“You get a lot more for a thousand dollars of computing power today than you did 10 years ago,” said David Shulman, senior economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast.
The Wall Street Journal URL is (paywall): https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-picks-up-but-still-below-feds-2-target-11556544247
Monday, April 29, 2019
Saturday, April 27, 2019
Quoted in WSJ, "Another Stock Market Record, But it's a Different Kind of Boom," Apr 29, 2019
"David Shulman, senior economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast, came up with the notion of the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks economy when he was at Salomon Brothers in 1992. “The market’s behaving like we’re in a Goldilocks world, and I think that’s justified the increase in [valuations] for stocks this year,” he says."
The full WSJ URL is below (paywall):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-stock-market-record-but-its-a-different-kind-of-boom-11556357400?mod=article_inline
Thursday, April 25, 2019
My Amazon Review of Philip Kerr's "Metropolis"
Babylon Berlin
The late Philip Kerr’s last Bernie
Gunther detective novel is set in the milieu of Volker Kutscher’s “Babylon Berlin,” the
Berlin of the late 1920s where an anything goes nightlife parallels the decline
of Wiemar Germany and the rise of Nazism. The young Gunther has just been
transferred from the vice squad to the murder squad where Berlin is racked by
the vicious murders of three prostitutes who are then scalped. Immediately
thereafter several disabled World War I veterans who were begging at train
stations were shot and killed at point blank range. It is Gunther, under the
guidance of murder squad director Bernhard Weiss (a real person), who puts the
two sets of crimes together.
Along the way we see the seediness of
Berlin’s nightlife, we meet Lotte Lenya of “Three Penny Opera” fame, the artist
George Grosz and the screenwriter and wife to Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou. Lang
had just directed “Metropolis”, but Kerr’s Metropolis is really reminiscent of
Lang’s “M” which would debut in 1931.
Kerr gives us a sense of Gunther’s life
in a boarding house, his drinking problem and his interaction with women. And
through Gunther and his Jewish supervisor we get a sense of the impending doom
facing European Jewry. With “Metropolis” Kerr has gone out at the top of his
game.
The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R33V0JMKNXLH9H/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
Labels:
Berlin,
Fritz Lang,
George Grosz,
murders,
Nazism,
Three Penny Opera,
Volker Kutscher,
Wiemar Germany
Monday, April 22, 2019
My Amazon Review of Steven Luxenberg's "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation"
Betrayal
Washington Post journalist Steve
Luxenberg has written an important book as to how the “separate but equal” doctrine
was codified by the Supreme Court in 1896 that for all practical purposes legalized
the Jim Crow laws of the South thereby betraying the promise of the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. He tells
this story through the biographies of the dissenting Supreme Court Justice John
Marshall Harlan, the majority opinion writer Henry Billings Brown, the lead
plaintiff attorney Albion Tourgee and the history of the free mixed-race
community that grew up in pre-Civil War New Orleans, of which Homer Plessy was
a member.
The two heroes of the book are Harlan
and Tourgee. Harlan was the slaveholding son of Kentucky’s Whig aristocracy who
while supporting slavery opposed the dissolution of the Union and fought on the
Union side during the Civil War. Tourgee was an Ohio lawyer who fought for the
Union and later became a judge in the Reconstruction South. Massachusetts born Brown, on the other hand,
bought his way out of Civil War service and became a judge in Michigan. Of
special interest is the milieu of the mixed race New Orleans community who
fought with Andrew Jackson in famous battle of New Orleans and how it evolved
over the 19th century.
Plessy v. Ferguson was a set-up case orchestrated
by Tourgee to overturn Louisiana’s separate car rule which kept black people
out of the white’s only cars at the sole discretion of the conductor. How was a
conductor to tell whether a light-skinned Negro was black or white?
Nevertheless that was part of his job. Also of interest is the fact that the
railroads did not like the separate car rule either. It cost them money. As a result
both the Louisville & Nashville RR earlier and later the Eastern Louisiana
RR fully cooperated with Tourgee in causing Plessy’s removal from the whites’
only car to set-up the case. Clearly the railroads, at least in the 1890s, were
not the handmaidens of segregation.
What is remembered today is Justice
Harlan’s famous quote that came out of his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution
is color-blind.” Would that be true today? Luxenberg has written an important
history. To me it was way too detailed and way too long, but at many points he
reveals himself to be a very fine writer.
The Full amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAIR48142PPMZ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
Saturday, April 6, 2019
Donald the Destroyer
To paraphrase a question that will be asked in two weeks, "Why is the Fed different from any other institution?" Answer: It is not. With President Trump's incessant criticism of Fed policy and his proposal to nominate two sycophants, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, we now have proof that he is out to bully and then destroy the institution. Hopefully cooler heads in the Senate will prevail and not confirm the nominees, but I fear that thought might be the triumph of hope over experience
Coming before the Fed has been the F.B.I., the C.I.A., NATO, EPA, State Department and host of other agencies. Simply put the guard rails designed to protect our democracy and our economy are one by one being destroyed. Although stock market reaction to Trump's announcement has thus far been benign, I don't want to see what would happen in a crisis. Trust me, it will be ugly.
Coming before the Fed has been the F.B.I., the C.I.A., NATO, EPA, State Department and host of other agencies. Simply put the guard rails designed to protect our democracy and our economy are one by one being destroyed. Although stock market reaction to Trump's announcement has thus far been benign, I don't want to see what would happen in a crisis. Trust me, it will be ugly.
Labels:
CIA,
Donald Trump,
FBI,
Federal Reserve,
Herman Cain,
Stephen Moore
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
My Amazon Review Steven Ross' "Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America"
Nazi Hunters
USC history professor Steven Ross has
written a way too detailed account of how a small group of Jews set up a spying
operation on Nazi activity in Los Angeles. The protagonist of his story is Leon
Lewis who was a WWI vet, a founder of the Anti-Defamation League and a Chicago
lawyer who moved to Los Angeles. He is assisted by Joseph Roos and Joseph
Klein. Through Lewis’ involvement with veterans’ organization he was able to
recruit non-Jewish German Americans to infiltrate and sew divisions within the
Nazi oriented organizations operating in Los Angeles. In this activity he was extraordinarily
successful. His work led to the rounding up of Nazi operatives along the west
coast when the U.S. entered WW II. He was light years ahead of the F.B.I.
Los Angeles was a focus of Nazi activity
in the United States because of the importance Joseph Goebbels viewed the
propaganda potential of the motion picture industry. Although Hollywood was
loaded with Jewish senior executives they did little or nothing to warn the
American public of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews in
Germany and Germany’s growing geopolitical threat. Simply put the executives
feared the loss of the German market.
Enforcing Hitler’s de facto censorship
of Hollywood was the German Consul Georg Gyssling. Gyssling was prominent in
Los Angeles social circles in the 1930s and was very effective in promoting the
“New Germany.” However his real role was to prevent a negative view of Germany
in Hollywood’s films. In that task he was extraordinarily successful and as a
result there were no anti-Nazi films made until 1939.
Although the Hollywood studios kowtowed
to Gyssling, behind the scenes they funded Lewis’ spying operation. The key
figure here was entertainment lawyer Mendel Silberberg who founded the still
very successful law firm of Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp.
Along the way we learn about the “Silver
Shirts,” the U.S. equivalent of the brown shirts and we learn about the
pro-Nazi sympathies in the Los Angeles Police Department which made cooperation
between Lewis and the police difficult.
What is new here is that we learned that
Gyssling actually had back channel conversations with Morton Klein. Further
after returning to Germany Gyssling remained a diplomat and at war’s end he
worked with Allen Dulles to arrange the German surrender. Simply put Gyssling
was more a patriotic German than a Nazi.
What troubled me about the book is that
Nazi’s knew about Lewis and viewed him as there most prominent enemy in the
Jewish community. Why wasn’t he assassinated? In a footnote Ross believes they
feared severe reprisals. To me that does not wash. Perhaps both Lewis and the
Nazis overestimated the strength of the Nazis in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless Ross presents an
interesting history of how and why all too many Americans got sucked into the
racist ideology of Nazism. A scary reminder for today.
The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2TDUFKDGNZ82G/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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