Grace Jones, Russian chips, oil profits & Egypt's infinite economic crisis
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Grace Jones performing at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, September 25, 2022. Photo: Larry Hirshowitz.
Russian chip supply
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30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Average in the United States, 2022 was not the biggest hike ever. But it was pretty severe
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Oil Profits
ExxonMobil and Chevron are expected to rake in almost $100bn in combined profits from 2022 as the US corporate oil titans capitalise on surging fossil fuel prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Cue share buybacks.
Source: FT
US energy consumption by source and sector
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Egypt’s Infinite Economic Crisis
This is rather good by Mahmoud Salem is a Berlin-based award winning writer and analyst who covers geopolitics, economics, and information security.
From the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
Egypt’s external debt
I wrote this in “Notes on the Global Condition” in January 2017 after Trump’s election and looking back on Brexit. In light of the ongoing shift in global trade relations it still seems relevant:
You don’t exit the force field you alter your position within it … and you don’t do so under conditions of your own choosing. Or, why economic nationalisms are not all alike. The diverging response in markets and from business actors to Brexit and Trump has been indicative of the huge power gradients within the global economy. On Brexit news and any talk of “hard Brexit”, sterling plunges. So far the response to Trump has been to drive the dollar up. It is the Mexican Peso that plunges and emerging markets in general that take a hit. When Trump tweets aggressively about Ford’s or Toyota’s Mexican investment plans, their stock drops and they cancel their plans. Meanwhile, Downing Street huddles anxiously with Nissan to cut a deal to persuade them to retain jobs in the UK. Whilst Trump crows of his triumphs in keeping jobs in America, the British advocates of sovereignty are so embarrassed by the deal that they have done that they refuse to disclose it to parliament. The only body that may actually be able to extract information about the deal is … Brussels! All this points to the fundamental distinction between those who have no option but to accept rules, those who have the power to decide whether or not they will accept a certain set of rules, those who decide or co-decide what the rules are and those who decide whether there are any rules at all. Does this have implications for the options open to a reformist administration in Washington, were there ever to be such a thing? Sure it does!
Artificial reefs
A woman born in 1835 on color film
My grand-parents born in 1910 still talked a little like this.
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Fountains run red
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Finding Ana by Elise Rasmussen
In 1981, Ana Mendieta returned to her native Cuba where she created the Rupestrian Sculptures, a series of carvings in the caves of Jaruco Park. These works confronted her anxieties of separation from her culture of origin and concluded the series of identity-based works for which she is best known. According to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Ludwig Foundation in Havana (as cited in Jose Quiroga’s Cuban Palimpsests published in 2005), Ana’s sculptures were destroyed.* In 2012, I (Rasmussen) traveled to Cuba and located these works, weathered but not dismantled. The project documents my journey and discovery of Ana Mendieta's lost works …
Elise Rasmussen, At Night They Go Amongst the Living (detail), 2012–13, C-print, 40 × 50”. From Finding Ana, 2012–13.
Source: Elise Rasmussen