Homeless in the rich world. How the BoJ ate the stock market. The world that Sec 301 made and the plot to kill Thatcher.
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook newsletter
Oskar Nerhlinger 3.-2. Klasse (1931) Source: Digital AdK
USA has the highest percentage of its population living on the street, but the UK “leads” the developed world in homelessness
The main form of homelessness is not people living on the street, but people living in temporary accommodation, the main driver is an inability to afford housing, and America is not even particularly close to the worst. The UK holds that ignominious title, with an astonishing one in 200 households living in emergency lodging outside the formal housing sector.
There is a certain out of sight, out of mind quality to temporary accommodation, but it accounts for more than 80 per cent of homelessness across the OECD. Hundreds of thousands of people across the developed world live this peripheral and fragile existence, and Britain’s record is dire. After declining for several years, the number of English households living in temporary accommodation more than doubled between 2010 and 2023 from 48,000 to 112,000, the highest figure since records began. I’m quoting figures for England because it has the most complete data out of the four UK nations, but the others are if anything worse.
Source: John Burn-Murdoch FT
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Home prices in China - whether new or “used” (sic) - continue to slump.
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The Bank of Japan bought stocks equivalent to about 7 per cent of listed Japanese companies. Now what?
In March, BoJ governor Kazuo Ueda called time on this aspect of the central bank’s extraordinary monetary easing programme. The bank has yet to announce what it will do with its half-a-trillion-dollar stock portfolio. With about a quarter of stock market gains during the Abenomics period connected to their stock buying, a poorly managed exit could sink the Japanese equity market. It could also undermine the BoJ’s inflation objective.
Toby Nangle in the FT discusses options for their disposal, including creating a sovereign wealth fund, or a “Hong Kong” solution.
And charts like this:
If you had to give the EU one piece of economic policy advice, it would surely be to raise R&D spending across the board to German levels.
Source: DailyShot
Oskar Nerlinger, 1. Mai - Feier im Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost, Aquarell und Federzeichnung über Bleistift, 1929-1930.
Source: AdK
Excellent reading suggestions:
Quinn Slobodian on the New International Economic Order of Section 301
Two versions of a new international economic order turned 50 this year. One, abbreviated to “NIEO” and revived recently, was spearheaded by the bloc of poorer nations called the G-77. It passed the UN General Assembly in February 1974, called for global redistribution and more resources for industrial development. But this was not the first NIEO. Richard Nixon had already been using this term for a year. What he meant was that the era of reconstruction after the Second World War was over. The vanquished fascist powers of Japan and West Germany were now post-fascist competitors and no longer needed special treatment. He had already freed the proverbial money-printing presses by delinking the dollar from gold. The Trade Reform Act of 1974 launched a series of new eras: of détente, as it was designed to increase trade with the Soviet Union; of new talk of “interdependence”; and of “fair trade.” The primary tool to achieve fair trade was hidden in a subclause with a long afterlife: Section 301. Under this provision, anyone could prompt a US investigation into a trade partner for practices deemed in some way unfair – the list could run from infringements on intellectual property to dumping. Retaliation meant suspending free-trade arrangements until the other party acquiesced. The international trade lawyer Robert Hudec saw at the time that “the new authority will not be easy to contain”. America had built an escape hatch into the architecture of global trade rules. Section 301 was strengthened over the years, putting ever-more power into the hands of the executive, meaning both the president and their appointed trade representative. The next two decades saw a continual stream of Section 301 investigations, mostly targeting Japan, western Europe and eventually the “Asian Tiger” economies of Taiwan and South Korea. They receded to near zero after 2000 as the US pursued its interests through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which came into existence in 1995, but even then the US made it clear it was not retiring old weapons. Just a few months after the agreement was signed, the US placed $6bn of tariffs on Japanese auto imports. Satisfying domestic politicians meant flashing both the multilateral and unilateral sides of the trade blade. Looking at history through Section 301 cases – which returned with a vengeance after 2017 – it’s clear that we are not leaving some sun-dappled postwar golden age of several decades. Nor are we necessarily returning to the walled states of the 1930s. If anything, we are leaving a brief early-millennial interregnum of hyper-globalisation when the US opted for WTO cases rather than unilateralism. We are still living in Nixon’s world.
Source: The New Statesman
The North Sea world
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I’m engrossed by Rory’s Carroll’s thrilling and insightful reconstruction of the IRA bombing of the Tory Party conference in 1984
Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” The IRA’s statement after its bomb exploded in a bathroom on the sixth floor of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in October 1984, was cleverly sinister but, with its repeated emphasis on luck, oddly airy. It took responsibility off the shoulders of the killers and placed it on those of Dame Fortune. This way of framing the horror that descended in the middle of the night during the Tory party conference was cruelly dismissive of the terrible harm done to real human beings. The “you” being addressed was, of course, the primary target of the bomb, Margaret Thatcher, who escaped unharmed. But what about the “unlucky” people that the IRA’s bomber Patrick Magee actually killed, maimed or bereaved or permanently disabled? Were the dead – Jeanne Shattock, Anthony Berry, Eric Taylor, Muriel Maclean and Roberta Wakeham – victims merely of ill fortune? Rory Carroll – the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent– has written a gripping, detailed and richly layered account of the bombing and its consequences. He notes, in the understated tone that characterises the book, the revelation that struck Magee 16 years later when Berry’s daughter Joanne asked to meet him: “for the first time [he] perceived Anthony Berry as something other than a Tory. A realisation struck him: I had killed a fine human being.”
Source: Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian
And marvelous poetry such as Latitudes by Yusef Komunyakaa served up to you, most days of the week.
Oskar Nerlinger, Train of Barges under the Bridge, 1931 Source: Weimarart
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