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One great theme of the post-2008 financial world is that money is a social construct, a way to keep track of what society thinks you deserve in terms of goods and services.

15 years ago it was easier to think that money was an objective fact. Money is a kind of stuff, you might have thought, stuff with some predictable value that you can exchange for goods and services, and you can acquire a quantity of it and then you own that money and can use it however you like to buy things. 

The bulk of Russia’s foreign reserves are held in the form of securities, deposits at other central banks and deposits at foreign commercial banks. A ban on transactions with Russia’s central bank means that it can’t sell those securities or access those deposits.

Even in his speech announcing the invasion, Putin referred to his oft-stated belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. This, of course, was never true — even when they lived side by side in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The two identities and cultures are distinct. But Russians and Ukrainians are the closest of kin. Even when we speak different languages, as we have increasingly done since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, we understand each other. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the most of his eloquent speech on the eve of the invasion by speaking in Russian, directly appealing to Russian citizens with the ease of someone who shares a cultural code with them. It runs thick as blood and has nothing to do with official Soviet avowals of brotherhood.

A lot of evidence pointed to Putin's intention to invade. But I kept hoping he would stop at the last moment, because a full-scale attack on Ukraine, guaranteed to spill the blood of Ukrainian civilians, is the worst war crime a Russian can possibly commit. Even the inevitable parallels with Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria, which I drew before when Putin took Crimea and when he published his historical screed assailing Ukraine as an “anti-Russian project,” do not do justice to what happened in the early hours of Feb. 24.

To make the curse permanent, God marked Cain to make sure no one would kill him to end his suffering. Russia, with the nuclear arsenal Putin keeps bragging about, also bears a kind of Cain’s mark now. It is not Putin who is cursed now —  it’s all of us Russians. Our identity, wherever we are, will be tainted by this invasion, by our failure to stop the dictator long before he crossed this unspeakable line.

Uber Outlines Vision for Flying Cars

"We also believe that in the long-term, VTOLs will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car," Uber wrote in its whitepaper (PDF).

As Uber draws attention to its vision for flying cars, the company acknowledges that it will take many years to develop. The paper reads, "The vision portrayed above is ambitious, but we believe it is achievable in the coming decade."

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will this week signal plans for a “hard Brexit’’ by saying she’s willing to quit the European Union’s single market for goods and services to regain control of Britain’s borders and laws, the Sunday Times reported.

May will hope to eventually line up a new free-trade partnership with the bloc, yet in the meantime leaving the EU’s single market and customs union risks making it costlier and more complicated for British exporters to trade with their biggest market. It may also force banks to carry out their threats to move jobs from London to the continent to ensure they maintain access to it.

The thousands who marched in Moscow on Sunday in honor of the murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov did so because they recognize just how much has been lost with his death. Nemtsov had been brave enough to tell the truth in Russia under President Vladimir Putin.

There is no evidence the Kremlin ordered Nemtsov's killing, and it would have as much to lose as to gain from such a public execution on one of the most closely surveilled sidewalks in Russia.

Nemtsov’s death may not change things in Russia; much of the population appears to be caught up in a nationalist fervor.

The economic forces driving this year’s nomination contests have been at work for decades. Why did the dam break now?

The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013

the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.

The Monte Toledo oil tanker covered the uneventful voyage from Iran to Europe with a haul of one million barrels of crude in just 17 days, but its journey has been four years in the making.

On Sunday, the tanker became the first to deliver Iranian crude into Europe since mid-2012, when Brussels imposed an oil embargo in an attempt to force the Middle Eastern nation to negotiate the end of its nuclear program. The ban was lifted in January as part of a broader deal that ended a decade of sanctions.

In southern Spain, the tanker’s arrival was met with little fanfare. It was a quiet Sunday at the refinery, and for the workers, the Monte Toledo is just one of the eight or so vessels they expect to receive this month. By the time the refinery has taken in all the Iranian crude, another tanker from Algeria will be already waiting.

Bloomberg published a report about the men of Wall Street and how they have decided to address the revealed abuses of #MeToo. “No more dinners with female colleagues” is one solution they have come to. “Don’t sit next to them on flights” is another. And “book hotel rooms on different floors.” And “avoid one-on-one meetings.” Having had more than a year to listen and learn and adjust to the new information, most of the men Bloomberg spoke with have looked around, searched their souls, and come to a tidy conclusion: “Avoid women at all cost.”

The consequences of this conclusion, for the women on the other end of it, are obvious: The women will miss opportunities for mentorship and fellowship and advancement. Their very presence will be interpreted as its own potential danger: to men’s reputations, to men’s prospects, to men’s careers. The women will, in this ingenious new strain of American Puritanism, be softly shunned: as seductive, as vindictive—as professional threats.

The term’s coinage was, it would turn out, a quietly monumental event. Sexual harassment gave women language, finally, to describe the abuse they so often experienced at work: abuse that manifested as sexual behavior but that was, in fact, evidence of a deeper form of discrimination

The move is the latest example of the ruthlessness Florida’s Republican leaders have employed in trying to undermine a constitutional amendment, approved overwhelmingly by Florida voters in 2018, restoring voting rights to ex-felons.

After its approval, Florida GOP lawmakers rushed to pass legislation requiring that ex-felons pay off all fines and fees, a particularly daunting requirement given that the state has no centralized way of tracking felons’ outstanding legal debts.

A federal judge partially blocked the law last year and in May, after a trial this spring, deemed the law unconstitutional. Using an uncommon procedural move, the state fast-tracked the case to the full 11th U.S. Court of Appeals — skipping the three judge panel that had largely backed the trial judge’s handling of the case. The full 11th Circuit, by a majority made up almost entirely of Trump appointees, formally reversed the trial judge’s ruling, prompting the push by Bloomberg and others to raise money for the fund set up to pay off the fines.

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers.

A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.

Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.

President Donald Trump’s hopes of reversing the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts are running into the reality that the numbers just aren’t there in terms of votes he can dispute -- at least not yet.

At a Saturday press conference held just as the major networks were calling the election for Biden, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hinted that hundreds of thousands of votes might be overturned by a federal civil rights lawsuit he planned to file in Pennsylvania alleging that Republican observers were excluded from areas where mail-in ballots were tabulated or kept too far away to watch in a meaningful way.

“A court would not set aside the results of an election, or particular votes, based on violations of laws concerning observation of the counting process,” said Michael Morley, an assistant law professor at Florida State University who’s worked on election emergencies and post-election litigation. “Courts will not disturb election results based on unproven generalized claims about the theoretical possibility of fraud.”

blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order. 

“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,

The outcome, he said, could be “a sequel to the Cold War.”

At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable.

A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and destruction, but wrong about being unthinkable. The Great War ended the first era of globalization, and it took generations to rebuild the level of worldwide integration that pertained before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a much smaller conflict than World War I, and the trade disruptions associated with the U.S./European quasi-embargo on Russia are smaller than the British blockade of the Central Powers.

at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply

stranded assets. That's how business people refer to these vast, idling industrial infrastructures. It's abandoned property that will have to be written off in a company's balance sheets before the end of its planned lifetime.

Germany has been twisting and turning over its phaseout of coal and lignite power plants over the past five years. Originally, it planned to stop using coal in its energy mix in 2038. Then the current government accelerated that goal by eight years to 2030. Recently, some politicians have called that decision into question.

The earlier phaseout plan could lose operating companies €11.6 billion ($12.5 billion), according to a 2022 study by Dresden University.

America’s plutocrats are transforming themselves into hereditary dynasties, thanks to a prolonged campaign against inheritance taxes (or “death taxes” as they have been ingeniously dubbed).

The research firm Cerulli estimates that almost half of the estimated $72.6 trillion that will be transferred to the next generation between 2020 and 2045 will come from the richest 1.5% of households. Welcome to the world of trillion-dollar trust fund babies.

The rise of such dynasties clashes with America’s fundamental belief in equal opportunity and upward mobility. It leads to social closure as the children of the privileged hoard positions at the top of society.