The day the international tax authorities came knocking
Excellent interview with Eugene Fama. The usual stuff on efficient markets but also
It’s not just the Fed, around the globe central banks are flooding the system with liquidity like never before. Is this a reason for concern?
Frankly, I think this is just posturing. Actually, the central banks don’t do anything real. They are issuing one form of debt to buy another form of debt. If you are an old Modigliani–Miller person the way I am, you think that’s a neutral activity: You’re issuing short-term debt to buy long-term debt or vice-versa. That’s not something that should have any real effects.
Then again, the financial markets sure seem to love it. At least it looks like that the S&P 500 is moving upwards in tandem with the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet.
Every day we hear a story about the movement of stock prices. But the story is different each day. So basically, these stories are made up after the fact. But when we look at it systematically, we don’t see a big effect of Fed actions on real activity or on stock prices or on anything else. That’s why I use to say that the business of central banks is like pornography: In essence, it’s just entertainment and it doesn’t have any real effects.
TOUGH BOOMERANGING FOR THE KREMLIN
From my piece for Bomb Magazine's Web site on the 40th birthday of Octobriana and the Russian Underground:
In 1970, Petr Sadecký slipped across the border of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with a cache of illegal comic books and the fantastic story of the dissident Russian artists who risked everything to create them. A year later, the publication of Octobriana and the Russian Underground, with its lurid illustrations and the suggestion of secret organizations staging drug-fueled orgies behind the Iron Curtain, was just the thing to send the anxious Western imagination over the edge.
DRAWING ON DOVLATOV
My review of the exhibition of Alexander Floresnky's illustrations for the collected stories of the great Russian humorist Sergei Dovlatov for Bomb Magazine:
In 1993, Alexander Floresnky, founder of the infamous Russian underground art group Mitki, nearly turned down the opportunity to illustrate the collected works of the great Russian humorist Sergei Dovlatov—thankfully, he did not.
Of the Soviet writers who emigrated to the United States between the late 1970s and end of the 1980s, the Russian humorist and novelist Sergei Dovlatov probably had the most significant influence on the American reading public outside of émigré communities. Significantly, while several of his books have been translated into English, eight of his stories appeared in The New Yorker. Indeed, poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, called it about right when he said that Dovlatov’s popularity in the United States was “natural” and predicted that one day he would be just as popular in Russia....
DON'T BE SILENT
The latest riff on Alexandr Rodchenko's original--this one from the Belarusian political art collective Project Antibrainwash, which I saw at EFA Project Space back in March:
"Don't Be Silent, 2011. Downloadable protest poster (36: x 48"). The text along the bottom reads: "Silence is consent."
Rodchenko's original:
Plakat Alexander Rodchenko "Books". The Board for the Leningrad branch of the State publishing house «Gosizdat». 1924 Reproduction Private collection © DACS 2008 © Rodchenko archives.
This image is appropriated time and again, most recently by the band Franz Ferdinand, and before that by the Dutch punk band, The Ex. And not least, by my wife as her Facebook profile pic:
