Englund

Nvidia stiger med omkring 3,5 procent och är bara 5 procent från den rekordkurs som noterades i maj i år. Nvidia är världens största börsbolag med ett värde på över 5.400 miljarder dollar,  motsvarande 52.000 miljarder kronor.  Victor Hultgren DI 2 september 2026  https://www.di.se/live/nvidia-narmar-sig-rekord-betydande-uppsida-i-aktien/ Why is France being so nice to Britain?  One clue to the new entente may in fact lie not in the British Museum but in a superb new French two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle, “La Bataille de Gaulle”.  Directed by Antonin Baudry, an ex-diplomat, it is—unusually for a French production—based on a British biography, “A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle”. Written by Julian Jackson, a historian at Queen Mary University of London, the 928-pager is the product of years of painstaking archival research.  It is an even-handed examination of both the visionary greatness and human fragility of le général. Of part...

Stock markets are not only ignoring the obvious threats, but seem imbued with extreme optimism. In the autumn of 1929, Irving Fisher, one of the greatest American economists, stated: “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”  This turned out to be one of the most incorrect forecasts ever made: in short order, US and global stock markets were hit by the Great Crash, which was followed by the Great Depression. Maybe markets were in some sense “right” before the crash and wrong after it. But who cared? For investors and the hundreds of millions of people across the world whose lives were upended by the disaster, the gods of the stock market had failed for a generation. Why might this story be relevant today? The answer is that the valuation of US stocks is even higher today than in September 1929.  The first global financial crisis after the disaster of the 1930s in 2007-09: the easy monetary — and relaxed regulatory — policies adopted after the stoc...

The US was the victor of the 20th century. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it not only possessed unmatched political and economic power, but embodied admired values of constitutional government and freedom.  This did not last. By the end of the first world war, the US was the master of Europe. Unfortunately, it supported a peace that its subsequent withdrawal made unenforceable.  Its abdication, together with the domestic political upheavals, the inflations of the 1920s and the mass unemployment of the Depression, led to the second world war. European empires disappeared and a social democratic consensus emerged. Laissez-faire had gone. Managed capitalism was the new order.  Deng Xiaoping chose “reform and opening up”. Another superpower emerged. Other upheavals include financial crises and mass migration. In the US, the administration is corrupt, incompetent and, most important, hostile to the norms and values that animated the founding fathers.  The ...

 Books of 2026: Economics Titles selected by me RE. Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto by Barry Eichengreen  The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order is Spiraling into Disorder by Eswar Prasad  Eswar Prasad argues that globalization and populism have entered a destructive feedback cycle https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/02/eswar-prasad-argues-that-globalization.html Keynes for Our Times by Robert Skidelsky Martin Wolf FT 17 June 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/96e24668-b203-4c78-92dd-99351fc04a09?syn-25a6b1a6=1

I would not claim that everything comes down to economics. People care about other things, too — immigration, crime, health, education and so forth.  But a good economy — one with widely shared economic growth — is, I would argue,  a necessary condition for political stability in a liberal democracy.   The fundamental problem is that the UK has not had that for two decades. It is not alone in this. But the deterioration in its performance since 2007 has been enormous (as has been also true of other large European economies). Martin Wolf Financial Times May 25 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/a1334546-73e9-4149-bb13-6f0999b5db91?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Uttrycket “bröd och skådespel åt folket” syftar på en gammal härskarstrategi: håll massorna nöjda och passiva genom mat och underhållning i stället för verkligt politiskt inflytande. Ursprung i Romarriket Frasen kommer från latinets “panem et circenses” och myntades av den romerske satirikern Juvenalis runt 100-talet e.Kr. Han beskrev...

  Martin Wolf: The Gulf crisis may just be starting First came the war. Then came the blockade. Now come the shortages. Those that left before the closure have mostly arrived. From now on, the shipments that did not leave will increasingly be missed. Up to now, shortages have been mostly imaginary. Now they will become real. They must be managed, ultimately by suppressing demand.    This, in a nutshell, is what Nick Butler, formerly group vice-president for strategy and policy development at BP and now at King’s College London, argues in a Substack post entitled “The end of the beginning”.  The markets seem to have persuaded themselves that these looming realities will lead, sooner rather than later, to a stable ceasefire and a reopening of the strait. This might happen. But it is not hard to imagine why it might not. Donald Trump insists he does not care about Americans’ financial situation.  Instead, the “only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran, t...

Det får akademiker att blunda för potentiellt samhällsviktig forskning och undvika obekväma slutsatser. En inspirationskälla till detta är sociologiprofessorn Jonathan Coles magistrala bok The Great American University (2009) om de amerikanska spetsuniversiteten, där han hävdar att några av de mest subtila hoten mot forskningens frihet kommer inifrån akademin. En huvudhypotes är att orsaken till dessa blinda fläckar av obeforskade problem förmodligen handlar om en kombination av opportunism och ideologi.  En mera avancerad hypotes är att det kan handla om att forskarkarriären såsom den är upplagd i samhällsvetenskap och humaniora resulterar i olika former av mental blockering. 1. Korruption, särskilt i biståndet. 2. Många pojkars/unga mäns tillkortakommanden i skolan. 3. Den bristande integrationen av invandrare. 4. Jämställdhetens tillkortakommanden.  5. Hedersrelaterat våld och förtryck.  6. Evidensbaserade undervisningsmetoder i skolan.  7. Forskningen om Israel–P...

Varför globala obalanser är viktiga Som jag noterade förra veckan  https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/05/martin-wolf-imbalances-are-back-on.html har konflikter om hur man ska justera externa obalanser återkommit ungefär vartannat decennium sedan 1980-talet. Varför är hanteringen av globala obalanser i betalningsbalansen både så svår och så viktig? Det korta svaret är att de ligger i skärningspunkten mellan nästan allt som är viktigt inom global ekonomi och politik: nationell makt, full sysselsättning, industriell styrka, finansiell stabilitet, finans- och penningpolitik och hantering av växelkurser. 1920- och 1930-talen var en lärdom i hur allt kan gå spektakulärt fel. Länder med strukturella överskott av sparande över investeringar och därmed externa överskott (som Kina, Tyskland och Japan) har byggt sina ekonomier kring ett överskott av omsättningsbara varor och tjänster. Att plötsligt förlora dessa kan orsaka en nedgång. Moralister i överskottsländer klagar över slöseriet i ...

 “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...

  Xi, Trump och Putin Efter 1989 tog historien som bekant slut. Sedan fascismen och sedermera kommunismen fallit ifrån stod liberalismen, som statsvetaren Francis Fukuyama konstaterade, ensam kvar med att erbjuda ett intellektuellt försvarbart systematiskt alternativ. Resultatet känner vi väl vid det här laget. Det ledde inte till att alla blev liberaler.  Tvärtom till att liberalismen var det enda som återstod att rikta sitt missnöje mot när något gick fel – och det gör ju saker lite för jämnan, både i livet och med samhället. Uttrycket ”taco” (Trump always chickens out) etableras för Trumps ständiga reträtter från sina fixa idéer. Samma mönster, i hjälpligt demokratiserad lättvariant, kunde beskådas under Viktor Orbáns styre i Ungern. Och det är märkbart även under Donald Trump i USA. Liberala marknadssamhällen. Inte att de är perfekta eller felfria, då skulle de aldrig kunna förbättras genom vårt röstande och våra val på marknaden. Däremot är de bättre än alternativen. Matt...

Warsh’s words indicate that he is very much the “hard money” central banker.   I agree, too, that the post-pandemic inflation was in part its fault: together with other central banks, it failed even to consider that the jump in the money supply in 2020 might lead to a jump in the price level.  I also agree with Warsh that the backward-looking monetary policy framework introduced in 2020 was a conceptual and practical error (not to mention grossly mistimed). Warsh might be far too willing to argue for whatever Trump wants.  It also appears that he intends to justify doing so by offsetting lower short-term rates with higher longer-term ones, as the Fed’s balance sheet is aggressively shrunk.  Martin Wolf 4 January 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/93b4c72a-0ceb-4839-bf72-06de3870d407

And options for “middle powers”. Europe has a key role to play in building a successor to the US-led global order Carney began by citing an essay by Václav Havel, writer, dissident and first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia. In this Havel argued that communism sustained itself, in Carney’s words, “through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false”.  The more one looks at what lies ahead, the more important, as my colleague Martin Sandbu argues, becomes the EU — in Trump’s eyes, the greatest enemy.  With every passing day, the EU is having more greatness thrust upon it, in all domains. Martin Wolf FT 28 January 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/b784dc0f-abbb-4d02-b78d-89c69b8082be Václav Havel, Tjeckiens tidigare president och dissident, publicerad i Dagens Nyheter den 19 november 2004.  Artikeln skrevs i samband med 15-årsjubileet av Sammetsrevolutionen, då kommunistregimen i Tjeckoslovakien föll. ​Här är en analys av sammanha...