We walked together through the Olympic Park in east London, about a month ago, on a bright October morning, talking, as we often do, about the books we had recently read. In my case, Another Country, a James Baldwin novel from the early 1960s which I had greatly enjoyed. In his case the plays of Bertolt Brecht. He was also reading some secondary literature on the German author and he mentioned that some critics consider Brecht’s best work to be his poetry. Like many people who read only in English, I think of him primarily as a dramatist, one of the best from the previous century. However, our conversation prompted me to recall a review of the new English translation of his Collected Poems, which came out a couple of years ago, which stressed the centrality of poetry to his oeuvre. At well over one thousand pages, it is an intimidatingly large body of work, which I have yet to engage with, although I know that I have a shorter selection of his poems on one of my many bookshelves, awaiting my attention.
Continue reading “Translating myself”Social distancing
We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance. In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people. The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics. The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others. Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.
Continue reading “Social distancing”Guffaw
Laughter isn’t an easy thing to characterise, especially across cultures. I’ve spend enough time in non-English speaking places to realise that I’ll never really understand their humour, but I’ve spent far more time in English speaking places and still even there, I know that I have a different sense of what makes me laugh. Actually the more time I’ve spent in different places, I believe, the less I laugh – I mean an outright guffaw, a good solid belly laugh, an uncontrollable rollicking snort. I still find humour in lots of things – even more than before – but the burst of laughter that I would have served up as a kid no longer comes up.
Continue reading “Guffaw”Securing our future
In June of this year, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo Securities led managed a Aaa-rated securitised Social Bond issue, on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The deal raised $1billion, consisting of $300m thirty-year bonds and $700m fifty-year bonds. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the securitisation market faced significant criticism from regulators, policy makers, and many loud voices in the media, who charged that these structures were too complex for investors properly to understand and that securitised bonds spread risk widely and irresponsibly within the financial system. Nowadays, such views have come to be seen as hasty and ill-informed, an over-reaction, a paradigm case of blaming the message-bearer for bringing unwelcome news.
Continue reading “Securing our future”Dead presidents
The global financial response to the slowdown in economic activity has been nothing short of extraordinary. In the United States, over $3 trillion in money supply has been created, with a further $3 trillion in fiscal activity. Overseas, in China, in the UK, in Canada, in the EU, similar levels of new money have flooded the money system, courtesy of central banking policies tailored to system: quantitative easing in open monetary systems, reduced capital requirements and increased access to money creation programs for banks in closed systems paired with aggressive foreign exchange management. There is a lot more money in the system, but the implications of that are diverse, more so than the commentary one reads on Bloomberg or in the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading “Dead presidents”