My Amazon Review of Christopher Clark's "Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame......"

 Revolution was in the Air

 

Contrary to the “Communist Manifesto” the specter haunting Europe in 1848 was not communism, but rather nationalism.  In this way too long 891-page book the distinguished historian Cambridge’s Christopher Clark recounts the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848.  Starting in Palermo in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and then spreading to Paris, Germany, Vienna, Romania, Hungary, and Poland. Europe was aflame with liberals and radicals demanding fundamental reforms. The liberal goals were limited to formal constitutions, political rights, and suffrage for the property-owning classes while the radicals were demanding full manhood suffrage and a right to a job. In the end the liberals would win out.

 

Clark starts his history with the 1815 Vienna settlement’s reaction to the French Revolution and then goes on to discuss the growing immiseration of the working class as the industrial revolution moves into high gear. The problems of the working class were defined as “the social question” by many of the intellectuals of the day. Falling real wages and periodic draughts characterized the milieu according to Clark.

 

Here is where I believe, as an amateur, Clark goes astray. It seems to me that Clark ignores Marx’s paean to the bourgeoisie in his manifesto. To quote “…has created massive and colossal productive forces…chemistry, agriculture, steam navigation, electric telegraphs and canals.” Again, in Marx’s words, “all that is solid melts into air.” In my opinion Clark should have spent much more time on the technological disruption that created the material basis for the revolutions. Indeed, the improved technology enabled the news of the Paris revolt to spread quickly throughout Europe.

 

The revolutions failed because of the radical-liberal split, the failure to bring the military on board, and the near complete lack of understanding of rural Europe by the urban intellectuals. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Remember Marx himself called it “the idiocy of rural life.”

 

However, the revolutions were in no way a long-term failure. Post-1850 new constitutions were written, Germany and Italy would be unified within twenty years, Jews were largely emancipated, and there were massive public investment programs in railroads, health, roads, and canals. The economy was about to boom and with it the ideas of social democracy and women’s rights took hold. Moreover, the pattern of radical movements centering around cafes and newspapers was firmly established and that would last up to the late 20^th century.

 

This is a massive book and there is much to be learned, but as I noted in the beginning it is far too long for the educated lay reader.

For the full Amazon URL see: Revolution was in the Air (amazon.com)

 

My Review* of Scott Patterson's "Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders...................."

 Tail Riders

 Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson has written a book celebrating the exploits of hedge funders Nassim Taleb of black swan fame, and Mark Spitznagel whose successful bets on high impact low probability events made them a fortune. Their strategy is simple and requires a great deal of patience and a high tolerance for pain in that they are continuously long deep out-of-the money put options on the major stock market indices. Most of the time the options expire worthless, but when disaster strikes their value explodes and those monster gains overwhelm the small ongoing losses. In essence Taleb and Spitznagel take positions on the left tail of the probability distribution for stock market returns.

 Although they don’t know when a catastrophe on the order of the 2008 financial crisis or the 2020 Covid collapse would occur, when it does happen, they are positioned for it. Their sales pitch is that they are selling portfolio insurance for a modest premium and that they allow for much higher equity exposures than otherwise would be prudent. Their model is 97% equities and a 3% position in their fund.

 When I was a partner in a hedge fund over two decades ago, we made a similar bet on catastrophe by buying out of the money call options on Eurodollar futures. It was a bet that interest rates would fall. When Long Term Capital Management failed in September 1998 the price of the options increased tenfold.

 Just to note, I previously reviewed Spitznagel’s “The Dao of Capital” and Taleb’s “Skin in the Game.”(See:  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Mark Spitznagel's, "The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World" and  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life"  )   Patterson is a skilled writer so he tells their stories better than they can. However, I would quibble with Patterson in that he wanders off into tangents that are really extraneous to the book’s main points.

* Amazon has yet to post this review. Amazon just posted this AM with  

 Tail Riders (amazon.com)

A Big Week for the Supremes

 The Supreme Court closed it 2022-2023 session with a raft of blockbuster decisions. They buried the so-called “independent legislature theory,” supported the voting rights in Alabama, did away with raced-based preferences in college admissions, undid Biden’s usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse in the student loan case and prevented Colorado from interfering with freedom of expression in allowing a web designer to refuse designing a website for a gay wedding. The last one is a harder call but think of the child of a Holocaust survivor being forced to make a web design for a neo-Nazi group.

 

In my nonlawyer opinion I think all of the above cases were decided correctly. I was especially pleased by the ruling in the affirmative action case where all to many elite universities have been practicing a 21^st Century version of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. What proponents of race-based preferences are really trying to do is to offset the failures of K-12 public education. The reason why African Americans and Hispanics are “under-represented” in elite schools is that public education has failed them with a pattern and practice of state-sponsored child abuse aided and abetted by the reactionary teachers’ unions.

 

One last point on this is that I would hope the Supreme Court will soon accept the case of the odious DEI loyalty oath that is now required for hiring and promotion at many elite universities. There is far less justification for DEI loyalty oaths than there was in the 1950’s where faculty had to pledge loyalty to the United States.  

The Night of the Long Knives Comes to Russia

 On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler launched what was to be called the night of the long knives against Ernst Rohm the leader of the paramilitary SA brownshirts and other opponents of his regime.  In what appears to be happening in reverse in Russia is that Yevgeny Prigozhin the leader of the private army Wagner Group is launching a coup against Vladimir Putin.

 

Although the situation remains fluid, Prigozhin has seized Russian Army headquarters in Rostov on the Don and a convoy is barreling north to Moscow facing little or no opposition. The Wagner Group is the most battle-hardened military force in Russia, and it remains to be seen whether or not they will be opposed by regular troops in the Russian Army. However, the force will likely face opposition from the air and the troops under the control of the FSB security service.

 

In the meantime, Ukrainian forces will likely take advantage of Russia’s lack of command and control and the absence of Wagner Group soldiers to step up their offensive to retake their lost territories.  It is very possible that the Russian Army in Ukraine will soon collapse.

 

Outside of the Ukraine theatre Wagner is very active in Syria, Mali, and Venezuela.  What happens to Russian influence in those places is now an open question. As Lenin once remarked “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

My Amazon Review of Peter Zeihan's "The End of the World is Just Beginning......."

 

The Coming Global Disorder

 

Peter Zeihan “end of the world” thesis is based on the demography of collapsing birthrates and the globalization we have been living with since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement is in terminal free fall. To him, the era of “order” is over and will soon be remembered as an aberration. I agree with him with respect to global demographics, but, although weakening, globalization will still be with us. Of course, if Zeihan’s view of the end of globalization is correct, the world as we know it will be in a world of hurt.

 

Simply put, much of the world has benefitted from the international division of labor brought about by the monetary stability of Bretton Woods and the presence of the U.S. Navy protecting freedom of the seas for all of the participants in the global economy. Instead of pirates trawling the seas, we have giant container ships bringing a harvest of goods to global producers and consumers.

 

Zeihan adopts a neo-Trumpian view of global trade where the U.S. worker has subsidized the rest of the world and as a result the U.S. will withdraw from the global economy no longer interested in enforcing international norms. Thus, with the unity of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union over, the support of Western Europe and East Asia less important. Less important, maybe; irrelevant not quite.

 

Where Zeihan is on much sounder footing is his discussion of demographics. Both Russia and China along with most of Europe and northeast Asia are rapidly depopulating. Simply put, the world is getting older at a very rapid pace and will soon be without workers. Watching Russia and China grow old might not be so benign for the world, because I fear that their leaders understand this and are in the process of expanding their reach before it is too late. Hence Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing aggressiveness over Taiwan. Further Zeihan under-rates the capabilities of the Chinese navy.

 

Zeihan goes into great detail in discussing global transportation, finance, energy industrial materials, manufacturing, and agriculture. In the case of the last the end of globalization will bring with it the prospect of mass starvation. During World War I the Central Powers were cut off from global agricultural trade bringing with it mass starvation.

 

According to Zeihan the United States, because of better demographics, its resource base and proximity to both Canada and Mexico is in far better shape than the rest of the world. To be sure the U.S. would end up poorer, but compared to the rest we would be looking pretty. Of course, a war with Russia or China would radically alter this picture.

 

Zeihan has a breezy writing style making the book easy to read. My guess is that he is directionally right, but he over-states his case.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Coming World Disorder (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of William Walker's "War Ups the Ante"

Europe Goes to War

 

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, the western democracies were not interested in war, but war was interested in them. This is the fifth in a series of Paul Muller books written by William Walker. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of William Walker's "If War Should Come:....."  )  Yet again, Walker does not disappoint. Muller is a banker/diplomat/spy working for the Swiss government immediately preceding and at the start of World War II. As usual Muller is up to his eyeballs in the diplomatic intrigue of that era.

 

The book opens with Muller in Finland where his acclaimed for helping to fight off the Russian invasion. This notoriety does not sit well with neutral Switzerland, so he is farmed off to the League of Nations where he is instrumental in getting the Soviet Union kicked out because of its invasion of Finland. There he meets his Hungarian “spy” girlfriend.

 

Muller soon gets involved in a British plot to block iron ore shipments from neutral Sweden through a planned attack on the Norwegian port city of Narvik. As Alan Furst noted in his “Blood of Victory” novel the British and French plotted to block Danube oil traffic from the Ploesti oil fields in Romania and seriously planned to bomb the Russian oil fields in Baku which were feeding Hitler’s war machine. Walker notes that the “phony war” between October 1939 and April 1940 wasn’t so phony after all. So afraid were Britain and France in confronting Germany on the western front, they planned these peripheral actions. Needless to say, they did not succeed, and they would soon meet the full weight of the German blitzkrieg in May 1940.

 

As in his prior novels Walker gives us a window into the diplomacy of the era. He is especially acute in discussing the role of William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France. It makes for an enjoyable read.

For the full Amazon URL see: Europe goes to War (amazon.com)

The Video Link to the UCLA Anderson Forecast on Commercial Real Estate

Presented below is the video link to the UCLA Anderson Forecast for Commercial Real Estate. The initial part shows the UCLA forecast for the economy. My short discussion on commercial real estate appears at 1:41 and the panel discussion starts at 1:55. The panel consists of Stuart Gabriel, Moderator and Head of the Ziman Center for Real Estate, Carl Muhlstein, Executive MD at JLL, Jackie Levy, CFO of the Caruso Group, and Paige Serden, Sr. Dir. at Gantry, and yours truly. You might find some of this worth your while.

 UCLA Forecast: June 2023 Economic Outlook - YouTube