But the gesture reflects a statistical truth: In 35 years — a little less than one person’s working lifetime — Poland’s per capita GDP rose to $55,340 in 2025, or 85% of the EU average. That’s up from $6,730 in 1990, or 38% of the EU average and now roughly equal to Japan’s $52,039, according to International Monetary Fund figures measured in today’s dollars and adjusted for Poland’s lower cost of living. Poland’s economy has grown an average 3.8% a year since joining the EU in 2004, easily beating the European average of 1.8%. It wasn’t simply one factor that helped Poland break out of the poverty trap, says Marcin Piątkowski of Warsaw’s Kozminski University and author of a book on the country’s economic rise.

One of the most important factors was rapidly building a strong institutional framework for business, he said. That included independent courts, an anti-monopoly agency to ensure fair competition, and strong regulation to keep troubled banks from choking off credit.As a result, the economy wasn’t hijacked by corrupt practices and oligarchs, as happened elsewhere in the post-Communist world. Poland also benefited from billions of euros in EU aid, both before and after it joined the bloc in 2004 and gained access to its huge single market. Above all, there was the broad consensus, from across the political spectrum, that Poland’s long-term goal was joining the EU. 

“Poles knew where they were going,” Piątkowski said. “Poland downloaded the institutions and the rules of the game, and even some cultural norms that the West spent 500 years developing.” As oppressive as it was, communism contributed by breaking down old social barriers and opening higher education to factory and farmworkers who had no chance before. A post-Communist boom in higher education means half of young people now have degrees. “Young Poles are, for instance, better educated than young Germans,” Piatkowski said, but earn half what Germans do. That’s “an unbeatable combination” for attracting investors, he said.Solaris, a company founded in 1996 in Poznan by Krzysztof Olszewski, is one of the leading manufacturers of electric buses in Europe with a market share of around 15%. Its story shows one hallmark of Poland’s success: entrepreneurship, or the willingness to take risks and build something new......

 I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.  NY Times March 16, 2026 Richard Bookstaber Author of “A Demon of Our Own Design,” which in 2007 warned of the coming financial crisis. At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, I was at a hedge fund. By its end, I was at the U.S. Treasury. At both, I worked with people only a few years out of college. The drama of 2008 was all they knew about financial markets. “Remember what’s happening,” I told them. “You’ll never see anything like this again.” Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they’ll see worse. We have returned to a period of risk, one rife with the sort of pressures that have led to major financial crises. This time, the risks are spread across industries, markets and nations: artificial intelligence, the roughly $2 trillion private credit industry, stock markets, Taiwan and now Iran. These risks are analyzed one by one, news article by news article. We understand them in isolation. Yet they are different entry points into the same underlying structure — a complex and tightly coupled system where the specific source of stress matters less than how quickly that stress can spread. 

Signs of systemic strain are emerging. Let’s start with private credit, which is already showing worrisome signs. Over the past two decades, the retreat of traditional banks after the financial crisis has left many companies increasingly reliant on borrowing from institutional investors. But these loans rarely exchange hands, leaving investors uncertain about what these instruments are really worth or how easily they could be sold if conditions deteriorate. Now clouding the picture is the fact that many of the borrowers underpinning the lending industry are software and technology companies — the kinds of businesses whose services could be replaced by A.I.That vulnerability is starting to worry investors. Already uneasy about the way higher interest rates are raising borrowing costs, some have begun withdrawing their money from the private credit funds of well-known companies like Blue Owl, BlackRock and Blackstone. Shares in Blue Owl have fallen sharply. And because the market has no organized exchange and information is inaccessible, investor withdrawals can trigger the kind of wholesale run that in the past turned financial stresses. Simultaneously, the A.I. boom is driving extraordinary investment into a small group of dominant technology companies, inflating their valuations to the point that 10 stocks now account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s value. That level of concentration is unprecedented — and dangerous, because it means a shock to any one of these companies can ripple across the entire market rather than be absorbed by it.What appear to be separate developments — a new kind of lending market and technological dislocation on one hand, stock market exuberance on the other — are in fact the same network of money and expectations, approached from different directions.

Return of the TACO trade?

Amid the global rally, one of the key fixtures of investing in 2025 stepped into the new year: the "TACO" trade. The phrase refers to the president's history of threatening to leverage intense levies, only to ease, delay or cancel them. It was coined last year after Trump's "liberation day" announcement of tariffs in April shocked markets but investors grew skeptical of his follow-through when he eventually backed down. Market reactions to subsequent U.S. trade policy announcements were more muted or saw recoveries more quickly. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, likened today's market moves to those seen last year. "Donald Trump's TACO bell has rung once again, much to the joy of financial markets," he said in a Thursday morning note. "Trump has form in chickening out of his threats … there are a lot of similarities with the liberation day market wobble in April 2025 and now. "In both situations, Trump took an aggressive stance and then backed down after financial markets wobbled."  https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-s-latest-tariffs-u-turn-is-sparking-a-global-market-rally-and-reviving-talk-of-the-taco-trade/ar-AA1UJqSI?cvid=69728c347ffe4d35a3dbc8d313dddb8e&ocid=UP97DHP