Marcus Lindqvist
Marcus reports on central banks, debt, trade and the flows of money that connect economies — always from the primary data.
Articles by Marcus Lindqvist
The Term Premium Quietly Became the Most Important Number in Markets
Long-term interest rates are no longer just a bet on where central banks are going. A second component, the compensation investors demand for holding long bonds at all, is doing more of the work, and it answers to different masters.
The World's Debt Numbers Come From the Borrowers, Not the Lenders
Almost every headline figure about developing-country debt traces back to one World Bank collection system in which the country that owes the money files the loan-by-loan return. Its rules decide what the world can see.
The Basel bank capital rules bind nobody until a national regulator writes them into domestic law — the Committee's own charter says its decisions 'do not have legal force'
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has no treaty, no founding statute and no power to compel anyone; its charter states in terms that it possesses no formal supranational authority. Nearly eight years after the final Basel III package was agreed and almost three years after its deferred deadline, the Committee reported that on data as of 30 September 2025 the revised market risk standards were in effect in fewer than half of its 27 member jurisdictions.
There Is No Agreed World Definition of “Made In”. The Programme to Write One Opened in July 1995 and Has Missed Every Deadline Since.
WTO members gave themselves three years to harmonise the non-preferential rules that decide a product's country of origin. Three decades on, the agreement's operative obligations still sit under a heading that reads “Disciplines During the Transition Period,” and what members have instructed the secretariat to run is a set of information sessions described as an “educational exercise.”
The IMF Created SDR 456 Billion in a Single Day. It Was Divided by Shareholding, and the United States Received SDR 79.5 Billion of It.
A Special Drawing Right is not a currency, and not a claim on the IMF. The largest reserve creation in the Fund's history was distributed in proportion to quotas — which is why one member received SDR 79.5 billion and another received SDR 2.4 million.
Countries Once Delivered Each Other's Mail for Free. Repairing That Bargain Nearly Cost the Postal Union the United States.
A treaty signed in Bern in 1874 turned the world into a single postal territory on one condition: each country kept the postage it collected and delivered incoming foreign mail without charge. That worked while the flows balanced. The settlement system built after they stopped balancing has been rewritten twice since 2019.
The World's Poverty Line Moved to $3.00 a Day. Nobody Got Poorer.
In June 2025 the World Bank raised its international poverty line from $2.15 to $3.00 a day, and about 125 million more people appeared below it overnight. The number is not an ambition set in Washington: it is the median of what the poorest countries themselves call poverty, converted through a price survey run across 176 economies.
Informal Work Is the World's Default Arrangement, and the Statistics Are Only Now Catching Up
About 2.1 billion people work outside formal arrangements, roughly 58 per cent of global employment, a share that has barely moved in a decade. New international standards are changing what counts as informal.