Trouble in China, the global carbon gap, Iran, Iraq, Silicon Valley & fireworks
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Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1958. Pape (1927-2004) was a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil in the 1950s and ’60s, drawing on Brazil’s class-divided modernity to draw inspiration from favelas and urban busyness.
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Trouble in China
Zhongzhi, one of the biggest groups in China’s vast shadow financing market, faces a shortfall of as much as $36.4bn and has warned that it is “severely insolvent”.
This reporting from the FT puts a spotlight on liquidity issues in China’s nearly $3tn shadow financing market.
Rotten Tails
Pre-sales is the dominant business model in China. Developers have sold a lot more apartments than they've built:
Source: Bloomberg
Why some countries are more carbon-intensive than others
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The violence of sanctions
Sanctions first emerged, as Nick Mulder showed in his excellent study, as a weapon of war and only later became discussed as an alternative to war. In Iran, they have represented a kind of Cold War on the people of the country:
Almost 10 million Iranians have slipped into poverty from a combination of sanctions, bad economic management and volatile international oil prices during a “lost decade” of growth, according to a World Bank report.
The report is the institution’s first official assessment of poverty in the country of 85 million people since the 1979 Islamic revolution. It portrays an economy in which inequality and poverty surged in the decade through 2020, with US-led policies contributing to that, and women bearing the brunt of the impact of both sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Source: Bloomberg
Multipolarity and Palestine
One might assume that the passing of unipolar American hegemony bodes well for peoples - like Palestinians - not generally backed by the old emperor. The Chinese government has called for and worked diplomatically towards a ceasefire in Gaza. But economic facts are more complex:
China’s bilateral trade with Israel grew from US$50 million in 1992 to US$15 billion in 2020, making it Israel’s largest trading partner in Asia and its third largest trading partner in the world after the European Union and the United States. From 2011 to 2021, the share of Israeli exports to Asia going to China rose from 25% to 42%.1 India’s trade with Israel too has grown, rising from US$200 million in annual trade in 1992 to US$7 billion in 2022, and these figures do not include India’s important but more secretive defence purchases from Israel.
Source: Middle East Institute and National University of Singapore
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Lygia Pape, Tecelar (Weaving) (1959). Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
Ordo-liberalism lives in Germany
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Iraq against the world?
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How Ukraine divides the world
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War reparations
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Techno-optimism in Silicon Valley
What do venture capitalists do that other capitalists don’t?
What does the “techno-optimist” movement base its optimism on?
And what sort of politics does this embrace of technology imply?
Those are a few of the questions that came up in my conversation with Cameron Abadi about Marc Andreessen, popular in Silicon Valley. The chat was on our FP podcast Ones and Tooze. You can listen and read more here.
Explaining fireworks
Gender and work
The Economist has this complex story — about progress made and then immediately undermined, and the battle to regain it:
Out of 6 million women who took up men’s jobs in the war, 300,000 were aircraft riveters like Rosie and Elinor Otto. She was possibly not the last of the Rosies, but certainly the longest-working. Everything about the job appealed: the camaraderie, the routine. Other “female jobs” were boring or even stupid. But once the war was over and the men returned, women were expected to go back to such work, or preferably stay at home. For a while she was a car-hop, running burgers out to drivers. She left when the boss ordered her to do it on roller skates. She didn’t make a fuss about losing out to the men; this was how things were. But riveting was proper work, and by 1951 she was back doing it at Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego. “I don’t act in movies,” she liked to say. “I build planes.”
Lygia Pape, Tecelar (Weaving) (1952). Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape.