The UK's grim trajectory, dumb & dangerous banks, the authentic Iranian face at risk & Morin on Gaza
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Awol Erizku, Lion I, 2022.
Born in Ethiopia and raised in the Bronx, Erizku’s work draws on influences from Picasso to Jay-Z to chart and to probe the Black condition amid global imperial and American capitalist power. This is an excellent profile in the New Yorker, hinting at how his celebrity status may allow him to be categorised in a racist mode that seeks Black “representation” in the production of artistic commodities to line the walls of the wealthy, without asking how that whole extractive system was born in racism:
Categorize Erizku if you want to. It’s a losing game. The sweetness of his demeanor—Erizku’s voice is a soft, low hum; the tenor reminds me of Alice Coltrane’s harp—should not confuse you, for the artist has a heated spirit. Erizku’s trajectory has veered further and further from the tyranny of the signature image. He seems to steer away altogether from the notion of an upward trajectory, with its requisite attachment to the Black bourgeoisie. In interviews, Erizku speaks passionately about his disdain for simplistic representation. Fuck Black excellence, in other words. But it is not that Erizku does not want to uplift the race. He is interested in iconography, and, moreover, he is interested in his people’s intense relationship to iconography, to fashion, to style, to beauty. So many celebrities have sat for him. And it is for a reason that he has made certain historical figures, including Nefertiti and Malcolm X, recurring idols in his still-lifes. What Erizku rejects is the defensive perch that kills the spirit of so many image-makers. Nota bene: it is a relief to have a twenty-first-century visionary who thinks outside the street-style dicta of “authenticity,” who blatantly choreographs and poses. I am thinking, here, of “Pardon My Ladder (Arm n Hammer)” (2019-20), Erizku’s sui-generis exploration of Black masculinity, desirability, and violence. (The photograph is one of many featured in “Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax,” the first major monograph of the artist’s work, out from Aperture in June.) In the image, we see a Black man’s naked torso, his head just outside of the frame. He seems to be a creature of fashion; he holds a Glock delicately, as if it were a handkerchief—hence the pun in the art work’s title—and on his extended fingers are beautiful rings. The photograph is the visual equivalent of a rapper’s epic, both fantasy and reality at once.
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Want to profit from a Chinese recovery, but don’t want to risk investing in China?
Buy European luxury instead:
Strategists say there are early signs that the flagging Chinese economy, which last year grew at one of its slowest paces in decades, will recover. However, they believe a rout that wiped close to $2tn off the value of its stock market makes it a dangerous place to invest. European stocks offer “a safer way” of getting exposure to China, said Florian Ielpo, head of macro at Lombard Odier Investment Managers. “Most of Europe’s sectors could profit from an improvement in China and that improvement is not priced in yet. “If you don’t want to be exposed to the structural problems but do want to be exposed to the cyclical recovery then European equities are the way to go,” he added. European luxury stocks have been lifted in recent weeks by earnings from heavyweights LVMH and Hermès, which beat analysts’ forecasts, convincing some traders that valuations had been excessively beaten down by gloom about China’s economy. LVMH shares are up 9.2 per cent this year, while Hermès has gained 11.8 per cent.
Source: FT
Dumb & dangerous (small) banks
About two dozen banks in the US had portfolios of commercial real estate loans in late 2023 that federal regulators indicated would merit greater scrutiny, a sign more lenders may face pressure from authorities to bolster reserves.
A trio of regulators publicly warned the industry last year to carefully assess any large exposures to debt on office buildings, retail storefronts and other commercial properties. At the time, authorities said they would pay closer attention to banks that rapidly piled up such loans worth more than three times their total capital.
While New York Community Bancorp, which set off a cascade of stock drops in recent weeks as it braced for potential loan losses, was the biggest US bank that came close to fitting the regulators’ criteria, many smaller lenders went further. That’s because they amassed outsize concentrations even faster, according to a Bloomberg analysis of federal data from more than 350 bank holding companies.
Bloomberg’s review found 22 banks with $10 billion to $100 billion of assets hold commercial property loans three times greater than their capital. Half of those firms had growth rates surpassing the thresholds laid out by regulators. The tally was even higher among banks with less than $10 billion of assets: 47 had outsize portfolios, of which 13 had swelled rapidly. The analysis excludes loans for nonresidential buildings that are occupied by their owners.
Source: Bloomberg
Emerging Market stars
"…there are also smaller rising stars in EM local debt such as Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica that have been able to leverage US exceptionalism through links such as remittances and tourism." One way of viewing the world!
Source: FT
The UK’s grim trajectory
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Awol Erizku, Malcolm x Freestyle (Pharaoh’s Dance), 2019-20
How not to build a railway
Last October the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, decided to amputate High Speed 2 (hs2), a railway project turned national trauma. He announced that the northern leg of the line would not extend beyond Birmingham to Manchester. Mr Sunak said that the London terminus for hs2 would still be Euston, some 10km east of Old Oak Common, but that private investors would have to pay for the tunnel connecting the two. That money is far from certain to materialise, which is why Mr Richardson’s team is soon to bury two giant tunnel-boring machines (tbms) at Old Oak Common. They will be entombed there, pointing eastward, until things become clear.
Proponents of hs2 dreamed of a railway to rival those in Japan and France, linking Britain’s big cities in a feat of engineering worthy of the country’s Victorian pioneers. Instead the project has shown that Britain cannot build. The rump line from London to Birmingham will be one of the most expensive in the world, costing up to £67bn ($84bn) or £300m per km of track. It will also be one of the most pointless. A totemic project to boost the north will end up mostly benefiting London. A huge investment to increase capacity and cut journey times will, for some routes, do the reverse.
What went wrong? It is tempting to say everything. But several problems stand out. The initial plan was far too optimistic, not least because ministers kept changing it; legislation ensured that costs ratcheted up; and the company in charge botched important decisions. To see how the project went awry, step aboard for a journey along the line … When archeologists began to exhume 45,000 skeletons from a graveyard next to the station, they discovered an infestation of Japanese knotweed. Experts had to be drafted in to separate old bones from invasive perennial. …. Almost a quarter of the journey from London to Birmingham will happen underground. Another third of the journey will be through cuttings, where high banks line the tracks. In a 45-minute journey passengers will have “meaningful” views for less than ten minutes. Ensuring hedgehogs can get around is a fine goal. The tunnels through the Chilterns were extended after a vociferous local campaign. But tunnels cost about ten times as much as normal tracks; cuttings five times. A big part of hs2’s budget has gone on making sure a small group of people in the south of England will never have to see or hear it. As a result many more in the north won’t either.
Source: The Economist
Climate finance stalls
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Corporate social responsibility in Xinjiang
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The authentic Iranian face is at risk…
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Edgar Morin (father of the polycrisis concept) on Gaza
Powerful words by 102 year-old philosopher Edgar Morin, one of France's most revered intellectual figures, as well as a Jewish anti-Nazi resister who fought as a lieutenant in De Gaulle's France Combattante. A translation is here.
Morin is too little known in the English-speaking world. His trajectory has both placed him in the cream of French intellectual life, a central intellectual figure there and revered too across Latin America, while also marking out his distinctness; he was a member of the French Communist Party, yes, but was expelled in 1951, just slightly earlier than other luminaries left (if they did at all). He took over at Nanterre from Henri Lefebvre, worked with Lefort and Castoriadis, Spinoza is among his top heroes (as for Althusser), and he has inspired left movements like Spain’s 2015 anti-austerity movement. But he is also a theorist of complexity distinct from post-structuralism, instead a humanist after Montaigne.
George Oppen’s remarkable poetry
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Awol Erizku, Arrangement for the historians who’ve re-casted Egypt in an African Context, 2018-20.