The Spy Who Came in from the Coal: Rudolf Abel and the Bridge of Spies
21 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
In Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) the character of Rudolf Abel – birth name William Fisher – played by Mark Rylance with a Scottish accent, might have been more accurately depicted with a Geordie lilt. Fisher was in fact born in Benwell, Newcastle in 1903 and later served in a traditional north eastern industry – not in the mines (which would have made the pun in the title more fitting), but in Wallsend, at the Swan Hunter shipyard, as an apprentice draughtsman. In fact, Fisher’s true accent is shrouded in mystery, and none of his New York contemporaries reported that he had a Geordie accent – but it is not clear if any would have recognised it even if he had. Accent or no accent, how did a Geordie lad end up being exchanged for the US spy plane operative, Gary Powers, shot down in May 1960? Why was…
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Turkey’s Baffling Coup and why India never had a military dictatorship..
18 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
Last week saw yet another attempt to dethrone democracy in Turkey (it was more a case of demagoguery than democracy). There have been a quite a few already in its recent history. TYe government even tried to make Turkey coup-proof in 2006 which obviously did not work! But this recent one was baffling and amateurish at its best.
Dani Rodrik explains his bafflement:
Military coups – successful or otherwise – follow a predictable pattern in Turkey. Political groups – typically Islamists – deemed by soldiers to be antagonistic to Kemal Atatürk’s vision of a secular Turkey gain increasing power. Tensions rise, often accompanied by violence on the streets. Then the military steps in, exercising what the soldiers claim is their constitutional power to restore order and secular principles.
This time, it was very different. Thanks to a series of sham trials targeting secularist officers, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had managed to…
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The Italian bank crisis – the one graph version
18 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
Today I was interviewed by a Danish journalist about the Italian banking crisis (read the interview here). He asked me a very good question that I think is highly relevant for understanding not only the Italian banking crisis, but the Great Recession in general.
The question was: “Lars, why is there an Italian banking crisis – after all they did NOT have a property markets bubble?”
That – my regular readers will realise – made me very happy because I could answer that the crisis had little to do with what happened before 2008 and rather was about monetary policy failure and in the case of the euro zone also why it is not an optimal currency area.
Said, in another way I repeated my view that the Italian banking crisis essentially is a consequence of too weak nominal GDP growth in Italy. As a consequence of Italy’s structural problems…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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