Target balance within the Eurozone. Veblen babies. potato blight of the 1840s. US troops in Germany.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Propaganda Secretary of Mao Zedong Thought (1968). Photo: Meng Minsheng
It has been a while old friend! Target balance within the Eurozone. Accumulated between Eurozone central banks these are the counterparts to persistent private sector trade and capital flows.
Source: FT
Veblen babies: inner city childrearing in the US as financial flex
Cities across America are losing children fast. Across Chicago, between 2010 and 2024, according to census-bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22%. In Los Angeles the figure was 23% and in New York, 12%. And yet in the country’s richest, densest cities, there is one group noticeably defying the trend: wealthier white families. In Chicago the population of non-Hispanic white children grew by 6% from 2010 to 2024, faster than the white population grew overall. In Washington, DC, it rose by a truly remarkable 62%. Their parents are professionals who grew up in boring suburbs and do not want their kids to. The change is most concentrated in central neighbourhoods in what Ness Sandoval, a sociologist at St Louis University, calls “winner takes all” cities, like New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Good examples include Park Slope in Brooklyn, Mar Vista in Los Angeles and Bernal Heights in San Francisco. Across Brooklyn the population of white children grew by 13% from 2010 to 2024. They now make up more than two-fifths of the total, up from a third in 2010. In Wicker Park’s two zipcodes, the number of white children increased by 39% and 94%.
Source: The Economist
The potato blight of the 1840s affected most of Northwestern Europe.
The potato blight in Ireland was not the worst, what made it into a disaster was Ireland’s extreme dependence on the potato.
Minsheng Meng, (1919-2007 Chinese), Woman and man in an interior, 1968,
Why the US threat of withdrawal of 5000 troops from Germany actually matters:
A peeved President Donald Trump said he would withdraw some 5,000 American troops stationed in Germany, and perhaps more elsewhere. At first glance the numbers seem small when set against the roughly 39,000 Americans stationed in or rotating through bases in Germany and the 80,000 active-duty American troops across Europe. But America also said it would no longer deploy one of its three newest and most potent units.
The Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTF) is the centrepiece of the US Army’s modernisation. It combines rocket units equipped with very long-range cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons with top-of-the-range computing and communication wizardry. Speaking to journalists in February, Colonel Jeff Pickler, the commander of the 2nd MDTF, which had been assigned to Germany, said it would use AI tools to be able to identify 1,500 targets every 24 hours, which is far more than could be found using traditional means. “There are not enough people that we could stuff in a headquarters or a command post that will ever be able to fully process all of that.” Though the MDTF would only be able to fire salvos of about 16 missiles at once, it could have a disproportional effect in terms of managing escalation dynamics, says Fabian Hoffmann of the Norwegian Defence University College. Because it is backed by America’s very large nuclear forces, it could strike sensitive or strategic Russian targets with less risk of Russia responding with nuclear weapons.
Source: The Economist
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Sphereology - Isolation - Insulatin: Wonderful excursion into the philosophical anthropology of Peter Sloterdijk
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David Gascoyne (10 October 1916 – 25 November 2001) was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement, in particular the British Surrealist Group. Additionally, he translated work by French surrealist poets.
Minsheng Meng, (1919-2007 Chinese), Female in sleeveless cheongsam dress holding a doll, 1960
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