StephenKMackSD's Blog

Niall Ferguson, in his Sunday Times essay of April 12 , 2020 , features John  Maynard Keynes as its main protagonist.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/dont-bet-on-a-quick-global-resurrection-z553527tx

Keynes appears first an a negotiator of the Treaty of Versailles, who collapses from overwork or The Spanish Flu. Yet Ferguson’s animus to Keynes dates from this 1995 essay in The Spectator:

Click to access let-germany-keep-its-nerve.pdf

Mr. Ferguson makes the charge that Keynes’ sexual attraction to German negotiator Carl Melchior of the Versailles Treaty was determinative:

Even before he arrived as a Treasury representative at Versailles, Keynes believed that any reparations imposed on Germany should be on the low side. There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with Carl Melchior, one of the German representatives at the armistice and peace negotiations, added a vital emo- tional dimension to his position.

Melchior was a partner in the Hamburg bank M.M. Warburg & Co. — ‘a very small man,’ as Keynes described him, `exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar . . . The line where his hair ended bound his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve. His eyes gleam. . . , with extraordinary sorrow.’

Ferguson repeats Keynes’ sexual partners year by year, and a confession made by Keynes to Virginia Woolf :

It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction. After all, this was a time in Keynes’s life of considerable homosexual activity: a bizarrely meticulous list of sexual encounters from 1915 suggests that he had at least eight male partners in 1911 (including liftboy of Vauxhall’), four in 1912, nine in 1913, five in 1914 and seven in 1915. In the immediate post-war years, he had at least two homosexual relation- ships. This explains Virginia Woolf s amused but not incredulous reaction when, recalling his ‘curious intimacy’ with Melchior some years later, Keynes declared openly that ‘in a sort of way, I was in love with him’.

Homosexual promiscuity and a confession of an ‘unrequited love’ ? by Keynes frames , the remainder of Ferguson’s essay, while his 1995 essay is devoted to portraying Keynes as a collabo of the Germans, in thrall to a disingenuous Melchior. 

Brad DeLong supplies the PDF of the essay, above . And here is the link to the original article, behind a pay wall: 

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/22nd-april-1995/21/let-germany-keep-its-nerve

After this clear demonstration of Mr. Ferguson’s sexual prejudice and his adaptation of the less salacious aspects of Keynes’ life, career and his Economics, his essay becomes a defense of Conservative Economists via this question, adapting the title of Keynes’ most infamous/famous work:

Who among today’s great economists will write The Economic Consequences of the Plague?  

Next in order of appearance in his essay: the US Congress, the arch-liberal Paul Krugman, Kenneth Rogoff — one of Harvard’s few conservative professors —,Larry Summers, who lies somewhere between those two ideologically, followed by this declaration:

I am with Rogoff and Summers. This is a disaster, the economic consequences of which cannot be offset by even the biggest monetary and fiscal splurge. Over the past three weeks 16.8 million Americans — slightly over 10% of the workforce — have filed for unemployment benefits. According to our best estimates at my macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm Greenmantle, GDP has declined by even more and is currently running at 75%-82% of its level in the last quarter of last year.  

What follows is the protracted Doom-Saying of an Economic Historian, framed by his fealty to the economic wisdom, of his newly minted alliance between Rogoff and Summers,  followed by this return to the kitsch of his opening sentence.

Opening sentence: 

‘Easter never felt more Eastery.’

Closing paragraph:

In short, I can’t honestly wish my readers a happy Easter. In the Bible, Christ’s resurrection happens in just three days. The resurrection of the world economy will take far longer. I only wish Keynes could rise from his eternal rest to tell us exactly how long.

Note that Keynes, from 1995 to the political present, is transmogrified, by Ferguson imaginings, from a promiscuous homosexual, given to reporting his sexual liaisons in his Diaries, to a German callabo, to a modern day Tiresias. The reader should call this by its name Political/Economic Fabulism !

Political Observer

Toro1963

Thank you for your comment.

Why have I posted these  examples of the  Financial Times reportage on the the Argentine Question? Macri’s ‘Austerity Lite’ was a dismal failure, as have all other instances of this Neo-Liberal economic sadism! Although Macri’s was the Soft-Core version. The Greeks are the most glaring example of this. Don’t lecture me using ‘they got what they deserved’ or that ‘Lazy  Southern Tier’ Economic Calvinism, where only The Elect will find salvation!

What were the factors that led to the near free fall of the peso? Framed not in the patios of Economic Technocrats’ rhetoric of obfuscation, via graphic expressions, instead of the clear language of sound argument.   

The reader can only marvel at the denial that the defenders of Macri’s political/economic intervention express,while de Kirchner and Fernández are now in office. If one takes Macri as an heroic actor fighting the dragon of Peronism – the melodrama collapses, Macri was just an usher, to the de Kirchner and Fernández spendthrifts.  

On the question of Mr. Mander’s reporting: where does he fall short? If he is a Journalist, rather than the author of kind of carefully massaged propaganda, where were/are the opposition voices, even just a mention of these otherwise absent voices, would have added to a necessary verisimilitude to his reportage. As well as establishing the Financial Times as publication almost worthy of their trust. 

Headline: Argentine peso falls sharply for a second day

Sub-headline:Turmoil continues to rock currency after strong showing by populist candidate in primary vote

Colby Smith in New York and Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires AUGUST 13 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/c3813244-bdd2-11e9-89e2-41e555e96722

The above news story re-worked:

Headline: Argentine peso falls sharply for a second day

Sub-headline: Turmoil continues to rock currency after strong showing by populist candidate in primary vote

Colby Smith in New York and Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires AUGUST 13 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/56fca4e0-be96-11e9-b350-db00d509634e

The political trajectory of Prat-Gay, ‘the former JPMorgan currency strategist’:

Headline: Finance chief Prat-Gay asked to rework his magic

Sub-headline: Fathoming depths of Argentina’s economic woes is added challenge

Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires NOVEMBER 29 2015

https://www.ft.com/content/70bcba74-9685-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc

*****

Headline: Argentina finance minister axed on economic uncertainty

Sub-headline: President requests resignation of Prat-Gay due to ‘differences’ in
department

Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires DECEMBER 26 2016

https://www.ft.com/content/2d82da08-cb8c-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/2fab03a5-ed35-489e-8f24-980c488d1ec6?commentID=ff6272ec-3d1a-469b-af3b-2141e27e5b6f

Should the regular reader of The Financial Times remind Mr. Mander and his employer of his September 1, 2019 essay, co-authored with Michael Stott ?

Headline: Argentina: how IMF’s biggest ever bailout crumbled under Macri

Sub-headline: With the Peronists waiting in the wings, the country is struggling to avoid a ninth sovereign default

https://www.ft.com/content/5cfe7c34-ca48-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

What reader can forget the supplied characterizations, and the words, from convicted criminal Christine Legarde ?

Its decision on the bailout’s future will be taken without the person who was instrumental in winning approval for the rescue: Christine Lagarde, who has stepped down from the IMF’s top job to lead the European Central Bank.

Ms Lagarde is unapologetic about her leading role in lending to Argentina. “We were the only game in town,” she told the Financial Times in July. “There was nobody else at the time to invest in the recovery process through which the government had decided to engage, and given the size of the challenge, we had to go big.”

Or this paragraph about the mendacious spendthrift who now shares power with Alberto Fernández. With all of her crimes, why isn’t Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in jail? According to the Party Line on de Kirchner, she was guilty, at the least, of gross malfeasance.   

The last 70 years of Argentina’s history have been punctuated with regular economic crises, and Mr Macri’s inauguration in December 2015 was no different. His Peronist predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had emptied the government coffers, signing decrees to increase spending by an extra $27bn in her final days in power. Inflation was running close to 25 per cent, foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low and generous subsidies for utilities and transport were draining the budget.  

What is unsurprising is the clutch of quotations from the ‘Economic Technocrats’ in the April 12, 2020 article by Mr. Mander and Mr. Smith: 

Carlos Abadi of Decision Boundaries, a financial advisory firm, 

Patrick Esteruelas, head of research at Emso Asset Management.

Gordon Bowers, an emerging markets research analyst at Columbia Threadneedle

Eduardo Levy Yeyati, a local economist, ( A Senior Fellow at Brookings )

From a collection of Capitalist hirelings, and a Brookings ‘Senior Fellow’ the reader obtains respectable bourgeois analysis, riffing on the Chicago Boys?  Under the leadership of both Neo-Liberals and ‘Center Leftists’ Argentina can’t seem to pay its creditors. To frame it paternalistically, should Argentina be treated like a spendthrift relative, that needs to be rescued from their own carelessness? Or is the International System of Capitalism, IMF, World Bank etc. and its  structures the root cause of these ‘Defaults’?

Political Observer

P. S. I have forgotten a very important point I wanted to make, that Macri was the first to ‘Default’, or should I use the preferred descriptor of the Financial Times ‘crumbled’ ?   

https://www.ft.com/content/2fab03a5-ed35-489e-8f24-980c488d1ec6

You might want to give that Helen Lewis Corbyn Anti-Semitism essay/defamation another ‘editorial look’!

Headline: Labour antisemitism investigation will not be sent to equality commission

Sub-headline: A report found factional hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn amongst former senior officials contributed to “a litany of mistakes”.

An extensive internal investigation into the way Labour handled antisemitism complaints will not be submitted to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, after an intervention by party lawyers.

The 860-page report, seen by Sky News, concluded factional hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn amongst former senior officials contributed to “a litany of mistakes” that hindered the effective handling of the issue.

…

https://news.sky.com/story/labour-antisemitism-investigation-will-not-be-sent-to-equality-commission-11972071

StephenKMackSD

Dr Ian Wellens letter is just a bit too polite. It lacks something like a necessary combativeness ! I am an uncouth American. On the rise of Keir Starmer, a look at part of an American context, might offer insights into British politics, via Helen Lewis’ carefully massaged essay in The Atlantic ?

Headline: Healing the Rift With Britain’s Jews

Sub-headline: The U.K. Labour Party’s new leader wants to disown Jeremy Corbyn’s toxic legacy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/uk-labour-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn-anti-semitism/609685/

Lewis is ‘ the former deputy editor of the New Statesman’ and ‘a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic’.

Also see The New Statesman essay by Patrick Maguire:

Headline: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical

Sub-headline: The former human rights lawyer aspires to unite not only the troubled Labour Party but the country. But who is he? And what does he really want?

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/keir-starmer-sensible-radical

Its telling that the Anti-Corbyn propaganda, that has been the business of Margaret Hodge, Jonathan Freedland,The Economist and The Financial Times etc. will now be imported via Helen Lewis’ essay in The Atlantic.  To bring this advocacy/apologetic for Kier Starmer, to an American audience. Note too, that Lewis advertises herself as a Feminist, which will help sell the notion that she is on ‘the right side’ , as she embroiders on her theme of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism. Tailored for an American audience, used to the hysterics of Rachael Maddow, Mika and Joe and the rest of MSNBC & CNN coterie of News Readers.

The central problem with both the Helen Lewis and Patrick Maguire,  and their concept/practice of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism, is that it ignores its roots in advocacy for Palestinian Rights, and it weapon of choice BDS.  Much too inconvenient, to the campaign of defamation based upon the construction of a self-interested fiction. An ongoing investigation into Corbyn, leads Lewis to speculate, laced with hope, that Corbyn might well be expelled from the Party!

Mr. Maguire’s essay is more adroitly focused on Starmer’s political rise,  with the Anti-Semitism issue seamlessly woven into his personal and political life, and there twin  evolution’s . This essay tailored to a British audience.  Helen Lewis’s essay is the purest kind of propaganda, for those familiar with Corbyn’s rise and fall, it is crude and lacks the journalistic style, the political/literary sophistication of Maguire.

Keir Starmer’s rise is simply the reassertion of New Labour, and its Neo-Liberal imperatives. The fight against Anti-Semitism, in the Party, is in fact about purging the Corbyn faction from the party. As reported by Maguire the numbers at Starmer’s appearances are not the numbers that Corbyn attracted.

Political Observer

“Bill Maher” When will this ‘Once Rebel’, now just the comic voice of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism, and its Con-Man-in-Chief Obama & the utterly loathsome Hillary, retire to the Comedy Old Folks Home? Like that other un-funny ‘Comic’ Jerry Seinfeld. It makes you almost long for the days of all those Borscht Belt graduates, like Myron Cohen, Jackie E.  Leonard, Sam Levenson. Not to forget the contributions to the Comic Art of Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Tom Lehrer, and the redoubtable Lenny Bruce!
‘Bill of Eternal Smirk’, just like Bob Hope! Both got rich and became ‘Stars’ of a medium that trades in Mediocrity, allied to a necessary political conformity!

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge

P. S. As the reader can tell, I had spent too much time in front of that Black & White screen, in the 1950’s and ’60.  And in darkened Movie Theaters, Parker Tyler was my muse. I’ve since freed myself from the salacious biography/fiction written by Gore Vidal, to live in Studio City. Near the once enchanted back-lots of Hollywood , now turned into Shopping Malls and parking garages, with the rest of the wanna-be Actors/Starlets that those Talent Agents passed by! To riff on Nietzsche ‘I am Eternal’ 

Yours,

M.B.        

Headline: Inside Bill Ackman’s $2.6bn big short

Sub-headline: Hedge fund chief bets on stockmarket recovery after profiting from coronavirus sell-off

Dan McCrum and Ortenca Aliaj chronicle, in all its gripping economic melodrama, the triumph of the grey-haired genius boy Mr. Ackman. The reader is almost transported to a pastiche of the Marvel World of the late, lamented Stan Lee, with the aid of sexy graphs, and the nearly breathless tone of awe of McCrum/Aliaj. Give credit where credit is due! Mr. McCrum and Mr. Aliaj write with verve, and manage to maintain both dramatic tension, and to almost transmogrify the jejune. Quite a feat!   

Two sentences stand out:

‘Mr Ackman declined to comment for this article.’

‘The coronavirus hedge marked the first time that Pershing Square had wagered in credit default swaps since the financial crisis.’

https://www.ft.com/content/70a5566c-5c02-4dcd-9360-c2b0001f2f29

Political Observer

Not even a mention of Pedro Sánchez’s essay in The Guardian of Sunday April 5, 2020 ?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/europes-future-is-at-stake-in-this-war-against-coronavirus

The end of the E. U., and its single currency, in the Age of The Pandemic, is gaining momentum , or is that too mild a descriptor? Perhaps ‘Hyper-Drive’ , laden with Hollywood Scientific Kitsch suits the compression of time experienced in the wake of Covid-19?

Who can recall the battle between The Virtuous Northern Tier vs The Profligate Southern Tier of the debates, of a not too distant past, through the wrong end of a telescope?

Go to YouTube and The Duran, for an enlightening discussion of the very questions Mr. Gideon Rachman seeks to explore, with his Neo-Liberalism leading the way, while the rest of us watch the slow-motion collapse of Monnet’s Utopia!

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/b809685c-77de-11ea-af44-daa3def9ae03

______________________________________________________________

My reply to Juan 

Thank you for your reply.  Sánchez wasn’t the only one ignoring warnings, but he is  ‘ And his financial projects are just crazy, as they are designed by the same people who organised the ruinous Venezuelan economy.’  Is the EU about the shared political/economic fate of Europe? Or is it about Germany :the Virtuous Norther Tier’s Saint and Spain as the Profligate Southern Tier’s Sinner? In a Telenovela about a Political/Economic Calvinism of the Saved and the Dammed? 
The ‘Venezuelan economy’ and ‘Communists’ the obligatory bad actors in your maladroit dramaturgy. 
Regards,
StephenKMackSD 

Has this newspaper moved to The Left, with Covid-19 as its goad? Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ ,that Mr. Thornhill makes the centerpiece of his intervention, in the face of the massive, and largely unsupervised bail-out of American Capital, passed by both Houses of Congress, is somehow an expression of that ‘creative destruction’? After the passage of this legislation both houses of Congress adjourned. 

The question that Mr. Thornhill never addresses is exactly which Capitalist enterprises  will experience that hallowed ‘creative destruction’?  

Extensive quotation of The Great Man Kissinger : 

Henry Kissinger, the grand old man of US strategic thinking, has argued that the latest crisis is triggering a political and economic upheaval that could last for generations. “Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability,” he wrote last week.

“When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant. The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus.”

Always hedging his bets, The Great Man opines that‘Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant.’  Kissinger Associates’ clientele are the very persons, and institutions, that will be rightfully blamed, as they were all co-conspirators in the Neo-Liberal Swindle: that sent Manufacturing jobs overseas, in the name of  cheap labor, and greater profits. Thus exacerbating the Covid-19 Pandemic, and the dire need for Respirators, and other vital material, that is stunningly obvious!

The return of The Welfare State, in its various iterations, and its political corollary the return of the shared fate of civic virtue, is a fait accompli! 

Mr. Thornhill makes a valuable contribution, in his link and brief quotation from  The Enlightened Economy, Prof Mokyr. The contribution offered by Tim Rogan’s ‘The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism’ is an invaluable contribution to this debate! 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173009/the-moral-economists

‘The dynamism of the market’ is the purest mythologizing. The largest and richest Corporations hold massive profits overseas:

Fortune 500 Companies Hold a Record $2.6 Trillion Offshore

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/6d944c62-77f0-11ea-af44-daa3def9ae03

Think of Stephens distopian view of the future,  as speculation in the political present, to unleash his penchant for fear mongering, garnished by comforting political kitsch. Think of that David Lynch’s classic Hollywood dreck ‘Blue Velvet’, as a bloated rhetorical example of the Sadism/Kitsch binary, that Stephens freely adapts, to make his point. But that point , to this reader, is about Neo-Conservative nihilism, or more aptly, its status as a modern day death cult! Look to the headline and sub-headline of essay: 

Headline: Covid-19: A Look Back From 2025

Sub-headline: In which the coronavirus has changed almost everything.

The usual fascination with collapse, decay and decadence of Conservatism, of the kind that Opus Dei and the politics of Francoism reflect, all tarted up via the mendacious re-write man of the History of Philosophy, Leo Strauss, and his coterie of hysterical defenders.  

Note that Mr. Stephens’ almost literary speculation is firmly anchored in our present moment of crisis, and that the political actors, in his precis, remain unchanged, even though five years have past. So view his brief sketch of his possible literary speculations, as his maladroit way of pronouncing, in his necessarily disingenuous way, on the actuality of our historical moment. Stephens, in his usual perverse way, demonstrates the value of hindsight as exercised in a pseudo-literary speculation ?  The Then/Now is muddied to Stephens political advantage?   

And like the Neo-Conservative he is, and remains, despite the respectable bourgeois cover of The New York Times, the Enemies of American are the same: Russia, China and Iran. The large cast of familiar names adds the necessary verisimilitude, to his political/literary miniature. An since this is The New York Times, the necessary balm of kitsch is supplied by this  homespun paragraph: 

Not everything was bleak. Adults read more books, paid closer attention to their spouses and children, called their aging parents more often, made more careful choices with their money, thought more deeply about what they really wanted in life. In time, that kind of spiritual deepening will surely pay its own dividends.

Political Observer