Ian Johnson on China's imperial ambitions in the NYRB

Between 2013 and 2015 it built more than 3000 acres of new land in the South China Sea by occupying and expanding shoals and refs just off the coast of the Philippines int islands big enough to support radar stations, runways and docks for its growing navy... Along with the building campaign has been Beijing's novel, contemptuous might be the better word, interpretation of the international law of the sea.  First, the Chinese government violated any accepted understanding of maritime law by declaring the reefs and shoals to be sovereign territory.  Then it claimed the waters around them as its exclusive economic zone.  Finally it declared that economic zones of control are virtually the same as territorial waters, go ing it the right to chase off any ship that passes through.  The fact has been to make the South China Sea into China's South Sea. This means more than Beijing being the dominant power in the region; it wants to control these waters as if they were an inland lake. 

Munchau in the FT on why Hard Brexit would also be bad for the EU

“Just consider the following three effects of a sudden Brexit. First, the eurozone remains dependent on the City of London for financial services and especially on settlement and clearing, the plumbing of the financial system. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, who is not a Brexit cheerleader, said recently there was a bigger risk of a financial crisis in the EU than in the UK. The eurozone is unfortunate in that it allowed its main financial centre to be outside its borders. There is a clear potential for blackmail here.

Second, it is trivially true that Britain has a smaller weight in eurozone trade than the eurozone has in UK trade. This is because the eurozone is bigger. But do not underestimate that manufacturing supply chains work in both directions. A sudden break could disrupt manufacturing production everywhere. Remember that a single bank, Lehman Brothers, was able to blow up the global financial system in 2008. Dynamic effects are harder to calculate than the static ones but they can be much bigger.

Third, the UK is a member of the UN Security Council, the Group of 20 advanced industrial nations, and the Group of Seven. If EU countries want to fight tax avoidance by multinational companies, manage globalisation in a fairer way, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or come up with policies to combat terrorism, they will need the UK.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Tony Blair

He doubtless justifies to himself his work for Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose regime has been strongly condemned by human rights organizations, in the same strange antinomian way he justified the manner in which he took us into the Iraq war: whatever he does must be virtuous because he does it.

Fintan O'Toole on the Easter Rising on the NYRB

The Rising acquired its imaginative potency not in spite of its small scale but precisely because of it.  It's power lay in its manufacture of highly individual and meaningful deaths during a period of mass, apparently meaningless, slaughter. It was handcrafted martyrdom in an age of industrial massacre. 

Adam Shatz on Miles Davis in the NYRB

Davis played on some of Parker's finest sessions but he was something of a tentative, even ambivalent, bopper, because he couldn't play as high or as fast as Gillespie. He was searching for a mellower, less frenetic approach to bop, and found it in "cool" jazz, a style he developed in the late 1940s with the Canadian-born orchestrator Gil Evans. So fervently did he believe in his own vision that, at twenty-three, he turned down an offer from Duke Ellington.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Davis assembled bands that were notable for their startling contrasts of personnel, like the pairing in his late 1950s sextet of John Coltrane, a tenor saxophonist with a furiously probing gnarled style, and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, a buoyant, sweet-toned alto player who always sounded as if he'd just gotten out of church.

Charles Gave on Jackson Hole

“The natural rate is going down because we are moving into period of secular stagnation.” This reminds me of Dr Diafoirus in Moliere’s play The Hypochondriac, who declared that opium puts people to sleep because “it possesses a soporific power which induces sleep”.

Mario Draghi on Eurozone banks

You’re right, banks are important, especially important for the euro zone, which is basically a bank-based economy where the credit intermediation goes mostly through the bank lending channel. Bank equities in the aftermath of the Brexit were especially hit. And especially in the euro zone, and especially those banks with a high share of NPLs, or non-performing loans.

Equity prices, bank equity prices are also significant for policymakers, because when if they drop in the way they did one would assume this is to stay cost of capital would increase, and therefore the net return on lending would decrease, that would suggest on the banking side a more conservative lending behavior. That’s why we do care about bank equity prices for the transmission of our monetary policy…

On the solvency side, our banks are better if not much better than they were before… So what is the problem? The problem now that we have to address is the weak profitability, not a problem of solvency.