ECB's wage obsession, Meloni v. the Agnellis, illegal sand mining & R-rated profits.
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Our art today is from Alice Lex Nerlinger. She was one of those Weimar figures who puts pressure on Germany’s post-1989 narration of its history. Born in 1893, the youngest daughter of a gas lamp factory owner in Berlin, Nerlinger was a bold contributor to the artistic avant garde of Germany’s 1920s. Her work used all the modern excitement of photomontage to capture social struggles and suffering along lines of class and gender, including impassioned protest against restrictions on abortion. In 1928 she joined the Communist Party. She survived the Nazis, destroying some of her works but attempting still to engage in underground political dissent. After 1945 she found a home in East Germany as a celebrated artist of the state: an anti-fascist story that pit the new state in the East against Nazism and the Federal Republic, different from the anti-totalitarian narrative that stresses continuities between the Third Reich and the GDR.
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ECB’s Knot Says Wage Numbers Needed Before Rate Cut Possible
“The only piece of the puzzle we are missing is the absolute conviction that wage growth will adapt to slower inflation,” Knot, who’s among the more hawkish rate setters, told the Buitenhof TV program. “When that piece of the puzzle falls into place, we will be able to lower the interest rate a bit.”
Source: Bloomberg
Real wages: EU v. US, 2019 v. 2023
Meanwhile the ECB is worrying about wage-price spirals!
Rightwing anti-elitism
The billionaire Agnelli family, whose carmaker Fiat employed more than 170,000 people in the 1970s, was Italian industrial royalty for over a century, courted by successive governments through incentives and favourable policy. Not anymore.
This week, right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attacked the family’s scion John Elkann and Fiat-Chrysler’s successor, Stellantis — rebranded after the group merged with France’s PSA in 2021. Her salvo was a cocktail of industrial policy and nationalist politics. It partly expressed frustration at not being able to influence decision-making over a lack of a stake and board seat, unlike the French government.
But, with European elections on the horizon, Meloni was also tapping into voters’ fears about the risk of multinationals relocating jobs abroad. “Challenges like electrification and automation can only be faced by big European groups, which was the rationale for creating Stellantis,” said Valentina Meliciani, professor of applied economics at Luiss University. “But this doesn’t mean the Italian government shouldn’t be worried about maintaining domestic production levels both in terms of quality and synergies with the local supply chain.”
Source: FT
Big news from China in Africa
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Under-investment in Britain (again)
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Alice Lex Nerlinger, Kinderbuchblatt Hochhaus, 1928
Illegal sand-mining may be REALLY big news
Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature’s ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.
I’ve gotta admit I find these numbers for the illegal traffic a bit mind-boggling:
But there they are, in Scientific American, no less.
Who could read when? Literacy since 1850
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Kimchi has a split personality
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Fifty Shades of Success
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Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Schneiderpuppe, ca. 1928