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.

Morgan Stanley US Equity Analysts lose it

Are we on a cube-shaped planet? Should “Us do opposite of all Earthly things?” Everything seems backwards. Sell winners, buy losers, own staples in both up and down markets. Just do the opposite of what makes sense. Bizzaro World.

Martin Marietta reported last week, and they and a couple of other materials companies have blamed their poor quarters on the rain. Even Milli Vanilli’s success with this line turned out to be fake. The rain? Oh, the stock went up a lot that day. Bizarro World. The credit card companies are discounting a consumer recession. The banks are discounting an industrials recession. But, Visa said volumes were good in January, and jobs, housing, delinquencies, confidence,and other metrics appear to belie the market price action. Bizarro World. Companies with good results are being hammered. Companies with bad results have stopped going down, with freight, WMT ,and other prior losers outperforming. Bizarro World.

Our portfolio advice has been pretty horrendous lately. As my 90-year old Latin teacher used to tell the class in 1985, “son,you are in left field, without a glove, with the sun in your eyes”.

For those who follow our portfolio, we did quite well over the five years from 2011-2015. But, our portfolio just had its worst month in 61 months in January, and things have not improved in February. The market is down more than we thought it would be. Our biggest sector bet has been financials (particularly credit cards). As an investor recently said to us at a conference, “I am doing a lot of things, just nothing with confidence”. Doing the opposite of what we recommended would have been better. Bizarro World. Or at least hopefully not the real world.

What’s the bull case? The positives are this: no one is articulating a bull case for US equities with conviction. Earnings expectations are potentially low. There is some fiscal stimulus this year (vs. drag previous years).The Presidential candidates don’t appear to be multiple expanders now, but they will get more centrist and the riffraff will be removed in a few more weeks. Sentiment is low (two weeks ago an investor on a panel we moderated said “It is a multi-variable world and every variable is negative”.) The US probably looks relatively better than other parts of the world. So maybe, the bull case is just that no one can articulate a bull case.

Martin Wolf On The GFC

So the basic idea is that, stripped down, there were some very large shifts in the world economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the end of which ­­ just to mention, the most important of which were the Asian financial crises and the rise of China, and the policies pursued by China ­­ the emerging world became essentially a huge capital exporter in aggregate, and pursued policies for a long time designed to reinforce those capital exports. Huge reserve accumulations, deliberate undervaluation in real terms of their currencies relative to what I think would have happened under floating rates. And they started to accumulate huge surpluses. 

There were a number of other developed countries ­­ Germany and Japan in different ways ­­ pursuing quite similar policies, to some extent accidentally as a result of ageing, or as a result of collapses in the desire for investment in their corporate sector, which also generated huge excess savings. And this is something that I develop more in my current book rather than in that earlier book: I have become more aware of the shifts in income distribution within our countries and the effects they have had. But the net effect of this was huge capital exports and a huge shift in the balance between savings and investment, shown in the real interest rate from the late 1990s onwards. 

Now, the world economy has to balance. Demand and supply must balance, demand must equal supply. The question is at what level of activity. My argument is that in the world system that we actually have ­­ this is slightly simplified ­­ the Federal Reserve acts as the global balancer. It effectively balances demand and supply, because when there is ever a huge net export of capital from the rest of the world, it almost automatically takes the form of excess demand for US liabilities ­­ or US assets if you like, or claims on the US to be most precise. Because it's the safest place. It's got the biggest capital markets, where everybody wants to put their money looking for decent, safe returns.

Manfredi Weber on the Greek crisis

Manfredi Weber 

"The prime minister of Greece should apologise for those utterly unacceptable statements. Unfortunately he has passed over them in silence. You are destroying confidence in Europe.

You’re talking about dignity. But dignity means truth and honesty. You have said that the banks are closing because the evil ECB is ratcheting up pressure. You said the banks would be open on Tuesday it is now Wednesday, you are not being honest with the Greek people.

Mr Tsipras, the extremists of Europe are applauding you. Fidel Castro wrote a message to congratulate you on your triumph. It seems to me you are surrounding yourself with the wrong friends

If you’re talking about a debt haircut, be honest. Its not extraneous financial institutions that will pay

It’s Portugal, they will pay 3bn, Spain, 24bn. It’s the nurses in Poland. You have to think about the dignity of people in other European countries.

How can you tell Bulgaria in terms of solidarity that Greece cannot countenance further cuts, when in at least 5 other European countries the standard of living is lower than in Greece. When it comes to hope, people in the continent need hope in the future. Latvia sat in your position in 2009, but the parties there didn’t resort to a referendum, they sorted out their fiscal budget, now they’ve got faith in the future

It seems you’re not standing for hope in your approach.

The PM of Slovakia is also thinking about a referendum because the citizens are sick of shelling out for the Greeks. Europe is not a sum of national views. You engage in confrontation, we engage in compromise.

You are looking for failure. We are looking for success.