Wilde's Preface to Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Buiter slags off Summers

There are several reasons why Summers would be an inappropriate choice as chairman of the Fed. Let’s start with Fed-relevant knowledge and expertise. Summers is not a monetary economist or macroeconomist. He has never shown any serious interest in researching and understanding the workings of the kind of complex, interdependent dynamic systems that represent the environment a central bank operates in. He is the arch-typical quick and dirty partial equilibrium man, full of clever isolated micro-insights, but incapable of grasping the whole. His macroeconomics stalled at the Keynesian cross. As a monetary economist he has never seen a Federal Funds rate target so low he did not want it just a bit lower.

As regards the regulatory and supervisory functions of the Fed, Summers would be a disaster. During his time in the Clinton administration, culminating in his stint as Treasury Secretary, he was, with Greenspan, the main official apostle of full-speed ahead financial sector deregulation. The same naive trust in self-regulation and market discipline that has tarnished Greenspan’s reputation has been a trademark of Summers in action, both at home and abroad. Summers remains cognitively captured by old Wall Street and a prisoner of its culture and views.

Even before Summers went to the US Treasury, his approach to financial crises (in emerging markets and developing countries) never got beyond the putting out of immediate fires. The impact of the bail-outs and rescue efforts advocated and promoted by Summers on the likelihood and severity of future crises was either not considered or not given any weight.

The only time Summers mentions moral hazard is when he asserts that now is not the time to worry about it. And of course, it is always now. Well, now is always the time to worry about moral hazard. There is always more than one way of skinning the cat, and different ways will have different implications for moral hazard. Just one example. Bank of America and Citigroup did have an effective special resolution regime (administered by the FDIC) throughout the crisis. Why was the tax payer called on to recapitalise the banks when it was perfectly feasible to make the unsecured creditors pay instead?

Once the immediate crisis is over, the highest priority should be attached to designing and creating institutional arrangements and incentive structures that will minimize the likelihood and severity of future systemic crises. Summers has never shown any interest in creating institutions that enable policy makers (in the Fed, in the Treasury and in the regulatory agencies) to make credible, long-term commitments. He invariable favours opportunistic discretion over rule-bound flexibility. The last thing the US needs today is a chairman of the Fed with the long-term perspective and attention span of a fruit fly.