War and Peace

By Zoltan Pozsar

2023.01.07

In 2019, James Sweeney, then chief economist at Credit Suisse, popped into my office and said “you know this pandemic and lockdowns… this is where your world [funding] and my world [global industrial production] intersect, because supply chains are payment chains in reverse”. I thrive on memes, and after James’ blitz visit, we quickly wrote Covid-19 and Global Dollar Funding, a piece that explained why the pandemic would lead to a major funding crisis… In 2022, Pippa Malmgren became my source of macro stimulus. Her meme that “World War III has already started, but it’s different from “traditional” world wars: it is a hot war in cold places [like Svalbard, underwater, cyberspace, and space], and a cold war in hot places [like islands in the Pacific, the DRC, and the Sahel]” inspired me to write four “war” dispatches last year: War and Interest Rates, War and Industrial Policy, War and Commodity Encumbrance, and finally,
War and Currency Statecraft.