Collected Articles
Last week, Britain’s newly minted (and now newly departing) prime minister, Liz Truss, replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) with Jeremy Hunt, a figure from the soggy Tory Party’s soggy center who was widely seen as “a safe pair of hands.” Hunt’s allies claimed that he would be CEO to Truss’s chairman, and that is how it turned out….
Read MoreWith environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…
Read MoreThe historian Barbara Tuchman famously compared European civilization before the First World War to a “proud tower” but showed how that tower was more rickety than those at its summit imagined. The pride was overdone, the hubris all too real.
If Europe today can be symbolized by a similarly proud tower, one candidate might be a giant North Sea wind turbine in September 2021, its blades barely turning thanks to winds that had dropped, unexpectedly, for weeks. This unproductive calm had led to a scramble for other sources of power to remedy the shortfall. But the price of one obvious alternative, natural gas, was already soaring (the European benchmark, Dutch front-month gas, was around five times as high as it had been two years before)…
Read MoreIf any central banker, both literally and figuratively, bestrode, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the…world like a colossus,” it was the 6-foot-7 Paul Volcker. But, perversely, the giant shadow he cast helps explain our not-so-transitory inflationary mess…
Read MoreThere have, it is true, been stickier moments to become Britain’s prime minister: May 1940, for one, when Winston Churchill took the top job. Nevertheless, however glowingly Boris Johnson may, in his farewell speech, have spoken of his legacy (“foundations that will stand the test of time,” “great solid masonry,” the “path to prosperity” paved, and so on), the reality is that Liz Truss, his successor, has inherited one hell of a mess, politically and economically, and time is already running out for her to fix it…
Read MoreIt’s a crowded field, but as an example of the destructive uselessness of ESG (an investment “discipline” based on analyzing how companies measure up against somewhat vague environmental, social, and governance standards), this story from Bloomberg takes some beating.
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The Financial Times’ Moral Money section is so nauseatingly named that many will be tempted to look away after one glimpse of its title. That would be an error. Grimly fascinating, Moral Money is an invaluable window into the orthodoxies of the corporatist elite, particularly — but of course — when it comes to planetary catastrophe. The FT being what it is, Moral Money’s climate message (in reality an updated version of an ancient blend, millenarianism and rent–seeking) is camouflaged, with the crazy played down. It is earnest and preachy, but — underpinned by the comfortable assumption that writer and reader alike see things the same way — not too preachy.
And it is nothing if not revealing.
Read More“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”
Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”
Read MoreBerlin has too much [history].” Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.
Read MoreWhen, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new.
This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians.
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