David Runciman on Lance Armstrong

For Armstrong, drugs added an extra element of competition to the sport: the competition to be the person who made the best use of drugs....

When he thought other athletes were taking drugs not available to him ... he informed the authorities and asked that they be checked out....

Accusing Armstrong of doping always seemed in desperately poor taste, given what he had been through. Armstrong himself exploited this advantage ruthlessly....

One of Armstrong's many exquisite hypocrisies was an ongoing suspicion of riders who spent too much time in Spain: he was afraid that they might be taking advantage of the inattention of the local authorities to try out new treatments. If he thought you were a little too fond of "Spanish practices", he would notify his friends in the UCI to warn them.

Dieter Helm on Privatisation of Electricity

If you define the problem as lights going out, he said, you misunderstand everything about the way the new world of electricity markets works. The ideal situation for private electricity firms is one in which there is only just enough electricity to go around. Then they can charge as much as they like, and people will have to pay. "People think insecurity of supply means will the lights go out or not - but that's not the issue," he said. "It's what happens just before they go off."

Julian D. A. Wiseman on IR Swaps in a Euro Break Up

In 1998, new swaps were being transacted against LIBOR in any of ECU, DEM, FRF, ITL, ESP, NLG, and PTE (LIBOR is the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, and is computed by the British Bankers’ Association). New swaps were also being transacted against FIBOR (the cost of borrowing DEM in Frankfurt, computed by the German Bankers’ Association), PIBOR (FRF in Paris), RIBOR (ITL in Rome), MIBOR (ESP in Madrid), AIBOR (NLG in Amsterdam),BIBOR (BEF in Belgium), HELIBOR (FIM in Helsinki), VIBOR (ATS in Vienna), DIBOR (IEP in Dublin), and others.

EMU brought on a simplification. There are no longer separate London ‘fixings’ of ECU, DEM, FRF, ITL, ESP, NLG, and PTE: there is one fixing of the cost of EUR money in London, and this is copied across for the other currencies. On the continent, the European Banking Federation has created a eurozone fixing called Euribor. And (for example), the German Bankers’ Association no longer fixes the cost of borrowing DEM in Frankfurt; instead it has specified that the FIBOR fixing shall be equal to the Euribor fixing.

For the most part, this has worked smoothly. (The one exception is that the French Bankers’ Association messed up the transition from FRF PIBOR to Euribor*3.)

Consider the position of two parties who have traded a BIBOR swap (the former Belgium-franc fixing), using German-law documentation. This swap is, well, whatever German law says it is. And it settles against, well, whatever the Belgium Banking Association says it does. Of course, for now and the foreseeable future, each jurisdiction’s law says that swaps are properly enforceable, and the various eurozone national banking associations say that their national IBORs have been properly succeeded by Euribor (with a modest exception for the French mess-up). But if either of these countries leave EMU, legal uncertainty would surely increase.
Conclusion

1. The old national currencies are irrecoverable. For good or for ill, Germany cannot recover the old Deutschmark — it has been too stirred up with the other national currencies.

2. A nation can leave EMU, by introducing a new currency. In doing so, it can leave euro obligations to be paid in euro, or it can cause varying degrees of trouble by doing something different.

3. Because governments have a lot of power over their legal jurisdictions, and over the legal definition of their own currency, both past and present, and over the definition of their former national ‘IBOR’, a government that wanted to cause trouble could cause a lot of it.

*3 PIBOR used to settle T+1. So if money was borrowed today for three months, the money would arrive on the business day after the trade date, and be repaid three months after receiving it. Euribor is T+2: money arrives the two business days after trading. The logical thing would have been for the French Bankers’ Association to say that a day’s PIBOR fixing is equal to the previous business day’s Euribor fixing, so that the old PIBOR fixing and the new Euribor fixing always span the same period of time. However, for ‘simplicity’, the French decided that today’s PIBOR fixing is to be today’s Euribor fixing. So, if you had traded a swap that was to fix against 3-month PIBOR on 29 September 1999, you might have thought that you were trading the cost of borrowing money from 30 September 1999 to 30 December 1999. But the rules by which PIBOR rolled into Euribor changed this to the cost of borrowing money from 01 October 1999 to 04 January 2000; changing the fixing from one that didn’t cover the turn-of-the-century weekend, to one that did. That made a big difference, and it seems that the whole sorry business is to end in court. (This problem was predicted in advance by William Porter of LEDR.)

Borat has the last laugh?

Edmund Wilson on Dickens

Edmund Wilson summed up the phenomenon succinctly: “Dickens had a strain of the ham in him, and in the desperation of his later life, he gave in to the old ham and let him rip

NYRB on Tomalin's Dickens

The vicissitudes of Dickens’s visits to the United States are tracked in detail in Tomalin’s biography, suggesting a curious admixture of innocent authorly vanity, a shrewd desire to make as much money as possible, and what comes to seem to the reader a malignant, ever-metastasizing desire for self- destruction. Dickens’s delight in his large and uncritical audiences shifts by degrees to an addiction to public performing; like Mark Twain, he quickly came to see that public performance paid more than writing, and was much easier, at least in the short run. Dickens’s need for the immediate gratification of public performing is both tonic and masochistic; consumed by vanity, the celebrated writer is consuming his very self.

Perry Anderson on India

When the British arrived, it was the sprawling heterogeneity of the area that allowed them, after a slow start, to gain such relatively swift and easy control of it...

The British had taken over the subcontinent with such relative ease because it was politically and socially so tangled and fractured, but in imposing a common infrastructural, juridical and cultural grid on it, the unified it as an administrative and ideological reality for the first time in its history. The idea of India was theirs......

But Gandhi’s achievements also came at a huge cost to the cause which he served... For him alone, religion mattered more than politics, which did not coincide with, but subjoined it. There was a further difference. Not only did he hold no religious office, but his religion was to a peculiar extent homemade, unlike any existing belief system at the time...

The composition of Gandhi’s faith, Tidrick has shown, was born of a cross between a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, the planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union. The two were not unconnected, as garbled ideas from the former – karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine – found occult form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years, Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period....

On religious grounds, it was essential to preserve the division of society into four fundamental castes, for it was this that had saved Hinduism from disintegration....

The threat to Gandhi posed by the prospect of Untouchables gaining the right to their own electorates thus went much deeper than fear of another British device to divide the national movement, like the separate rolls granted to Muslims, real though this was. More fundamental questions were at issue. If Untouchables were to be treated as external to the Hindu community, it would be confirmation that caste was indeed, as its critics had always maintained, a vile system of discrimination, relegating the lowest orders of society to a subhuman existence with which the smallest brush was pollution, and since Hinduism was founded on caste, it would stand condemned with caste. To reclaim the Untouchables for Hinduism was an ideological imperative for the reputation of the religion itself. But it was also politically vital, since if they were subtracted from the Hindu bloc in India, its predominance over the Muslim community would be weakened....

To cut off these dangers, Gandhi – still in prison – announced...he would fast to death until the award was rescinded and Untouchables were bundled back into the Hindu electorate....under colossal public pressure, and physical threats to him and his community if he stood firm, Ambedkar yielded to Gandhi’s blackmail.

Satyagraha had not been a success: each time Gandhi had tried it, the British had seen it off. His great achievement lay elsewhere, in the creation of a nationalist party, whose road to power forked away in another direction. For in the end independence did not come from passive resistance, let alone sexual abstinence, individual or universal. It was the result of two other dynamics. The first was the broadening of the electoral machinery first introduced by the British in 1909, and expanded in 1919.....

Michael Wood on Prometheus

The moral of Prometheus is that the quest for knowledge beyond reasonable, practical limits is like a form of sexual recklessness. You won't get a disease but you will, man or woman, become pregnant with your own destruction.

The Marquise de Sevigne

"There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and - I have forgotten the others."

Ferdinand Mount asks if Britain is turning into an oligarchy. David Runciman replies.

A better guide to the current state of British oligarchy is the Leveson inquiry. It hasn't revealed corruption and avarice on anything but a mundane scale; few outright monsters have emerged; there is as yet no smoking gun.  What it has revealed is the complacency, passivity and reckless negligence of those who thought they were doing nothing wrong. Th econgestion of British public life, its squeezed, banal, thoughtless, easy way with power, its acquiescence in its own straitened quality; its thin conception of the public good, its sense of comfort with its own limited ambitions have all been on daily display.  It's nothing dramatic.....Ministers don't do anything nefarious. They simply don't know what's being done in their departments and they don't have any real incentive to find out. Murdoch doesn't know what's going on in his company either, and he too has no incentive to find out.  Confusion and inattention are all our kind of oligarchy needs.

The Economist on the Greek default

Other aspects of the restructuring are more troubling. One is that the European Central Bank (ECB) was able to sidestep a coercive write-down of its Greek bonds, acquired as part of a programme to stabilise bond markets in troubled euro-zone countries. That will undermine its power to stop future market panic through bond purchases, since investors now know that the larger the ECB holding of a country’s bonds is, the bigger the write-down private investors would suffer in a restructuring.

Gavekal on the coming Eurozone balance of payments crisis

Over the past two years, the euro crisis has morphed from a sovereign crisis in a peripheral country (Greece), to a banking crisis, and back to a sovereign crisis in core countries (Italy, Spain). At every turn a "solution" is devised whose purpose is to "save" the euro but whose actual result is simply to push the crisis into new and more desperate terrain. The latest solution - aggressive easing by the ECB - means that the next phase of the euro disaster will be a balance of payments crisis. Indeed, the ECB's change of operating procedures undeniably "solves" last year's problem of eurozone governments financing themselves. But what kind of solution is it when, as Jacques Rueff put it 50 years ago, the ECB's move amounts to "financing expenditures which have no return with money that does not exist"? The highest-odds scenario is thus that the bloated eurozone public sector, having guaranteed its financing for the next three years, will stop all effort at reform, and that the southern European countries will become even less competitive than they are now. In turn this means that -- barring a collapse in oil prices -- their dollar trade deficits will grow larger and that a classic balance of payments crisis is thus right around the corner.

So far, this crisis has not materialized because of the generosity of the Fed, whose swap lines already total US$100bn. To all intents and purposes, the Fed is now financing not only the US budget deficit but also the southern European trade deficits, while the ECB gets to carry the exchange rate and solvency risks. (This Fed-dependence carries a delicious historical irony: one of the prime goals of the euro architects was to create a powerful alternative to the dollar, ensuring that Eurocrats would never again be subservient to Washington. Yet today, thanks to the euro, Europe must go cap in hand to Washington to stay solvent).

Mark Lilla on Americans' politics

Americans' assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. They are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S.Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul, who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of liberalism, not conservatism.

Mark Lilla on Fascists

Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society - representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement - that we forget that they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. There was nothing conservative about them.

Mark Lilla on conservatives

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke's view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for: we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to pre-existing opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke's critique of the French revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege.