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Javier E

Opinion | The Economist Who Foresaw Our Global Economic Order - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dollar-currency-economist.html

economist history economics policy currency single trade financial

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Charles Kindleberger thought there should be one world currency, and he had a candidate: the U.S. dollar. He argued that there would be more trade, cross-border investment and prosperity if all nations either adopted dollars (as, say, Ecuador has) or tied their currencies to the dollar at a fixed exchange rate, which has almost the same effect.
  • A multiplicity of unpredictably fluctuating currencies discourages trade and investment by injecting uncertainty into business decisions.
  • Kindleberger’s one-money philosophy made him an outsider in academia
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  • He also disagreed with Friedman’s nemeses, the Keynesians, who worried that nations wouldn’t be able to fine-tune spending and taxing policy for domestic conditions if they had to keep their currencies in sync with the dollar.
  • Although the United States’ share of global domestic product has shrunk since the aftermath of World War II, the dollar continues to play a dominant role in financial flows. “Around half of all cross-border bank loans and international debt securities are denominated in U.S. dollars,”
  • the world today is closer to Kindleberger’s vision than he or his intellectual opponents could have imagined
  • What’s more, the Federal Reserve has become in effect the world’s central bank: When the Fed raises rates aggressively, as it’s doing now, other central banks tend to follow sui
  • t the British Empire really was an empire; London bankers were happy to extend loans to British companies operating in the colonies because they were subject to British law. That enabled the colonies to develop somewhat, albeit under Britain’s thumb. The United States has less control over borrowers in emerging markets. Kindleberger’s goal was “to get the economic boost of imperialism, but without the political and social downside of actual imperialism,” Mehrling wrote.
  • Roosevelt worsened and extended the Depression in 1933 by torpedoing central bankers’ efforts to stabilize exchange rates between currencies.
  • In contrast, Paul Volcker, who chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, comes across as a hero in the book for working with other central bankers and finance officials to resume international cooperation after the Nixon shock of 1971.
  • There’s a concept in economics of the optimal currency area. In theory, the area of a shared currency, such as the euro, should be big enough to encompass a lot of economic activity but not so big that it includes nations that are disparate and require different economic policies. To Kindleberger, no area could be too big. He thought the whole world was an optimal currency area.
  • In essence, his goal was to duplicate on the world stage what was achieved in the United States by a mentor of his, Henry Parker Willis, who was a designer of the Federal Reserve System that knitted the nation together financially.
  • Kindleberger was realistic enough to observe that nationalist politics was an obstacle. “While the optimum scale of economic activity is getting larger and larger, the optimum social scale appears to be shrinking,” he once wrote. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Whereas the economic logic of the payment system pushes toward hierarchy and centralization, the political logic of subglobal and subnational groupings pushes toward autarky and pluralism.”
Javier E

Opinion | World War III Begins With Forgetting - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...america-world-war-iii.html

war preparation preparedness ww3

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Yet how many Americans can truly envision what a third world war would mean? Just as great power conflict looms again, those who witnessed the last one are disappearing. Around 1 percent of U.S. veterans of World War II remain alive to tell their stories. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, fewer than 10,000 will be lef
  • The vast majority of Americans today are unused to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices, let alone the loss of life and wealth that direct conflict with China or Russia would bring.
  • Preparing the country shouldn’t begin with tanks, planes and ships. It will require a national effort of historical recovery and imagination — first and foremost to enable the American people to consider whether they wish to enter a major war if the moment of decision arrives.
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  • It wasn’t just major war that seemed passé. So did the need to pay any significant costs for foreign policy choices. Since the Vietnam War roiled American society, leaders moved to insulate the American public from the harms of any conflict, large or small: The creation of an all-volunteer force did away with the draft; air power bombed targets from safe heights; the advent of drones allowed killing by remote control.
  • The deaths of more than 7,000 service members in the post-Sept. 11 wars — and approximately four times as many by suicide — devastated families and communities but were not enough to produce a Vietnam-style backlash. Likewise, although the wars have cost a whopping $8 trillion and counting, the payments have been spread over decades and passed to the future.
  • Not having to worry about the effects of wars — unless you enlist to fight in them — has nearly become a birthright of being American.
  • Today the United States is again assuming the primary burden of countering the ambitions of governments in Moscow and Beijing. When it did so the first time, it lived in the shadow of world war and acted out of a frank and healthy fear of another. This time, lessons will have to be learned without that experience.
Javier E

Opinion | The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...raine-liberal-nationalism.html

nationalism liberalism ukraine

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
  • That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
  • The second idea is nationalism.
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  • There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.
  • it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian.
  • The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.
  • Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land
  • Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future
  • Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together.
  • Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.
  • Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.
  • Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites
  • The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity
  • Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure
  • It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.
  • It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.
  • “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”
Javier E

Antisemitic campaign tries to capitalize on Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...musk-twitter-antisemitism.html

campaign anti-Semitism twitter

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • A coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic memes and images on Twitter resulted in more than 1,200 tweets and retweets featuring the offensive content, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
  • The tweets identified by the A.D.L. added to a flurry of racist, transphobic and rule-breaking content that coursed through Twitter on Friday after Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, had officially taken control of the platform.
  • “Now that Elon is taking over Twitter it’s time to finally put our skills to use,” read the post, which told users to argue with Jewish users and “like” tweets from other participants.
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  • The anonymous user also credited Ye
  • “Ye broke the dam,” read one tweet identified by the A.D.L., which included an antisemitic meme that was widely circulated on unmoderated message boards.
Javier E

Opinion | Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter. Shudder. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ter-purchase-robber-baron.html

musk twitter free speech

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Carnegie and the steel barons elected Republican lawmakers and presidents committed to protecting their companies’ profits by levying high tariffs on foreign competitors. Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites.
  • What makes Mr. Musk particularly powerful and potentially more dangerous than the industrial-era moguls is his ability to promote his businesses and political notions with a tweet
  • The likely consequences of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership will be political as well as economic disruption.
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  • It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.
  • Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?
  • Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.
Javier E

Obsessed by the Present, Who's Got Time for Old Masters? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-art-old-masters-auctions.html

art market collection masters trends history

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Experts say that younger collectors often regard art from the distant past as remote and irrelevant, and find the technical aspects of a sale off-putting. “Old masters are difficult to approach because of the problem of condition and attribution,” Turquin said. Today’s buyers tend to be interested in paintings by artists who are under 45 0c, not over 400.
  • The fixation with “the Now” (as Sotheby’s calls its most of-the-moment auction category) could be viewed as just a byproduct of fashionable 21st-century life. But for sociologists, changes in the art market are one of the many elements that reflect how the pace and preoccupations of our culture have altered over more than 100 years. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen’s landmark socio-economic study, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” showed how free time and superfluity — what we now call luxury — conferred status, or “reputability,” on the wealthiest individuals in late 19th-century America.
Javier E

France Faces 'Most Severe' Drought as Heat Persists in Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rance-drought-europe-heat.html

europe heat wave crisis history

shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Heat waves in Europe are increasing in frequency and intensity at a faster rate than almost any other part of the planet, according to scientists, who say that global warming and other factors like the circulation of the atmosphere and the ocean all play a role.
  • In Germany, more than 100 firefighters battled flames that engulfed parts of Grunewald, a forest in the west of Berlin, after munitions and fireworks exploded at the city’s bomb disposal site on Thursday morning.
  • The drought has been particularly devastating for European agriculture, which was already suffering from an abnormally dry spring season, parching crops, making it harder to feed livestock and raising worries about reduced harvests.
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  • n Germany, the Rhine — the country’s most important water transport route — was so low that some ships have been forced to reduce their cargo loads. Uniper, a German power utility, even announced Thursday that it would reduce output from its largest coal-firing power plants because insufficient coal could be shipped to the plant via the Rhine.
  • And in France, which gets about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy, heat waves have hampered power plants because they use water to cool their reactors. Several have been forced to reduce production over the past month, or to exceed normal temperature limits for the water that they release back into natural waterways.
  • “Because of climate change,” he said, “we are going to have to get used to these kinds of episodes.”
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