Quoted in the WSJ, "Inflation Picks Up, but Still Below Fed's 2% Target" April 30, 2019

“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

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

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

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 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th 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 19^th 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

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.

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