Yardeni's dial-back and Sweden's tax package
2026-09-22 · The rulebook · Nord Pool crash into two Nordic rate meetings, Yardeni's dial-back tested against credit, Sweden's tax package in the Riksdag
Nord Pool prices fell hard into two Nordic rate meetings; Ed Yardeni's dialled-back S&P target tested against a credit tape that isn't buying his caution.
Nord Pool fell hard — into two Nordic rate meetings
Nord Pool weekly averages came in sharply below the prior week across the Nordic zones. Finland and the northern Swedish zone led the fall; the southern Swedish zone and both Danish zones softened materially; Norway's south held above, and the exceptional print was up in the far north. The shape is northern zones collapsed, southern zones softened — a single week's weather layered on top of the pattern.
Both Nordic central banks are meeting into that print. Our view is that Norges Bank holds. Norway's south still faces a triple-digit Continental clearing price, and the physical link from NO2 into Germany has effectively reversed on the week — the Continent is pushing power into Norway, not the other way. That is not the setting in which a cautious central bank finds courage to hike. The Riksbank base case is the same — hold, and if there is a surprise it is dovish, not hawkish. We are not putting a marker on the Swedish call; only the Norwegian one has local-shop support.
The operator read on the power tape itself: lock in the north, do not touch the south. The collapses in Finland, SE1 and NO4 rest on wind capacity and the hydro balance — real, and durable. The collapses in SE4, DK1, DK2 are a Continental spill and a weather week. Denmark's DK1 export flow into Germany collapsed on the week; when weather flips, DK1's price snaps back.
Yardeni dials back — but the credit tape isn't buying his caution
Ed Yardeni, on Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart, pushed back his S&P 500 target from year-end to the middle of next year. He still holds his Roaring Twenty-Twenties call — an S&P at ten thousand by the end of the decade. The dial-back is about pace, not direction. His stated near-term concerns: higher-for-longer oil, the Bank of Japan unwinding the yen carry trade, and Federal Reserve hawkishness. The debt-service pressure on the US Treasury sits underneath all of it as his central medium-term worry.
Where we disagree: on credit. Spreads sit near the tightest of the cycle. If the fiscal picture and the carry-trade unwind were pricing risks the way Yardeni describes, the credit tape would be showing it. It isn't. Credit is a truer read of stress than equity is — equity can rally on narrative; credit can't when the fundamentals actually deteriorate, because default risk is a hard number. Either bond investors are being led into a wall, or Yardeni is over-weighting risks the professional bid has already dismissed. We take the second read. What would flip us is a rapid non-event-driven widening in high yield over the next few weeks.
Where we agree: on industrials, with a heavier caveat than his. The broad US industrial sector has been the weak leg of the recent rally. Some of the European industrial names we watch — Atlas Copco, KONE, Airbus — read as softer trend in our own work. Selective, name by name, not broad. And on emerging-markets-ex-China we agree strongly. The Hong Kong tape has been ugly on the year for the internet leaders, which is why the trade sits better outside China than inside it.
Felix Prehn, on Felix & Friends, runs the same fiscal worry to a harder conclusion — that any real cut to US federal spending mechanically triggers a recession which then forces even larger emergency outlays. Right on the loop; wrong on his companion video's leap that central-bank gold buying signals the dollar is on the way out. Central-bank gold buying is real; the endpoint is a bigger claim than the evidence carries.
Yardeni's sizing on the tail — high enough to matter, low enough to stay long — is right. If US ten-year yields settle in the four-to-five per cent "old normal" he described, multiples don't rerate, earnings do the work. The hedge, if one needs it, is long the broader Nordic index against a short in the crowded American AI leaders — Nordic because it is bank- and industrials-heavy and hasn't re-rated with the American AI names, and because the krona and krone are the natural currency leg of that rotation.
Sweden's tax package: proposed, awaiting Riksdag vote
Two propositions sit before the Riksdag. Proposition 309 reworks the procedure for kupongskatt — Sweden's dividend withholding-tax regime — addressing a long-running fraud and EU-law problem: organised dividend-reclaim abuse and reclaim disputes for non-resident funds. Proposition 306 writes, for the first time, a statutory definition of stadigvarande vistelse — habitual residence, the threshold that determines unlimited Swedish tax liability for individuals.
Where in the lifecycle: tabled. Next step: committee reading and a Riksdag vote in the autumn session, which runs through December. What changes for whom at the next step:
- Foreign investors and custodian banks holding Swedish equities through a foreign structure: workflow change on distributions, cleaner withholding-agent chain, higher compliance load on the paying side. Not a rate change.
- Mobile Nordic operators — the audience closer to this seat. Habitual residence has been case-law-driven; a statutory definition is likely to come out more restrictive than the accumulated case law, because the state wants revenue certainty. Anyone living near the informal threshold should be modelling the new statutory one now, before it lands. First application would begin the tax year after the vote — which is why autumn is the window to restructure.
The wider point: this is a template. Sweden's move to codify both procedures is a signal that Finland and Denmark are likely to follow with something similar in the coming cycles.