domination by a handful of stocks continues to intensify. Half of Tuesday’s rise in the Nasdaq was attributable to four chipmaking companies — Micron., Sandisk, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia Corp. Getting back to Churchill, it’s worth listening to the audio of his speeches from 1940, when he was new to the job and defeat looked very likely. They’re familiar but still extraordinary. Listen to “Blood, toil, tears and sweat,”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80_HXIHa724 “We will fight them on the beaches,”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LncVnecLA and “Their finest hour.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jjhxeHIjvU In contemporary parlance, he held barely any cards, but nobody ever talked a better fight. John Authers Bloomberg September 23, 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-09-23/s...

  I april 1940 hade den svenske matematikprofessorn Arne Beurling placerats på Elfviks Udde. Under sin värnpliktstjänstgöring under början av 1930-talet hade han utbildats i kryptoforcering, och i slutet av maj fick han i uppdrag att forcera ett helt nytt material. Det enda han fick veta var att det var tysk trafik.  På två sommarveckor lyckades han knäcka kodningsmaskinens metod med hjälp av papper och penna och endast ett dygns insamlade meddelanden.  Genom Beurlings insats kunde man tillverka en forceringsmaskin, vilket hjälpte Sveriges regering att få förhandskunskap om många viktiga händelser under kriget – bland andra Operation Barbarossa, Tysklands anfall på Sovjetunionen.  Totalt 150 000 tyska meddelanden togs emot och dechiffrerades under perioden 1940–1943. Som mest hade försvaret 250 personer anställda på Lidingö. Men 1942 blev verksamheten en egen myndighet, Försvarets Radioanstalt, FRA, och flyttades till Lovön. https://www.lidingonyheter.se/nar-elfvik-v...

På dagens datum, den 14 juli 1683, började de osmanska turkarna belägra Wien, en kraftmätning som slutade med ett stort nederlag. Kampen vid Wien räknas i dag som den stora vändpunkten i kampen om sydöstra Europa, och en av de avgörande händelserna i världsdelens historia överhuvudtaget Kejsar Leopold flydde till Passau och lämnade greve Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg med 15 000 man att försvara staden mot omkring 120 000 osmanska soldater (det exakta antalet deltagare i belägringsarmén är okänt). Grevens hopp stod till polackerna. Kung Johan Sobieski lovade att bistå med en stark undsättningskår som kunde avtåga från Kraków i mitten av augusti, men det var långt ifrån säkert att han skulle hinna fram i tid.  Osmanerna skar av Wien från nästan alla möjligheter att erhålla livsmedel från omvärlden och i början av hösten tycktes en osmansk seger vara nära förestående. Inalles tycks Johan Sobieski, som tog ledningen för den samlade undsättnings­hären, ha fört befäl över mellan 70 000 o...

Dumt nog hade Napoleon III förklarat krig och förlorat. Nu tänker Macron bjuda sin G7-gäster på middag i Spegelsalen i Versaille. I fredsvillkoren ingick ett stort krigsskadestånd som Frankrike skulle betala.  Krigsskadestånd utdömes även efter VK1, vilet bidrog till VK2. Så det kan bli.

As historian Richard Overy noted in his 2021 book Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945 https://www.amazon.se/-/en/Richard-Overy/dp/0713995629 the modern use of “appeasement” as a pejorative term to describe any failure to act firmly against threats to Western security is misleading as a description of British and French strategy in the 1930s.  It is more useful, he argues, to describe this strategy in terms made familiar during the Cold War: “containment and deterrence.” A vital part of the British and French strategy in the 1930s was what, even then, was called deterrence. Both moved from limited military spending to large-scale and expensive military preparation.  “Rearmament was not a sudden reaction to German moves against Czechoslovakia and Poland,” Overy writes, “but a policy that had been pursued, often with considerable domestic protest, since at least 1934 In his 2017 historical novel Munich https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Robert-Harris/author/B000APBPA4 ...

 En inte ovanlig uppfattning i Sverige då https://www.svtplay.se/video/jmL9oL9/astrid-lindgren-och-kriget   RE: Jag är den förste att intyga att detta är ett undantag  i hennes skriverier. Motsatsen är ofta och starkt annorlunda. Den svenska utrikespolitikens eviga fråga. Skall vi följa Tyskland eller skall vi följa England? https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/03/den-svenska-utrikespolitikens-eviga.html Landet utanför : Sverige och kriget 1939-1940 av Henrik Berggren https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789113039527/landet-utanfor-sverige-och-kriget-1939-1940/

  Ukraina har redan i dag förmåga att utföra attacker över 2 000 kilometer från fronten. Senast i tisdags kom nya rapporter om att ännu en oljeterminal attackerats. Den här gången i Sibirien.   Men i dagsläget utförs anfallen främst av attackdrönare som har en betydligt mindre sprängkraft än en kryssningsrobot. SvD 8 oktober 2025 https://www.svd.se/a/93ypkW/karta-har-ar-platserna-i-ryssland-som-kan-attackeras-av-tomahawk RE: Som framgår av kartan kan Tomahawk nå Volgograd, som tidigare hette Stalingrad. Eskalering i Europa - europeiska styrkor kan tvingas gå in i Ukraina. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/10/eskalering-i-europa-europeiska-styrkor.html Ingen fara, fattas bara. Ai,Ai,Ai Kanske det blir räntesänkning  

In fact, the guns didn’t fall silent by September 1945. Even with the Axis powers defeated, fighting continued nearly everywhere the war had occurred, from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe to the Pacific. As explained in The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell University Press, April 2025), edited by Ruth Lawlor and Andrew Buchanan.  The Greater Second World War Edited by Andrew N. Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor | Hardcover | Cornell University Press The book proposes a much more capacious framework for the war that lengthens the conflict’s timeline and broadens its geography. Lawlor and Buchanan suggest a different chronology, one in which the war begins years earlier as Japan, Italy and Germany scrambled for more territory in Manchuria, Ethiopia and Austria.  They nudge forward the war’s end date too, pointing to the violence that took place in the months and years after 1945.  This included civil wars in Greece and China, ethnic cleansing in Eastern Eu...

  https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/hon-aker-till-japan-for-att-protestera-mot-karnvapen-tabut-ar-urvattnat   No sane person could applaud the dropping of the first bomb, and less still that of the second, which annihilated Nagasaki on Aug. 9.  Yet I defend President Harry Truman and those around him who shared responsibility for doing so. At the rate people were dying in Japan — especially prisoners in Japanese hands — more victims would have perished than the 100,000 (a conservative guesstimate) who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the struggle continued for even a few weeks longer. Moreover, during the earlier months of 1945, conventional bombing of Japanese cities by B-29s had already killed more than 300,000  one-third of these in the March 9 fire-raising assault on Tokyo. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American B-29 bombers barraged Tokyo with napalm in the most devastating aerial bombardment in history. 80th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo M...

In 1914, the automaticity of alliances led to conflagration; in 1939, the opposite was true.  The alliance system was so weak (or cowardly?) that it had no deterrent virtue. The führer was therefore able to methodically play his tricks,  from the remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936) to the invasion of Czechoslovakia (March 15, 1939).  He then took the risk of aggressing against Poland, counting on its allies' abstention. "Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich," he told his military chiefs.  The declaration of war from London and then Paris therefore came as a surprise, since the Reich was banking on a limited conflict. For although Article 5 of the treaty obliges the signatories to react, it does not postulate the use of cannons:  The parties must only take actions deemed necessary, "including the use of armed force." In short, the use of weapons is merely one option left to the free judgment of states. The war went global in 1941, not because o...

  I Polens kanske mörkaste stund 1940 deltog 150 polska piloter på brittisk sida i slaget om Storbritannien.  Över 200 000 polska soldater stod under allierat befäl i slutet av andra världskriget.  Men det fria Polen sveks av de allierade och slukades av Stalin. Fredrik Johansson SvD 25 januari 2025 https://www.svd.se/a/5Ekz9X/donald-tusk-ar-svaret-pa-donald-trump No. 303 (Polish) Fighter Squadron https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2018/11/no-303-polish-fighter-squadron.html By Copilot: After Wo rld War II, Poland was notably absent from the Victory Parade held in London on June 8, 1946. Despite the significant contributions of Polish forces during the war, the British Labour government, under pressure from Stalin, did not invite the Polish Armed Forces to the parade.  This decision was influenced by the political dynamics of the time, particularly the need to maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Polish soldiers, who had fought valiantly alongside the ...

After the fall of France in 1940, Britain’s military position against Nazi Germany was so absolutely dire that it took a reactionary of sorts, with a romantic view of national destiny, to fight on. Churchill’s romantic sense of history sometimes led him astray. In a chapter on Mussolini, Mr. Reynolds explains how Churchill’s love of the Roman Empire affected his judgment.  Even after Mussolini was executed in April 1945, Churchill opined that the Italian leader had rescued his country from the communism Churchill’s irrepressible imperialism complicated his relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt Robert D. Kaplan WSJ 19 January 2024 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/mirrors-of-greatness-review-churchills-personal-diplomacy-c8e300e3 Winston Churchill, 1940: ”We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches.   We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We sha...

 As Neill Lochery reminds us in “Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945-1948,” this double game is hardly new.  During World War II, not only Switzerland, but Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and even social-democratic Sweden engaged in ruthless profiteering with the Third Reich under the guise of nonalignment. Despite growing Allied scrutiny, the neutrals provided fleeing Nazis with passports, visas, bank accounts and escape routes to South America.  In exchange for huge quantities of illicit gold, Portugal fed the Nazi war machine with tungsten. Sweden supplied iron ore and ball bearings. Just as important were the neutrals’ success in rewriting their own stories. Highlighting its rescue missions, postwar Sweden reinvented itself as Europe’s great humanitarian power, Mr. Lochery notes, even as it “utilized the spoils of war to launch the Swedish economic miracle.” WSJ 4 January 2024 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/cashing-out-review-the-spoils-of-neutra...

Geopolitical volatility returns to the financial markets Markets do not have a great record of pricing geopolitical risk and assessing low-probability, high-impact events, or “tail risks”.  FT 15 October 2023 https://www.ft.com/content/9152bc6f-1b8e-4edc-a071-9b274d8bbe45 Back  -   Next  -   Book Home   -   Climate Change US in Frantic Bid to Avert Wider Israel War After Iran Warning US asks Qatar and China to intercede and limit spillover Bloomberg 15 October 2023 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-15/us-in-frantic-bid-to-avert-wider-israel-war-after-iran-warning Henrik Berggren Han tillämpade en särskild metod i arbetet med ”Landet utanför”  – Det är så självförhärligande att säga pionjärhandling men … jag har faktiskt läst tidningarna dag för dag, år för år, genom hela kriget.  – Om man är intresserad av varför människor agerar som de gör är kronologin den enda vägen. Gång på gång har jag upptäckt att händelser blir begripliga...

A French military hero became the figurehead of the collaborationist Vichy regime. His trial in 1945 raised questions that are still unanswered. In 1940, after an intense six-week battle, the most formidable army in Europe was defeated by a much more flexible and aggressive German military.  For almost 80 years, France has lived with its memory of that shameful defeat, as well as its ensuing four years of collaboration with the Germans.  What makes this period of occupation stand out is that the “armistice” signed in 1940 left half of France independently governed by a reactionary coterie of its own politicos and military leaders.  Their headquarters, though, were not in Paris, where the German administration held sway, but in the spa town of Vichy, in the middle of the country. Their leader was Marshal Philippe Pétain. Ronald C. Rosbottom Wall Street Journal 25 August 2023 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/france-on-trial-review-marshal-petains-shadow-88838286 A new...

Many readers will be familiar with Finland’s heroic resistance to Soviet aggression in the Winter War of 1939-1940, a conflict in which Mannerheim again rose to the fore.  Far more sensitive is Finland’s 1941-1944 military alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.   For decades, the official story in Finland was that Hitler forced the country into this alliance, and that the so-called Continuation War was in any case a “separate war” between Finland and the USSR.  Meinander carefully demonstrates that this comforting version of history is largely untrue. He calls Mannerheim one of the chief architects of the “brotherhood-in-arms with Germany”. Tony Barber FT 25 July 2023 Mannerheim, Marshal of Finland — nation-builder and Nazi partner | Financial Times (ft.com)

It ruled a quarter of the world’s land surface; its navy controlled the most critical sea lanes.  Yet the resources on which its population depended to live and its armed forces depended to fight came from distant colonies and, increasingly, the U.S.  The fleet that carried these supplies was highly vulnerable to German U-boats. WSJ 7 January 2022 https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-best-books-on-the-global-march-to-war-11641572437 Britain's War: Into Battle, 1937-1941 By Daniel Todman (2016) https://www.amazon.com/

battle-britain-80th-commemoration-flying-among-clouds-ghosts The real story of how Britain won WW2 With link to Biggles https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-real-story-of-how-britain-won-ww2.html "She brought us up to believe that anyone can do anything - you know, the sky's the limit. Well, I think she reached that and beyond." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- london-62330141

I den utmärkta tidskriften Fokus, den 28 augusti 2009, publiceras ett utdrag ur en ny bok av den engelske historikern Richard Overy där han ställer frågan om varför det utbröt ett allmänt europeiskt krig i september 1939. Hitler var, skriver han, uppslukad av tanken på att ur Östeuropa mejsla fram en större och grymmare version av det habsburgska imperiet, beväpnad med en ny ekonomisk modell som kallades Grossraumwirtschaft (en gemensam marknad för ett stort område). Det är inte utan att jag får vatten på min kvarn. Nyligen frågade jag på denna blog - Är inte detta ytterst EU:s yttersta mål Att återupprätta ett mångkulturella imperium liknande det som leddes av Habsburg (och som slutade i en jättelik katastrof) ? Där hade jag också länkar till mer om Rom, Habsburg and den Europeiska Unionen (EU). Artikeln i Fokus 1939: Nedräkningen till andra världskriget, av Richard Overy, Förlag: Historiska Media (2009) hos Bokus 1939: Countdown to War at Am azon