Stefan Tours the anglo-Swedish Blogosphere

On blog@stefangeens.com, Stefan gives "A guided tour of English-language Swedish blogs":

Fortunately, there are many English-language bloggers that are connected to Sweden in some way, so I thought I might take you on a guided tour of the anglo-Swedish blogosphere (Defined as blogs where a majority of the writing is in English, and thus accessible to outsiders)

Thank you for a good list of links, and for putting me on it!

Homeland Investment Act and the Dollar

The Swedish Newspaper Dagens Industri this morning published an article that tried to explain the much debated weakness of the Swedish Krona during the spring. According to the article, the U.S. Homeland Investment Act could provide a useful clue. The HIA has let U.S. firms repatriate profits earned abroad during 2005 and a Dollar/Euro chart suggests that it has had a dollar positive impact.

Dagens Industri provides a chart showing "U.S. direct foreign investment" to support its reasoning:
Looking for other opinions on the web, I came up with the following: The investment blog "Always Bet on Black" cautiously exclaimed itself to be "a modest USD bull" in early December. In October TaxProf had an estimate on the amount of repatrieated money tha he found to much exceeded estimates:

Well, here's what has happened: In nine months the law has increased the flow of repatriated foreign capital by a whopping $225 billion. J.P. Morgan estimates that another $75 billion will return to America in the fourth quarter. About half of these returning funds were profits from pharmaceutical companies and much of the rest from such high-tech firms as Dell, IBM and Intel. We can't resist noting that this $300 billion of repatriated capital is nearly double the estimate by Congress's hapless Joint Tax Committee, which had assured us this time last year that not a dime more than $165 billion would arrive. To quote Britney Spears: Oops, they did it again.

Maybe it is time now for the fall in the dollar that economists has been waiting for during quite a while?

Open Thread III

Open thread, all posts except spam are most welcome. Bid for the watercolour painting below at the Swedish birdwatcher's auction. The proceeds will be used for the benefit of the "victims of the earthquake catastrophe" in South-East Asia, SOF says.

I'm Among the "Other Estimated Strategists"!

Good news for me: Even though the ecosystem ranking for this blog has fallen from "Flippery Fish" to god knows what slimy little organism, the blogger himself is now within the ranks of the "Other Estimated Strategists". All according to a fixed income investor survey on the Swedish bondmarket carried out and published by Dagens Industri:

Other estimated strategists on the Swedish bondmarket are ...[4 analysts on the dominating Swedish banks]... and ... Mats Lindh.

Thank you all, and Cecilia, your misspelling is forgiven!

(Talking about misspellings, I just found another amazing feature of Blogger's spell-checker: it suggests "blocker" instead of "blogger". )

Market Efficiency: Not of Earthquake Strength

Shortly after an earthquake occurs in the U.S. its Geological Survey reports it a list of "Recent Earthquake Activity" on its homepage. Nonetheless, a strong earthquake in the Californian Gulf occurring 9.32 CET wasn't reported by Bloomberg until over an hour thereafter, 10.36 CET (yes, I have checked the time conversion). When Bloomberg's story hit the screens, currency markets and the European bondmarket (led by the Bund Futures) had already reacted, several minutes ahead (about 10.20 CET), by selling USD and temporarily buying the Bund-contract, its price path during the morning shown in the diagram above, time again given in CET. Lazy Europeans controlling the financial markets at this time of day? Even lazier journalists? I don't know, maybe the quake wasn't what sparked the reaction, but an emailed tsunami advisory, possibly lagging USGS listing of the quake, mentioned in Bloomberg's story. Time to put tsunami warnings on a frequently updated public web-site? In case me and Bloomberg haven't overlooked such a site: yes, I do guess so!

Math Puzzles and Challenges

A friend of mine recommended the site mathschallenge.net for those interested in mathematical puzzles and challenges, including programming problems. I haven't had time to try it, but it looks good, with several problems of different difficulties posted each month. Perhaps something for Abiola, on his site Foreign Dispatches such problems sometimes appear, or for Jan Nordegren posting almost daily on his math-problems blog think again.

(Political sidenote: thinking again over Jan's Ronald Reagan quote: "Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born." - couldn't it just as easy be rewritten into an argument against death penalty? According to reasoning in the book Freakonomics, crime and free abortion are statistically and economically related (negatively!). I got said book recommended from the same person who recommended the math-site, that's how it all - however barely related - ended up in this post.)