A key aspect of improvement in the Brazilian external accounts has been the process of “de-dollarization” of its external liabilities. This means that now a large share of Brazilian external liabilities (such as public bonds and shares held by non-residents) are denominated in Brazil´s own currency, making creditors bear the exchange rate risk and making the economy less vulnerable to large exchange-rate movements

Despite massive underemployment and informality, the low unemployment rate and growth of real wages are understood as inflationary problems to be solved by constraining demand.

On 31 January, for instance, the New York Times told its readers that Hitler was likely to be stymied by the opposition ‘if he sought to translate the wild and whirling words of his campaign speeches into political action’.

Como se instrumentarán a través del FMI vía swap, piensan en ambos costados de las orillas donde se diseñó el plan, no se requerirá ni una ley en Argentina ni una autorización del Congreso de los Estados Unidos

But in the process, the peso has become so strong, once inflation is factored in, that it’s making it incredibly cheap for middle- and upper-class Argentines to binge on those imported goods. And because Chile has such lower tariffs than Argentina — almost 30 percentage points less, for instance, on clothes — thousands of people are making the trek over the border every day to make those purchases. It’s turned into such big business for stores in Santiago that some of them have exempted Argentines from a rule requiring customers enter a Chilean ID number when making on-line purchases.

The choice of Santander to become Treasury’s conduit to the peso came down to two crucial factors. One, the Spanish lender is part of a small group of so-called primary dealers in U.S. treasuries, which means it has a long-standing relationship with the Federal Reserve. The other is that it has large markets teams in both New York and Buenos Aires.

The opaqueness of First Brands’ operations was amped up by its growing use of a number of short-term borrowing techniques, known broadly as trade finance, that allowed it to take out what amounted to corporate payday loans, often tied to expected shipments or inventory.

Even its much-reviled Washington consensus—while some of its commandments were taken to an extreme length and other ignored—is fundamentally sound and has much to recommend itself.

De acuerdo con la explicación oficial, lo que se busca es desincentivar la compra de esos billetes para luego realizar operaciones especulativas. En modo indirecto, además, esto reduce también la motivación a la compra de dólares, ya que la estimación es que muchos se inclinaban hacia la divisa debido a la ganancia extra que podían obtener.

A fines de septiembre, y mediante la comunicación A 8336 del Banco Central, se estableció que quienes compren dólares oficiales no podrán venderlos luego en el segmento financiero por 90 días.

‘Comprá, campeón”, subraya, en referencia a la frase con la que intentó semanas atrás alejar los rumores de que se avecinaba una devaluación del peso.

Entre los hitos más recordados de su gestión macrista está el bono a 100 años que colocó por 2.700 millones de dólares, pero también sus maniobras a partir de 2018, cuando los fondos frescos comenzaron a escasear. Ese mayo logró vender 3.000 millones de dólares en bonos del Tesoro en pesos a los fondos Templeton y BlackRock con el objetivo de mostrar que el Gobierno todavía tenía acceso a los mercados. Le propuso entonces a Macri pedir un rescate al Fondo Monetario Internacional que resulto el más grande en la historia de la institución (57.000 millones de dólares).

El entonces secretario se ganó con rapidez el aprecio del presidente gracias al acuerdo alcanzado con los fondos buitre que habían llevado a Argentina a los tribunales en 2010 y que bloqueaba el acceso del país sudamericano a los mercados financieros. Desde ese momento, el crédito privado internacional comenzó a fluir a raudales y Caputo fue ascendido a ministro de Finanzas a principios de 2017. Argentina había regresado al mundo y el entonces jefe de Gabinete, Marcos Peña, lo bautizó como “el Messi de las finanzas”.

The German chemicals powerhouse BASF has already temporarily shuttered 80 plans worldwide and is slowing production at another 100 as it plans further output cuts depending on what happens to gas prices.

Over half of Europe’s aluminium smelters have already been affected by the power crises. The EU has temporarily lost 650,000 tonnes of primary aluminium capacity, or about 30% of its total, Eurometaux said. Some of Europe’s biggest steel and chemical plants have also been taken offline and there is no clear idea of when they can start up again. And Europe's fertiliser industry association says more than 70% of the continent's fertiliser production has been either shut or slowed due to sky-high gas prices.

“Sky-high gas prices and aggressive monetary policy tightening have pushed the global economy to the brink of a late 2022/early 2023 recession – defined as two quarters of falling per capita GDP. We expect a global recession to be avoided, but a sustained and substantial improvement in growth also seems unlikely,” Oxford Economics said in a note.

"They will not get there," Guntram Wolff, senior fellow of the Bruegel think-tank, said of the 5% goal. "If you are a highly indebted country, you can't issue more debt, it means very difficult budgetary choices," he said of the hefty tax hikes or spending cuts that it would require.

The European powers have three options to come up with the money they need to fund both their own expanded defence budgets and Ukraine: cut domestic spending, borrow more, or confiscate the $200bn of Russian money that is frozen in Euroclear. They are considering all three but are making little progress.

Not only does Europe not have this money, Europe is slipping into recession and crises. Germany says it can no longer afford to pay for its social services and France and the UK are on the verge of asking for International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout loans. Almost all of Europe is suffering from anaemic growth, cost-of-living crises, elevated energy costs, and high budget deficits. With external debt of over 100% of GDP in several countries, they can’t even afford to borrow their way out of their deepening holes.

hiking VAT to 22% to create more money

This morning UBN reported that the IMF has just persuaded Ukraine’s government to significantly increase its projections for additional funding up from that $37.5bn to $65bn for 2026.

The Trump administration is offering a bailout of hedge funds and banks that bought dollar-denominated Argentinian bonds because of their faith in right-wing President Javier Milei. Milei took over the country a few years ago, which suffered from a lack of dollars and an inability to engage in foreign trade because left-wing governments defaulted on International Monetary Fund and hedge fund obligations. Milei then secured IMF funding due to his pledges to cut pensions and the welfare state.A week and a half ago, voters rebuked Milei in a local election, which led to concerns that the country doesn’t have enough dollars to service its debts should Milei find himself out of power. Argentina quickly went into a financial crisis, a sort of bank run on the country. Those hedge funds are on the hook for defaulted bonds.

Mehta refused to put into his remedy an anti-retaliation provision, which means Google can take revenge on those who testified at trial.

This is, in many ways, the dynamic that defines reactionary centrism: the right must be understood, but never blamed. The left can be blamed, but need not be understood.

Wilson counts “75 rare interviews”.

a spitting comet

she had her own ideas, and particularly for the house magazine, the Poetry Review. She wanted to raise standards by paying contributors rather than charging them. In her debut editorial, she asked: “Cannot we cease railing at the Moderns?” The answer was a predictable no.

In Electric Spark, her capacious and penetrating study of Spark’s life, work and psyche, Frances Wilson favours “Muriel”, though, “When I discuss her writing, I call her Spark”. Where Stannard stepped back, Wilson opens her third eye: “[Spark] is no longer here to score through my sentences, but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, her control of my hand”.

German scholarship had dominated Roman republican history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But after the Second World War the approach of Ronald Syme, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1949 to 1970, won primacy among most anglophone scholars; over time and in other hands it tended to devolve into dry-as-dust analyses of rival political groupings, largely stripped of “real” political issues. At the same time groundbreaking German work such as Christian Meier’s sociologically inflected Res publica amissa, published in 1966 but never translated into English, drew little notice.

n idea not conceived in English is probably not worth thinking at all.” Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, perhaps the leading proponent of the historical approach highlighted by this volume, attributes this dictum to an unnamed member of the “Classics faculty, Cambridge, c.1987”.

How much debt do you ask? Well…“Private credit funding of artificial intelligence is running at around $50 billion a quarter, at the low end, for the past three quarters. Even without factoring in the mega deals from Meta and Vantage, they are already providing two to three times what the public markets are providing,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at UBS.And many new computing hubs are being funded through commercial mortgage-backed securities, tied not to a corporate entity, but to the payments generated by the complexes. The amount of CMBS backed by AI infrastructure is already up 30%, to $15.6 billion, from the full year total in 2024, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated this month.

If we move away from regulations and textbooks, we will actually discover another major source of financing the budget deficit - balances in treasury accounts. In fact, this is a kind of "intra-treasury" liquidity reserve, which theoretically should be minimized (if we focus on ideas about the efficiency of the treasury), but in real Russian conditions after 2022 it has been increasing for a long time, allowing it to be used as an additional reserve to cover unforeseen expenses. Balances in treasury accounts first decrease every month as the treasury finances budget expenditures, and then, from the beginning of the tax period, they grow. From the point of view of their direct purpose, their size should not greatly exceed the difference between the minimum and maximum monthly values ​​(in relation to the Russian situation in recent years, this is 2.5-3 trillion rubles), but in practice a much larger amount has formedlarge  balances (up to 9-10 trillion during 2024 and more than 11 trillion rubles in December 2024).

The SEALs reached shore thinking they were alone, and started to remove their diving gear. The target was only a few hundred yards away.

For instance, the Fed crew pushed aggressively for intertwining cryptocurrencies into the banking system. It was “hand-to-hand combat” for 18 months among regulators, with the Fed and officials Nellie Liang and Janet Yellen at Treasury pushing a bill, along with the most bank-friendly Senator, Pat Toomey, that would have given access to Fed facilities to stablecoin issuers. Fortunately, they lost after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX blew up spectacularly, and the Fed finally flipped its position by issuing a statement opposing crypto coming into regulated banking. (Of course, the embarrassment never ends, some dingbat regulator at the Fed, supported by SF Fed President Mary Daly who also screwed up on SVB, had allowed FTX to buy a bank charter, and get access to the payments system and a Fed backstop.)

Not enough has perhaps been made, in assessing Durrell’s radical animus against England, “Pudding Island”, as he called it, of the wrench from India, where he was born and spent his first schooldays. Opportunistic romancing about these early years came easily to him. Haag disposes of his various later claims to being Irish simply because a great-grandmother, born in Delhi, carried the surname O’Brien. Neither was it true, as he liked to tell his French admirers, that childhood inspirations came from being able to glimpse Mount Everest from the dormitory windows as a pupil at St Joseph’s College in Darjeeling.

In military management, there is a long-standing, hopeless chaos with layers of colonels, who should not only have stopped increasing long ago but should have been separated into a distinct brigade, isolated from decision-making, and who still shuffle papers full of lies.

And what does the Ukrainian industry look like in terms of cooperation with Western arms manufacturers? There have been numerous announcements that Ukraine is collaborating with various companies. This largely remains in the realm of media announcements. If Ukraine doesn't receive significant funding in the form of subsidies for the purchase of Western equipment, even from factories supposedly being built in Ukraine, it won't buy this equipment. We spoke with a representative of one of the ministries responsible for international cooperation. She said that if Ukrainians had a choice, for example, between purchasing one Lynx vehicle for €10 million and three or four Ukrainian-made BTR-4 vehicles for the same price, they would choose the Ukrainian ones. The fact that Western vehicles would be 20-30 percent better doesn't make much difference from their perspective.

Using more than 1,000 radar satellite passes, the FT tracked changes at sites associated with ammunition and missile production, two bottlenecks in the west’s support for Ukraine.

For example, France supplies 90% of its barrel production to Ukraine. Moreover, Ukrainian long-range artillery, particularly Western-supplied systems, is often superior in quality to its Russian counterparts, which is another crucial factor.

). Of course, our national debt remains a politicized issue; people embed their ideological aims in their urgent warnings about Treasuries and interest rates. The Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff told me that “progressives have had their head in the sand about the deficit,” partly because they’re bad at admitting there are trade-offs; he published a paper in the August 2024 issue of the American Economic Review showing that long-term real rates tend to move back to a historical equilibrium. “It was like saying climate change might have partly natural causes,” he said. He watched his thesis get mangled as it moved through the ideology machine. “People think, Well, you’re in favor of ‘austerity’ because you think there’s a trade-off.”

. The stand-in force remains the most important part of the future Marine Corps, not the Marine expeditionary unit.

A divorced father of three boys, he would tell ChatGPT what was in his fridge and ask for recipes his sons might like. When his seven-pound Papillon dog ate a healthy serving of shepherd’s pie, he asked ChatGPT if it would kill him. (Probably not.) During his contentious divorce, he vented to ChatGPT and asked for life advice.“I always felt like it was right,” Mr. Brooks said. “The trust level I had with it grew.”

In a relatively short space of time, one company, Valnet, has acquired a dizzying number of titles, including three publications I once freelanced for — Android Police, How-To Geek, and MakeUseOf.Valnet — a Canadian company whose two founders made their name, and their fortune, in adult media — also owns ScreenRant, The Gamer, XDA Developers, and Polygon, to name but a few sites from its fast-growing portfolio.

The formerly USAID-funded Bihus, which specializes on uncovering corruption, released a new investigation on May 20. It found that the greater part of 40 billion hryvnia (1 billion USD) allocated to the building of frontline fortifications hadn’t found its way to the war-torn Donetsk steppes.

Shyrshyn has been defending Ukraine since the first days of the full-scale invasion, having enlisted in the 80th Air Assault Brigade, where he became a platoon commander. Later, he became a company commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. He proved himself a true leader during the offensive operation in the Zaporizhzhia direction in 2023. His company was one of the first to break through to Robotyne after months of frontal assaults on well-prepared enemy defenses — because the commander was always with his soldiers, personally participating in the assaults and fighting on the front lines. His company can be seen in Oleg Sentsov’s film "Real."

The division of the latest 155 mm Caesar self-propelled howitzers (SPHs), as well as the rest of the brigade's artillery and mortar crews, did not have the opportunity to complete a comprehensive firing course and are learning to shoot during combat missions. All 120 mm mortar shells supplied to the brigade, manufactured by the Ministry of Strategic Industries, turned out to be faulty. On December 4, during test firings, not a single one of the 10 shells detonated. The mortars could not provide fire support, and there was no suitable ammunition available to train the mortar crews. Furthermore, the Ministry of Defense neither oversees the quality control of mortar supplies to the troops nor removes faulty ammunition from service.

95% of the brigade's commanders had not fought in the war and needed extensive training and selection before they could be trusted with command. 100% of the brigade's technical specialists had to be trained from scratch—for drones, equipment, and management—and there was no time to shape them into proper specialists.

Nevertheless, most of the soldiers who were sent to France did not desert but were preparing. Neither did more than 4,000 people recruited without selection from the TCR (Territorial Centres of Recruitment), who came to replenish the brigade in September-November, who, in the absence of the brigade command and the home station, lived on the territory of the OC "West" training center and were somehow trained by the instructors sent there by the OC.

In other words, they took away almost all of the fully fit soldiers who had just been appointed by the brigade commander and battalion commanders, actually resetting the previous four months of work, in March-June, so that this brigade was organized in August, and then... they issued an order for everyone who remained to prepare for the trip to France at the end of September.

MP (AWOL) March 46 (3) April 123 (6) May 217 (31) June 1978 (185) July 3882 (310) August 2748 (217) September 3253 (187) October 3211 (339) November 5832 (448).

n early June, it emerged that Russia was actually reducing its payment levels for contract fighters. This would indicate that they are having no issues with finding a sufficient number of fighters. In 2025, payments were reduced in several regions. In particular, in the Samara Region, the amount dropped from 3.6 million rubles (approximately $40,000) to 2.1 million rubles ($23,000); in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO), from 3.1 million rubles ($34,400) to 1.9 million rubles ($21,100); and in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, where earlier reports mentioned payments of 3 million rubles ($33,300), they have now been reduced to 1.5 million rubles ($16,700). In Bashkortostan, it was decided to cut the one-time payments from 1.6 million rubles ($17,800) to 1 million rubles ($11,100).

Another user wrote that zombie units are widespread:Without exception (well, maybe 154 to some extent), these 150 ‘organisms’ are just ticking boxes—nothing more. For management, they dumped every possible reject from other brigades here. A small example: The deputy battalion commander for armaments DOESN’T KNOW how to properly document and transport weapons in a rail convoy. The brigade’s own leadership is clueless about most regulatory documents—even electronic workflows had to be set up by a sergeant transferred from another brigade. Need I mention that this ‘divinely blessed’ formation’s transport service, in 1.5 years of existence, hasn’t processed a SINGLE vehicle registration?

Contrary to the popular belief that the U.S. job market is extremely tight right now, most jobs still get lots of applicants.

internal recruiters whose function, in part, is to push back on hiring managers’ wish lists. (“That job doesn’t require 10 years of experience,” or “No one with all those qualifications will be willing to accept the salary you’re proposing to pay.”)

His letter ended with a threat – ‘“In addition, we understand that the bill requires the Cabinet of Ministers to ensure that the same level of localization is introduced in future procurement related to projects financed by international financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank. In this regard, we would like to emphasize that these requirements could have a serious negative impact on the future of such institutions in Ukraine and the corresponding support of the EU."

Its financing predominantly runs through two channels: Guarantees provided to mortgage lenders and, via the Sakani Program, interest subsidies and down payment supports provided to home buyers

University of Texas finance professor John M. Griffin and his doctoral student Amin Shams detailed Tether’s activities in a 2018 paper. For the period of March 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, Griffin and Shams found plausible evidence to conclude that a few actors printed tethers without real dollar backing to artificially rescue Bitcoin (BTC) when its price fell and stimulate its overall growth. The trading activity was concentrated on Bitfinex with trading patterns not seen on other exchanges. Griffin and Shams also noted the dubious nature of Tether’s reserves and demonstrated unbacked issuance. So long as no one could tell the difference between a tether token and a real dollar, these unbacked tokens could be traded as if they were real dollars. Think of it as a cheat code in a video game for unlimited gold when every other player must grind quests to get them.

Two weeks ago, French semiconductor manufacturer Sequans Communications raised $384 million from more than 40 institutional investors to buy bitcoin. The company’s stock jumped 215% that week and peaked at $5.83 a share—but it’s since fallen back down to $1.98.

The challenge of securing enough gas turbines is one of the clearest examples of how booming investment in artificial intelligence is reshaping the electric power industry, overwhelming suppliers and upending longstanding notions of what makes sense financially.

The agency is split primarily into two branches: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which has about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers, and Homeland Security Investigations, whose roughly 7,000 agents investigate drug smuggling, human trafficking, counterfeit goods, and a range of other cross-border criminal activities.

Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said.

Less than four months later, on April 25, 2019, the rumblings of the government’s first financial crisis began. J.P. Morgan decided to shed US$800 million worth of Lebac, a short-term bond from the Central Bank, and buy dollars. One of the largest financial institutions in the world, J.P. Morgan had voluntarily taken on US$2.3 billion in debt and had a good relationship with the Macri administration — several representatives had worked in its offices. Hence the bewilderment at the Central Bank.

December 17, 2015, Sturzenegger felt confident. Macri had taken office as president a week earlier, and as head of the Central Bank, Sturzenegger had fulfilled one of PRO’s main campaign promises: lifting currency controls, the cepo. He raised the purchase limit to US$2 million per month and removed all restrictions. The dollar rose to AR$13.93. Sturzenegger celebrated the measure at a lunch with the Central Bank’s board of directors. But one of the guests pointed out that the devaluation would immediately translate into higher prices, a phenomenon known as pass-through. “Pass-through is a myth,” he answered.

His bachelor pad was a set location for the Juan José Campanella film, La Hija de la Novia (The Daughter of the Bride).

In one of his books, he defines himself as an “incorrigible optimist.” Those words are not so different from descriptors offered by interviewees: workaholic, Swiss discipline, fundamentalist, hard-headed, and naïve. “In a sense, he is pretty dogmatic, with a dose of messianism,” said an economist who knows him pretty well. “He says: ‘I have the solution for Argentina’s crisis, I have it all thought out, I have the correct theoretical model’. As president of the Central Bank, he became the most incarnate version of that.”

On Tuesday, Starmer circled the wagons to defend McSweeney, telling cabinet: ‘We will learn from our mistakes, but we will not turn on our staff – including our chief of staff, without whom none of us would be sitting around this cabinet table.’

. He claimed that at the time he had been discombobulated by a fire-bomb attack on his home (an incident which credible figures in government have linked to the Russians, who will be delighted to know it put the PM off his game

his biographer Tom Baldwin (whom some on the left would like to replace McSweeney),

McSweeney is exercised by the fact that the civil service has 7,000 communications officers, 4,500 of whom work for arm’s-length bodies and quangos and frequently attack what the government is trying to do. Like Dominic Cummings, he is enthused by the possibilities of technology to speed change, such as AI in the NHS or gamers being hired by the Ministry of Defence to fly drones. He is now experimenting with ‘synthetic voters’ – essentially fake focus groups of AI voters who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. In the last week he has been reading The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp, co-founder of the tech firm Palantir, which argues that the West’s technical dominance over the past century has been down to collaboration between governments and tech firms.

‘Rachel is a study in Shakespearean tragedy,’ a cabinet colleague of hers remarks. ‘She played a big part in getting our economic credibility back. But in opposition she essentially said no to things, and the problem is that the first thing she said yes to in government was the winter fuel cut.’ Starmer and Reeves both began with a miserablist message that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. This resulted from a major misunderstanding. ‘We tried to do what Cameron and Osborne did in 2010 and blame the last government,’ the cabinet minister says. ‘And while things were significantly worse than we expected, that didn’t resonate with the public.’ A Labour strategist adds: ‘We assumed it was 2010 because the public finances were a mess, but the public appetite was for 1997. They wanted the hopey-changey thing. We told them how it would get worse. We still haven’t really explained how it will get better. It’s almost like what we liked about George Osborne’s “pain for a purpose” was the pain part.’

“This kid is full of beautiful ideas, my kids love him, but he’s just not serious,” said a top corporate lawyer who donated to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. “Everything he’s proposing would require an increase in taxes and that’s just not going to happen.”

Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can't fund any projects if they don't pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it's the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don't need developers. I was miraculously allowed onto some mandated “Professional Development For Board Members On AI” panel hosted by the Financial Times5, alongside people like Yahoo's former CDO, and the preparation consisted of being informed repeatedly that the audience has no idea what AI does but is scared they'll be fired or sued if they don't buy it.

“Opinion” also remains important for retaining and attracting new readership. Its top stories regularly bring in 750,000 to 1.2 million page views. The median number of page views for “Opinion” in 2024 was just below 200,000 per story, and that figure rose in early 2025. Still, a source familiar with the paper’s overall traffic said that “Opinion” is a solid, but not outsize, contributor to it.

In response to concerns from the agribusiness sector, Finance Minister Luis Caputo suggested producers engage in carry trade strategies to increase returns. Rural associations, in turn, replied: The productive sector we represent has received statements from national officials that are troubling. First, we were advised to engage in financial speculation—an activity entirely unrelated to our core mission. Our work is to generate real, exportable wealth, which over the years has allowed successive governments to confiscate a total of $200 billion.

Yes, China halted exports of all rare earths to Japan for two months in 2010 during a territorial dispute, scaring Japanese manufacturers, which nearly ran out of supplies. Sumitomo, a Japanese trading group, and the Japanese government subsequently helped Lynas, an Australian company, build more mining capacity in Australia and processing capacity in Malaysia, so that Japan would have an alternative to China.

The Houthis were also able to down more than a dozen U.S. Reaper drones, each worth around $30 million.

But there are two ways in which Hayek can be used to argue something different. In his own understanding of human evolution, we have continued to rely on forms of ‘tacit’ knowledge that lie beyond the reach of computers. It was the innate human ability to navigate uncertainty that enabled us to interact with one another in the marketplace. As a result we are able to use the hidden power of the market to build computers, but they shouldn’t be able to use it to build us. Of course, Hayek had no idea what might become possible in the age of AI, when computers are increasingly adept at mimicking all the forms of knowledge – tacit, unspoken, unconscious even – that human beings possess. He was thinking of cack-handed earlier attempts to use computer technology to run the economy, such as the doomed Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile, which promised to manage prices and goods in real time and never got further than resembling a set for a bad sci-fi movie. It may be that the latest AI technology will soon be able to ‘do’ freedom as Hayek understood it. Perhaps liberation isn’t only for humans after all. But there are grounds for Hayekians to be nervous of Silicon Valley’s ambitions in this area – let alone what is being attempted by its Chinese rivals. The point of the market was to allow us to fulfil our potential. If there are non-human entities who do better under market conditions than we do, might that not be a good reason to shut the market down?

Today, American intellectual property is locked into dominant firms, who spend large amounts of money making sure no one else can use it. Apple for instance spends $1 billion a year on its legal division, and Disney is right now suing people online for using Baby Yoda memes. China, however, has a way around our IP laws; it just hacks our corporations or legally forces technology transfer, and then moves this knowledge throughout its technology sector. Thus American know-how floods into China, while Americans are locked out of the wisdom we developed and paid for.

American strategy for 50 years has been designed to create financial assets, which we then traded to China and foreign countries for physical goods

Clarivate’s recent decision to shift from perpetual access ebook sales to a subscription-only model

And then there's the further point where they’re in the process of claiming that they can take money out of anyone's bank account or freeze anyone's bank account. It's actually mind-bending trying to keep up with these stories of all the different ways that they're going after bank accounts. I mean, they froze a New York state government bank account related to EPA grants that were already handed out that were being administered by Citibank. And I want to dig into that more and write about it more. But that's just one of, I would say, four or five different payment stories that are calamitous.

biofictions

In the end, this was a pyramid scheme resting on the investments of thousands, then millions, of Americans.

since Macintyre’s book has no footnotes

The Iraqi connection is usually the most neglected part of accounts of the siege, since it complicates an otherwise straightforward tale. Yet the operation was wholly planned and organised by Saddam’s intelligence service, right up to the moment the gunmen burst into the embassy. Macintyre recognises that ‘war between Iran and Iraq was looming, and the opening battle was being fought inside 16 Princes Gate.’ In fact, it wasn’t the opening battle: the embassy seizure was one of a rapidly escalating series of violent incidents staged by Iraq in the first half of 1980, leading up to its full-scale invasion of Iran on 22 September. Some years later, I read a declassified message from an agent in Baghdad working for the Defence Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, sent on 8 April, three weeks before the Iranian embassy takeover. ‘There is a 50 per cent chance that Iraq will attack Iran,’ the agent wrote (his name is blacked out but he was evidently well connected with the Iraqi elite). ‘Iraq has moved large numbers of military personnel and equipment in anticipation of such an invasion.’ Skirmishes had already begun: two days earlier, an Iraqi commando unit had fired rockets at an Iranian oilfield. The agent finished by saying that Iraq’s leaders believed that ‘the Iranian military is now weak and can be easily defeated.’

With hindsight, Trump 1.0 is perhaps best described as a lite form of positive-sum populism. He won the election in 2016 against the backdrop of talk of “secular stagnation” (Summers) and a mini-recession in manufacturing. From 2017, Trump’s extraordinarily expansive fiscal policy accelerated growth, helping to restore something close to full employment. Tellingly, this generated tension with the inflation-guardians of the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, tax cuts handed huge benefits to the highest earners and deregulation favored business. Trump’s wilder plans were either not fully fledged, or, he was restrained by “the adults in the room”. We don’t know what a second Trump term might have looked like. The chaos of 2020 blurs any clear analysis. But the escalation of tension with China was ominous, as was the radicalization on the right-wing.

There are questions, moreover, about whether foreign holders of US debt securities will continue to be treated fairly. Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has reportedly mulled the possibility of converting five- and 10-year US treasury bonds held by foreign investors into 100-year securities bearing low interest rates, whether those investors like it or not. During the 2024 presidential campaign, advisers to Trump such as Robert Lighthizer mooted the possibility of taxing foreign purchases of US treasuries as a way of driving down the dollar and enhancing the competitiveness of US exports.

This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

Europe’s current economic model is unworkable. Post-war success was based on rebuilding shattered economies, the generous Marshall plan, low labour costs and a strong technical and manufacturing base. The common market reinforced by the single currency since 1999 facilitated trade amongst members. The expansion of the EU and the reunification of Germany created new pools of cheap labour and new markets. More recently, China provided new markets for automobiles, machinery and industrial technologies underpinning growth.

Benedikt had read Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fé soon after it was published in 1935, prompting her to embark on her own writing career in her native Vienna and to follow Canetti into exile in Hampstead.

El año 2024 fue el de menores inversiones extranjeras en 20 años, las empresas transnacionales se retiran una tras otra del país. Quieren irse.

El Banco Central acumuló reservas brutas, pero las netas, las disponibles realmente para pagar, no se movieron en casi 16 meses de gobierno.

Senior officers openly acknowledge that the scope of current operations and combat requires a larger standing military, suggesting that establishing new regular battalions is key to reducing reservist strain and burnout. They say one regular battalion can handle the missions of 12 reserve battalions and that they hope to expand the regular force to lower the burden on reservists.

The Eisenhower stagnation was also the context for a major, if little remembered, employers' offensive against unions.  It was no coincidence that the recession came on the heels of 1956, a year in which unemployment dipped below 4%, wage growth accelerated, and labor productivity growth went negative. The episode fits easily within Michal Kalecki's famous sketch of the political business cycle . Capitalist not only experienced “1950-58 [as] a period of declining profit margins” they also “complain[ed] that they have ceased to be bosses in their own enterprise,” as the New York Times put it in a story on the “corporate rebellion” against workplace norms. Who could blame them if they grew “boom-tired”?

The second paper was about Leontief’s experience with American politics, particularly the history of national economic planning in the 1930s and 1970s crises and in the (relatively) stable period in between. The main lesson I took was the intensity of business opposition to planning (which was intense enough that Eisenhower’s business dominated Defense Department ended U.S. government funding for I-O; for awhile in the 1950s the U.S. was one of the few countries in the world without a public I-O program, despite the technique having been invented by U.S. government funded research). In the 1970s, many (including Leontief) expected that business would end up demanding central planning, and some powerful business figures did briefly ally with Leontief and certain labor unions to form the Initiative Committee on National Economic Planning. But this sort of corporatism failed to launch, and has been nearly forgotten. Despite these failures, the experience shows, minimally, that there is a planning tradition in the United States, and that the history of the “Keynesian era” of the 1940s to the 1970s cannot actually be understood solely in terms of Keynesian aggregative macroeconomics. If you make it to the end of the paper, you’ll see it’s actually a prehistory of supply-side liberalism.

The combination of deficit spending and monetary ease raised the old specter of debt monetization, in which the Treasury sells its debt directly to the central bank instead of the bond market, thereby freeing itself from interest obligations and market discipline. (Pejoratively, this is referred to as “printing money.”)

Last week, Mauricio Claver-Carone, Donald Trump’s State Department envoy for Latin America, said in a CNN interview with Andrés Oppenheimer that the US justice system will investigate the $LIBRA scandal, in which “defrauded Americans” lost millions of dollars: “It’s complicated that there were victims, defrauded Americans, hundreds — if not thousands — who have lost millions of dollars [to the $LIBRA cryptocurrency]. And [on top of] some of the president’s [Javier Milei] advisers were Americans… I think there are going to be judicial investigations; it is a complex issue, but a good lesson for President Milei, and for others, in the sense of being better advised, of having a better team and not falling into unnecessary mistakes and self-inflicted coups.”

To quote a reader with extensive HR experience who attempted to explain this dysfunction to me: While there are professionals that specialize in tech and with time develop enough depth to understand the discipline and move the needle in the right direction, for most recruiters it is not an economic advantage to do so; as the winds of the market are ever changing, recruiters are always the first ones to go into the chopping block when there are layoffs. Better to be a generalist recruiter and keep your job options open. I.e, the recruiters you are talking to probably go out of their way to avoid learning anything, because they may be recruiting in a different industry next month.

Hayek, after all, pioneered the notion of bombing countries that were recalcitrant to Anglo-American will, calling for lightning air attacks on Iran in 1979 and Argentina in 1982.

Schroeder seems to have come to appreciate some of the inconsistencies and internal contradictions in his approach, as is made clear by an essay written probably c.2015–16, a reflective think-piece published for the first time in Stealing Horses and in some respects the highlight of this collection. At the time of the 1914 centenary, he had come to accept that what he called a “collective tide of recklessness” may have been more significant in accounting for the outbreak of the First World War than systemic factors. Therein may well also lie a lesson and a warning for today. Great historians have a life, and they have an afterlife. Paul W. Schroeder’s may just have begun. But Disputing Disaster does not suggest new ways of examining Europe’s “seminal catastrophe”.

Much of this will be well known to scholars of the period, but Anderson writes with incision and often also with sympathy. The inclusion, as a British representative, of the late Keith Wilson strikes a jarring note. It is rather like adding a piccolo flute to a string sextet in the place of the cello. His output does not seem to fulfil Anderson’s criteria of substance and originality. His emphasis on the importance of the Russian factor in British policymaking and his suggestion of British dissimulation in 1914 go back to Herbert Butterfield and to an extent to Butterfield’s mentor, Harold Temperley.

On the economic front, instead of lifting capital controls as promised, Milei maintained the restrictions—the “cepo”—inherited from the previous two administrations. Concerned about the devastating effects that another peso devaluation could have on local prices and, consequently, on consumption, the government doubled down on these capital controls and introduced a new strategy based on the monetary approach to the balance of payments. This system, known as a crawling peg, established monthly 2 percent devaluations aimed at forcing convergence between inflation and the dollar’s exchange rate. Curiously, the same strategy was implemented by Argentina’s last dictatorship between 1978 and 1981, with disastrous consequences. Notably, the architect of that plan was Ricardo Arriazu, one of Milei’s most revered mentors. The strategy gained a lot of support from the financial sector, which itself stood to gain from the fixed devaluations of the peso.

The same quality of embeddedness and immersion can be observed in her accounts of the great decisional conjunctures in her career as chancellor. Merkel was at the centre of the process by which Europe’s leaders hammered out, over many arduous months, a response to the crisis that threatened first to bankrupt Greece and then to consume the Eurozone economy. She was among those who pressed for a solution that would pair emergency relief measures with a stringent (and politically costly) programme of structural reforms in the worst-afflicted Eurozone member states. This was a controversial stance, and she was caricatured in the Greek, Italian, Spanish and even parts of the British press as a Hitleresque ogre pounding Europe in the name of German dominance. But there were no stand-alone decisions: Merkel worked closely with a group of like-minded states (the most important among them Finland and the Netherlands), insisting that the negotiating parties honour the rules of the Lisbon Treaty, the no-bailout provisions of which stipulated that every government should take responsibility for repaying its own debts. She pushed this way and that as the opportunities arose, trying to move the process in the direction she preferred, but never breaking ranks with her colleagues. In this respect, she was less a helmswoman or chess player than a rugby forward at the heart of the scrum.

Apart from their loathing of his Peronista credentials,

Radical young Jorge (“Giorgio” to Italian relatives) Bergoglio remains, as aged Pope Francis, an impenitent Peronista. He repeatedly invokes the Italian radicals in his ancestry and speaks warmly of his first sight of the equestrian statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Rome.

e in his salad days as a young Russian émigré

With the passage of time,’ Ferguson says, ‘one realises that the episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called the Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.’ Ah, ‘both sides’. In one stroke, the insurrection is explained by an irrational Zeitgeist – everyone was doing it! – and the millions who went out on Black Lives Matter demonstrations are treated as pathological cases: you see, everyone – far left, far right – was stir-crazy after such long confinement.

It is certainly unpredictable. But by the same token, if the threat is of a sudden “credit event risk”, this is something that can be contained by decisive action by the monetary authorities, as the US monetary authorities have demonstrated in recent years.

LP: You’ve also criticized the Biden administration for glossing over the ongoing situation during his presidency. Why the reluctance to offer clearer guidance and warnings? PA: It’s interesting, I take part in a Global Biosecurity Working Group that played a big role in defining the nine-point plan to address the pandemic that Biden used to get elected. But the minute he was elected, he put a hedge fund guy, Jeff Zients, in charge of the pandemic response. Zients decided the best way forward was to convince people that the pandemic wasn’t happening.

Que los pagos en moneda extranjera por obligaciones del sector privado financiero (bancos) y no financiero (empresas) son renovados en su totalidad. En este sentido, el importante incremento de los depósitos en dólares producto del blanqueo ha producido ya una emisión de deuda en el mercado local por cerca de u$s7.500 millones en los últimos tres meses y algunas empresas de gran tamaño han incluso logrado volver a colocar deuda en el mercado internacional a tasas de interés de un dígito que se ubican entre 5 a 7 p.p. debajo del rendimiento de los bonos del Gobierno nacional.

Kowol also draws attention to scepticism about the concept of a “people’s war”, or at least the left-wing variant of that discourse. To many Conservatives “the heroes of Dunkirk were not the civilian ‘little ships’ who had come to the rescue but the Army, Navy and Air Force, and their skilled and primarily upper-class leadership”. Furthermore, such ideas were linked to positive ideas about how the war was to be won. Tanks and bombers, in particular, were seen as weapons that could be used by elite warriors to destroy enemy morale. They could help achieve victory without the changes to the structure of the armed forces that radical socialists demanded and which Tories feared might upset the structure of society.

A case in point is the Army Installation Management Command, or IMC, created in 2006 and chartered to “reduce bureaucracy, apply a uniform business structure to manage U.S. Army installations, sustain the environment and enhance the well-being of the military community.” IMC is headed by a lieutenant general, with a major general as deputy and brigadier general as chief of staff. IMC includes a workforce of 30,000 soldiers and 70,000 civilians. Formerly, Army installations were managed by garrison commanders reporting to local commanding generals, with an Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installation Management. In theory, centralizing the installation management function promised common standards and greater expertise. In practice, results have fallen far short, with the Army experiencing a “crisis” in installation management in recent years.

The immediate precedent for his work is, of course, that of Georges Perec, who devoted himself to exhausting places by describing them in obsessive detail. Perec invented a genre: he wrote guides to his own building, even to his own staircase (Espèces d’Espaces, 1974; Species of Spaces, 1997). Fifty years ago he sat at a café on Place Saint Sulpice to describe minute by minute what he saw (Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, 1975; An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, 1982). In Clerc’s book we find a similar listing technique: gradually moving away from his apartment, always on foot, he announces the names of the streets in capital letters, followed by their dimensions: RUE D’AUBERVILLIERS (1820 × 30 metres) seems to be the longest, the smallest tiny RUE LUCIEN-GAULARD (31 × 8 m), which leads to Saint Vincent cemetery. We learn that it is the final resting place of the film-maker Marcel Carné (Hôtel du Nord), of Ninette Aubart, a survivor of the Titanic. Clerc lists all the cemeteries in the eighteenth, including Saint Ouen cemetery, which despite its name is in the arrondissement and contains the graves of the author’s father and grandparents. “Cemeteries have never made me melancholy, but precise”, he writes.

Five years later, he paused to describe, square metre by square metre, his two-bedroom flat (Intérieur, 2013; Interior, 2018)

“We must finally create attractive conditions for companies,” said Veronika Grimm, a member of the government’s panel of independent economic advisers and a professor at the Technical University of Nuremberg, urging the next government to adopt a wide-ranging agenda to revive competitiveness.

There are economic reasons to push for such a massive infrastructure binge. In many states, building new infrastructure is one of the few ways that electric utility companies can raise rates, decisions that require approval from the public service commissions that regulate what they charge and the profits they make. Big new sources of electricity demand—met with new infrastructure—can mean higher profits. Those utility companies are also political juggernauts in state capitols, where lobbyists can persuade lawmakers to roll out generous incentives to AI developers promising jobs and economic development. All of the above are understandably eager to avoid energy shortages at all costs, of course, and view having too much power as preferable to having too little.

En esta ocasión, Anaya leyó un emotivo discurso de despedida a Galtieri en el que afirmó: “Usted puso de pie a la Nación”. “Las generaciones futuras me juzgarán”, había dicho Galtieri al despedirse del periodismo el ahora ex presidente.

eva a descartar el “plan Massera” que contemplaba elecciones generales con tres candidatos militares.

Lo hacían no solo por la persistencia del terror reinante –no se descartaba por entonces que las Fuerzas Armadas intentaran volver a atentar contra la democracia- sino por el decreto del 13 de diciembre que ordenaba enjuiciar a militantes montoneros o del PRT-ERP.Existía el temor que una denuncia de violación de derechos humanos terminara siendo un búmeran que permitiera iniciar causas penales a las víctimas.

Sin embargo, cuando los sobrevivientes y los familiares de los desaparecidos iban a la sede del teatro San Martín a concretar las denuncias, omitían la pertenencia política de las víctimas, la mayoría enrolados o simpatizantes de organizaciones revolucionarias.

since Hitler’s tanks bestrode the continent

As such, it is particularly incumbent on the Fed to avoid further exacerbating the problem by reallocating to bills or focusing exclusively on bills when organic balance sheet growth resumes. That’s not to suggest it would be appropriate for the Fed to exclusively buy duration, as that would look and feel like monetary financing.

In the basis trade, hedge funds are taking long-term Treasuries and using them to manufacture different Treasury instruments: short-term, Treasury-backed repos that can then be held by the ultimate source of funds – institutional cash piles. From an institutional cash management perspective, a Treasury-bond backed repo is wholly dominated by a Treasury bill. There is no counterparty risk, no duration risk in the collateral, no risk of needing to take possession of an asset the liquidity pool is not allowed to own.

Kenner proclaimed it ‘one of the dozen or so most important books of the 20th century’, but this is hard to credit.

The myth of inviolateness was underpinned by the equally mythical ‘sovereignty of the seas’. Ever since the Middle Ages, it was declared that the kings of England ‘time out of mind had been in peaceable possession of the sovereign lordship of the English sea and the islands therein’. This comforting fiction survived every humiliation at sea and emboldened English skippers to demand that foreign vessels strike their colours in deference. This demand was frequently met with defiance, if not derision. After bumping into a returning Hansa salt convoy in 1449, Robert Winnington reported with some surprise: ‘I came aboard the admiral and bade them strike in the name of the king of England, and they bade me shit in the name of the king of England.’ Pepys records that even the hyperaggressive Captain Robert Holmes (later to be celebrated as the hero of ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’) was sent, briefly, to the Tower for failing to force the Swedish ambassador to strike his colours at the mouth of the Thames. This English obsession occupies over eight hundred pages of the standard work on the subject, Thomas Wemyss Fulton’s The Sovereignty of the Sea (1911).

The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later

In recent years the ANPI, the largest partisan association, has reinvented itself, opening up membership to anyone who subscribes to its ideals. As a result there are now branches of ANPI in cities all over the world, including London and Glasgow.

First the authorities began announcing haphazard plans for accommodation in vacant buildings without doing any preparatory groundwork, leaving a vacuum that could be filled with xenophobic scaremongering; then the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, gave far-right agitators the run of the streets as they broke the law and engaged in various acts of violence, enjoying a degree of latitude that would have been unthinkable for a protest movement led by socialists or republicans. This is the point at which self-consciously sensible folk would say that we should always choose cock-up over conspiracy as an explanation for such matters. But cock-ups usually go through a process of natural selection, weeding out the varieties that produce fewer political off-spring for those in power. The hands-off approach to the far right, which continued after a full-scale riot in Dublin’s city centre, is a matter of public record, acknowledged by the police themselves, and there is little doubt that the force would have come under intense pressure to change direction much sooner were such disturbances causing as much political damage to the government parties as they were to Sinn Féin.

Nevertheless, they continued to share a belief in what Novalis called “magical idealism”: the use of creative imagination to break down the boundaries between words and the world. Where Borges achieved this by mining the paradoxes of theology and mathematics, Bonomini’s circle set about developing what one critic called “the art of moral elegance”. This did not mean that they were blind to Argentina’s political turmoil: they declared themselves against both the junta and the murderous guerilla movements that opposed it. Bonomini liked to quote Borges’s dictum aimed at Juan Perón in 1946: “Dictatorships encourage cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they encourage idiocy … To fight against these sad monotonies is one of the writer’s many duties”.

Then there is the fact that this “logic machine” is frequently, comically incorrect in his judgments. While some of us were trying to urgently point out that Joe Biden should clearly not be running for reelection, Yglesias was in denial. The fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, he said, was “for real” in his commitment to humanity’s well-being. (Bankman-Fried later admitted to a journalist that his ethics were “mostly a front.”) Yglesias admitted he trusted Bankman-Fried because he was rich. (“Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.”

I mean, people say let your money work for you. The monetary policy run by supposedly independent central banks keeps bailing out investors, while deliberatly creating conditions that bankrupting other players in the economy, allowing the people who’ve been bailed out with printed central bank fiat currency to pick up even more quality assets at distressed prices.

Frustrated with the quality of the new conscripts sent to the front line by territorial recruitment centers, commanders are now seeking to conduct their own mobilization drives to better screen and train new fighters, multiple commanders and soldiers said.“The main problem is the survival instinct of newcomers. Before, people could stand until the last moment to hold the position. Now, even when there is light shelling of firing positions, they are retreating,” said a soldier with the 110th Brigade.

Another place where we can talk about real tradeoffs is the question of which investment projects are able to obtain financing, especially given the end of the long period of very low interest rates. Just as machine tools can be scarce, so can access to credit. There are two important dynamics here. First, as interest rates rise, private capitalists will demand a higher return on any investment projects. Second, as interest rates rise, the costs of keeping an existing enterprise going will rise and weaker firms will fail. Civilian-oriented investment to meet social needs will be disadvantaged by both of these dynamics, as we can already see in the case of renewable energy. Historically, when credit is tight, the government has taken steps to ensure that financing is available to military-industrial producers. For example, the Defense Production Act of 1950 directs the Federal Reserve to help oversee special “V Loans” to military producers. The same Fed currently dismisses out of hand the idea that they should do anything at all to tilt the field in favor financing the green transition. This sort of double standard should be politicized, as part of a broader attack on the political economy of financial constraints on industrial production.

The rouble's fall has been compounded by a fall of more than 20% in the stock market so far this year as investors shift their savings from stocks to deposits, which offer interest above the benchmark rate of 21%.

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

wo days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.

Along with some others, notably Myrdal, Hirschman didn’t wait for intellectual exile: he proudly gathered up his followers and led them into the wilderness himself. Unfortunately, they perished there.

it would not be a great exaggeration to say that we have never known how large Nigeria is. The first census after independence, in 1962, was marred by regional infighting, because of its role in determining federal spending and assembly seats. The initial results, which reduced the population share of the politically dominant north, were rejected by the Northern People’s Congress. A redo in 1963 was also rejected as fraudulent—this time largely by southern politicians. The 1973 census was largely rejected as illegitimate; the 1980s and 1990s saw no censuses under military dictatorship; and the 2001 census produced an implausibly low number.4 Even in the relatively successful 2006 attempt, census enumerators were attacked and killed, and the results were still disputed

And it was in turn thanks to Fischer, Anderson believes, that complex multi-nation studies of the kind written by Renouvin, Albertini, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and others made way for the single-country studies (France and the Origins of the First World War, Russia and the Origins and so on) that dominated from the 1970s onwards.

Anderson brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere; then he can step out of it again and size it up coldly from a distance. It’s surprising how rare this is. Historians rarely attempt it. We tend either to dismiss one another’s books altogether or to fillet them for material and move on. Anderson, by contrast, lets the books and arguments of his subjects relax and breathe a little, until they begin to betray their inner contradictions and blind spots – then the vivisection can begin.

. Macintyre presents hi, as a conscientious cop doing his job

“Without nostalgia who could love England?”, asks that excellent poet Anne Stevenson.

His process for creating posts, he told me, is pretty simple and AI intensive: “I use ChatGPT to ask for the best images that can generate a lot of popularity and engagement on Facebook,” focusing on topics like the Bible, God, the U.S. Army, wildlife, and Manchester United. “WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK,” read the ChatGPT prompt in one screenshot he shared with me. You then take the prompts to the image-generation programs Leonardo.ai and Midjourney. Voilà: slop.

(According to Einav and Finkelstein, Medicare for All can’t accommodate patients’ varying “tastes for medical care.”)

This failure also has also created constituencies among various types of domestic manufacturers opposed to the kind of market liberalization inherent to sanctions relief—undermining a core belief held by Western policymakers that sanctions can spur behavior changes in countries like Iran through bottom-up pressure, including from business lobbies.

By the late 2010s, as the sociologist Yagil Levy writes in Shooting and Not Crying, published in Hebrew last year, killing had become the principal metric of military efficacy. Operational success was measured by the number of targets generated and the percentage of assassinations carried out. ‘There was this romance with big data,’ Alon recalled. ‘People got rewarded for spearheading projects with buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” in the title.’ Commanders doled out medals to enterprising conscripts eager to help automate intelligence operations. Government officials celebrated Israel’s technological capabilities as proof of its military supremacy. In May 2023, Eyal Zamir, the director general of the Ministry of Defence, boasted that the country was on the verge of becoming an ‘AI superpower’.

the data-driven tech boom of the 2010s led the army to employ the services of civilian firms that were experimenting in mass surveillance and machine learning. The American data analytics firm Palantir opened an office in Tel Aviv and secured contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the IDF. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon all have offices in Israel. Start-ups staffed by veterans of intelligence units and funded by venture capital firms, often from the US or the EU, offered advanced surveillance and weapons systems. Among the most prominent were the cyber-espionage firm NSO, the biometric surveillance company Oosto and the hacking firm Cellebrite. Over the last decade, defence officials have claimed that the revolving door between the military and civilian technology firms is key to maintaining Israel’s military edge.

n the mid-2000s, military chiefs began remaking intelligence units in the image of Silicon Valley start-ups. The press framed service in military intelligence as ‘better than a degree from MIT’, claiming that it prepared young Israelis for success in a global tech economy. Applicants, typically from the middle-class, liberal and Ashkenazi communities who had rallied for an end to the occupation a few years earlier, vied for entry. Preparation began early. Teenagers took coding classes, studied foreign languages and passed the requisite tests. New recruits were rewarded with lectures from billionaire tech moguls and tours of Tel Aviv start-ups.

Yet another Syrian-Argentine who was a Menem intimate is Ruben Beraja, whose tenure as DAIA chief coincided with the latter’s presidential mandate. Beraja was a participant in the notorious US $400,000 payoff to witness Carlos Telleldín — about which, more here — and by the late ‘90s had become a fairly controversial figure, in spite of his repeated protests about supposed “victim-blaming.” Memorial groups and what of the Jewish left which had survived the Proceso increasingly began to harass him wherever he went, demanding that justice extend past phantom Iranians to the various Menem associates implicated in AMIA. Ruben Beraja got the last laugh, though. The failure of his own Banco Mayo, in which almost all Jewish institutions kept their funds, enabled a restructuring of Argentine Jewish life which substantially marginalized left-wing factions from the governance of DAIA and other national umbrella organizations. In their place came religious and Zionist hardliners, awash in foreign donations, who remade the public face of Argentine Judaism in their image and swept any inconvenient questions about AMIA under the rug. Chief among these was the missionary cult Chabad-Lubavitch, whose relief efforts for Jewish families left destitute by the 2001 crisis pulled them from standing at the barricades with gentile peers (Lutzky, 2012: Chapter Seven). The first major revolt against neoliberalism in the twenty-first century was also the first in Argentine history where Jews hewed in large numbers to the side of reaction — a trend which has continued to deepen ever since.

Announcing the Bank of Russia’s latest rate hike to 19%, Elvira Nabiullina acknowledged rates might go to 20% in October and rates would continue to climb to get inflation back to the 4% target in 2025. But monetary policy cannot tame what’s driving inflation.

The answer is simple: the tech industry's desperate attachment to artificial intelligence is largely fueled by the SaaS industry, because AI is the first meaningful new "thing" they've had to flog to customers in quite some time, and because so many of these solutions are sold in bulk on annual contracts signed by people who aren't the end user, artificial intelligence feels like something that they can put on top of another solution and claim it's new.

might galvanize the other side more than their own—Corbyn’s 2019 reception in Mansfield being a case in point

Even in seemingly unpopulated or abandoned areas of Gaza, soldiers engaged in extensive shooting in a procedure known as “demonstrating presence.” S. testified that his fellow soldiers would “shoot a lot, even for no reason — anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots.” In some cases, he noted, this was “intended to … remove people [from their hiding places] or to demonstrate presence.”

branded its staff “third-rank students from first rate universities”

At the time, Democrats seemed uniquely fat and happy. In the summer of 2016, a manufacturing worker from the corporation Carrier, which had just announced it was sending jobs to Mexico, asked President Obama at a town hall meeting about offshoring. Obama was annoyed. Such jobs, he said “are just not going to come back.” Trump’s appeal in that context was pretty obvious.

The Greens’ approach to environmental policy is economically punishing for most people. They are in favour of high co2 prices, making fossil fuels more expensive in order to create an incentive to get off them. That may work for well-to-do people who can afford to buy an electric car, but if you don’t have much money, it just means you’re worse off. The Greens radiate arrogance towards poorer people and are therefore hated by a large part of the population. That’s something the AfD plays on—it thrives on hatred of the Greens, or rather of the policies the Greens pursue.

But the Greens have been fanatical on this point, so completely in thrall to the us that they have adopted a virulently anti-China position. Baerbock, the Green Foreign Minister, has made real diplomatic blunders. In at least one instance, in Saarland, she scared off an important Chinese investment with a lot of jobs attached. So, this is a worrying new development.

Brazil was no exception, and it adopted a suite of ad hoc programs: emergency aid to people in situations of vulnerability; an emergency benefit for formal employees; an emergency benefit for maintaining employment and income; and emergency financing to cover payroll expenses. These emergency income guarantee programs consumed 63.5 percent of the “war budget” spent in 2020.16

gainst this backdrop, this section proposes an analysis from the perspective of financial cycles. To do this, we discuss two points: first, a fall in the two main banking revenue streams appeared as a trend before the Covid crisis and, for this reason, we can consider that decline to have a more structural dimension; second, the state played a key role in restoring the sector’s profitability.

And while Barnett conducted numerous high-profile interviews over the years with the likes of The New York Times, the producers of the Netflix documentary Downfall, and the Today show, what was most unusual from his lawyers’ perspective was that he had the receipts. Unlike would-be whistleblower clients who find themselves “perp walked” out of the plant without access to their phones or email accounts, Turkewitz told the Prospect, “John had meticulously documented everything, he had thousands of pages stored on his computer.” Those documents were especially invaluable because of the meager force of the “AIR 21” statute governing aviation whistleblowers, which forces industry employees who are fired for speaking out about unsafe practices to litigate their grievances in a secret court system operated by the Department of Labor that lacks subpoena power.

The judge said this while ruling in the DOJ’s favor, in a case filed by 737 MAX victims’ families to force the agency to hand over its files on the decision to close the Boeing case with a toothless DPA. The judge, Beryl Howell, denied the families’ motion, but rebuked the agency for failing to “take seriously the reputation of the Department of Justice [in] responding to all the smoke that has been generated about this DPA,” as evidenced by its failure to send a single lawyer from the fraud division to the March 1 hearing. “It’s the Department of Justice’s reputation at stake here in how well they’re protecting the public interest,” she told the courtroom.

In any given year, Cairo pays 50–60 percent of state revenue in payments on this debt, while 40–45 percent of its revenue comes from regressive taxes on the poor, many introduced in 2016 with IMF support. The other half of its state budget is borrowed money, which Cairo acquires from Gulf Arab donors, the IMF, and by selling its own deposit certificates and bonds at high interest.