American protectionism, fossil fuel rearguard, Cuban protests, two visions of American transport - Chrysler vs Amtrak & how the Black Panthers mapped Yale.
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Evelyn Statsinger, Sassacricket High, 1987
Evelyn Statsinger was an artist deeply informed by her impressions of the natural world. Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Statsinger relocated to Chicago in the 1940s to attend the School of the Art Institute. During this time, Statsinger became acquainted with a group of artists known as the Monster Roster and received mentorship and support from notable Chicago figures including Katherine Kuh, Kathleen Blackshear, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the years that followed, Statsinger began to develop her own unique visual language, relinquishing identifiable forms in favor of surreal compositions based on her observations in nature.
In 1972, Statsinger moved her Chicago studio to a rural 1890s schoolhouse in Allegan, Michigan. The remote property, nestled within the sand dunes and woodlands on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan, served as the artist’s home base and allowed Statsinger to closely observe nature in all its orders of magnitude. “When Statsinger would return to downtown Chicago, she imported the outdoors to the city by bringing with her those specially observed bits of matter,” curator Dan Nadel reflects in his essay for the exhibition. “She collected seed pods, shells, twigs, leaves, and stones, which she arranged carefully in her studio. She could go macro or micro with these specimens—making them a subject or finding new details within them.”
At times mysterious, and eluding definitive classification, Statsinger’s intricate compositions describe vast, ethereal worlds that evoke the biological systems and cellular structures of plants as if viewed under a microscope. As art historian Dennis Adrian observed, “The forms which the artist favors often seem drawn from microscopic plant life, the exotic fauna of the sea or from the layered and crystalline structures of the earth itself. Statsinger’s subtle and reverberating colors make ingenious use of unexpected complements and harmonic arrangements in a way that brings to mind the marvelous chromatics of odd biological specimens or rare minerals.”
Source: Richard Gray Gallery
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Lie back and think of Pennsylvania
The US is alienating Japan and the EU by mishandling its obsession with swing voters in steel states — which is causing Joe Biden to make a national security issue out of the takeover of Pennsylvania-based US Steel by US ally Japan:
Questioning the sacred status of the US steel industry gets you disapproving looks in Washington, where an ostentatious attachment to things ferrous is how coastal elites signal they’re in touch with Real America. The Deerhunter has much to answer for.
But really, come on. This is way out of proportion. Iron and steel manufacture directly employs about 80,000 people in the US, 0.06 per cent of the total workforce and comfortably less than half the number of American pedicurists and manicurists. US Steel itself has just over 20,000 workers, half the number of employees at Penn State university. As I noted last week, US trade policy is disturbingly vibes-based. There’s a vague sense of the need to be seen fighting trade wars rather than actually creating jobs.
Japanese officials who complain on behalf of Nippon Steel will no doubt be explicitly told the same as the Europeans when the Biden administration tried to bounce the EU into joining its green steel club by threatening to reimpose the suspended Trump-era Section 232 national security tariffs on steel and aluminium. The electoral college is what it is, the swing states are what they are and the presidential election is this November. You’ve got to help us win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin or you’ll get Trump back. …
It’s one thing for the US to export its electoral problems by demanding its allies help micromanage a few tens of thousands of voters in the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern states. It’s another to alienate them with clodhopping threats and misguided lectures. Trading partners have voters and even principles too.
Source: One of those Alan Beattie FT columns you just want to frame!
Big banks and big (private) wealth
A year on from UBS’s rescue of its once-great rival Credit Suisse, the success of the most consequential bank merger since the global financial crisis is becoming increasingly dependent on whether Khan can turbocharge the wealth business. UBS has attracted an increasingly demanding shareholder base over the past 12 months, with investors hoping the wealth division will fuel a surge in the bank’s valuation. The bank’s new three-year strategy is designed to achieve that. “UBS continues to be seen and valued like a conventional European bank, despite being the largest global wealth manager and deriving around 60 per cent of its revenues from wealth and asset management,” Cevian Capital partner Gustav Moss told the Financial Times.
As part of the three-year strategy, Ermotti has targeted increasing invested wealth management assets from $3.8tn to more than $5tn by 2028. To hit that goal, the business is aiming to attract $100bn of net new assets a year by 2025 as it tries to win back clients who left Credit Suisse in its final tumultuous years.
The Credit Suisse takeover has cemented UBS’s position as the biggest wealth manager outside North America… in the US wealth market, UBS is far behind industry leader Morgan Stanley and also trails Wall Street rivals Bank of America and JPMorgan. UBS’s Americas wealth business generated just $4 of profit for every $100 of revenue in the final quarter of 2023. That is only expected to rise to $10 to $15 by 2027, around half the profits margins of its big US competitors.
Source: FT
Unusual scenes in Cuba
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Fossil fuel rearguard
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Evelyn Statsinger, Untitled, 1960
Unions attempt to break the American South
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The scale of China’s renewables revolution
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A different future….
How 250 American families drove more than a million miles in Chrysler’s mid-1960s turbine prototype. Not your average youtube video. Truly a sentimental journey!
America’s rail reality
The world’s biggest economy has fewer miles of electrified railway than Iran.
Only in the North East Corridor (NEC) between Boston and Washington, DC, do intercity trains in the United States run even vaguely like trains in other rich countries. Elsewhere, Mennonites, who do not use cars or fly, make up a remarkable share of passengers.
And yet as bleak as it can seem, Amtrak, the national rail carrier, is in fact recovering well from the pandemic. In the latter half of last year, ridership was just 3% below its levels in 2019—previously the firm’s best-ever year. And through his infrastructure law of 2021 President Joe Biden, an Amtrak superuser as a senator, has put aside $66bn for investment in passenger-rail infrastructure.
Is a new golden age of train travel down the tracks? The biggest recovery at the moment is on the NEC, an electrified track largely-owned and maintained by Amtrak directly. In 2023 trains there carried 12.7m people, a record high, and about 43% of all Amtrak passengers in total… Ticket revenues on the corridor easily cover the cost of operating the trains, and generate a surplus used for maintenance.
Elsewhere, rail is either directly subsidised by Congress (for the long-distance lines) or by state governments (for the rest), and trains travel on tracks owned by freight companies, all too infrequently. Passenger numbers are recovering on those trains too, but far less fast than on the NEC. It does not help that ageing rolling stock means those journeys are often getting worse. Derailments are absurdly common, as are crashes at level crossings… For now, there is so much money around that the firm can invest in both. On the NEC, a civil-war-era tunnel near Baltimore where trains have to slow to a crawl is being rebuilt, something that ought to have happened decades ago. On the long-distance lines, new trains are being procured.
But investment spending must be re-authorised in 2026, notes Yonah Freemark, of the Urban Institute, a think-tank. Another risk is that infrastructure-act money by law can be spent only on investment, not operational costs. Last year House Republicans proposed a 64% cut to Amtrak’s day-to-day budget—which if carried out would make investment pointless.
Source: The Economist
Crime and geopolitics in Southeast Asia
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$17billion at sea
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Monopoly, Black Panther style
How the Black Panther Party mapped the political economy of Yale University in a 1970 magazine — New Haven was a site of struggle:
Big H/t to Nathan Tankus
Evelyn Statsinger, Land and Sea, 1951