Matthew Yglesias passes on a rumor in Slate:
Stanley Fischer Likely to Be Tapped as Fed Vice Chair
According to John Hilsenrath, "according to a person familiar with the matter," Barack Obama is poised to nominate Stanley Fischer to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.
This is a bit of a surprising development if only because Fischer didn't seem to be seriously considered as a contender for the top Fed job. I figured that was either because Fischer wasn't interested in a government job or because the White House deemed him insufficiently American. If either of those were the case, it would seem to disqualify him for the vice chairmanship too. But he's extraordinarily well-qualified, a distinguished academic economist (Ben Bernanke's mentor) who also served as chief economist at the IMF and as president of the Bank of Israel. As Janet Yellen is already poised to be the best-qualified Fed chair in history, the duo would represent a significant upping of the ante in terms of the idea that the institution should be stewarded by real central banking professionals.
Fischer himself is an interesting guy (read Dylan Matthews' profile from February), born in a town in what was Northern Rhodesia at the time but is now known as Zambia. When he was 13, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia, which at the time was run as a kind of apartheid rogue state. Then he went to the London School of Economics, then MIT for graduate school. He stayed in American academia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, then worked at the World Bank and the IMF through most of the 1990s. He's essentially a native of countries that don't exist anymore, and as he's Jewish he obtained insta-citizenship in Israel when in 2005 he was asked to run its central bank. But he's also an American citizen.
With all the talk about Nelson Mandela lately, I only just this week started to develop a nuanced understanding of the demographics of the White Male Power Structures during the first half of the 20th Century in South Africa and Rhodesia.
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28 comments:
OT, their blaming the fake interpreter on apartheid.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/11/is-south-africas-fake-sign-language-interpreter-a-legacy-of-apartheid/
It never ends, its alwsys whitey's fault. At least we get a good laugh.
The new head of the Bank of England is a Canadian, the first non-Brit to head the BoE.
And yes this is pretty much the case. A global, intermarried elite, some Jewish, most not, all cavorting with each other. Say like Tony Blair and Wendi Deng Murdoch. It is the same thing as the trans-european nobility in feudal times, when nations did not exist but kingdoms and feudal fiefdoms did.
Mark Carney details from Wiki (Carney is the BoE head succeeding Mervyn King):
Carney met his wife, Diana Fox, a British economist specializing in developing nations, while at the University of Oxford. She is said to be active in various environment and social justice causes. The couple married while he was finishing his doctoral thesis in the mid-1990s. They have four daughters and lived in the Rockcliffe Park neighbourhood of Ottawa before moving to London in 2013.
During his Harvard years, Carney was back-up goalie for the school's ice hockey team Carney continued playing hockey with the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club while studying at the University of Oxford.
Carney attended St. Francis Xavier High School as did his brothers, it seems he's potentially a Catholic and may well be the first Roman Catholic BoE head.
Neoliberalism in a nutshell: good management has no country.
“””””Neoliberalism in a nutshell: good management has no country.”””
Unfortunately as shown by their performance, bad management has no country either and being in charge means never saying your sorry.
But he's extraordinarily well-qualified, a distinguished academic economist (Ben Bernanke's mentor)
It's so weird that someone can say things like this with a straight face. If you have the right background and credentials and believe the right things, you are by definition "extraordinarily well-qualified," and nothing you actually do can ever change that. Reality just has no impact on their beliefs whatsoever.
"Southern Rhodesia, which at the time was run as a kind of apartheid rogue state." Oh bollocks; no it bloody wasn't.
Paul Warburg, one of the fathers of Federal Reserve, was born in Germany and in fact was a major figure in German banking. He also worked in London and Paris for British and French banks. He arrived in New York in 1902, and only twelve years later he was the Governor of the New York Fed.
Oh, and he was one of the founders of Council on Foreign Relations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_M._Warburg
Everything old is new again.
Lending for consumption - usury - is wholly malignant and economically destructive.
In theory the banking mafia would maximize profit when they achieve debt saturation i.e. when all available discretionary spending in an economy has been transmuted into loan repayments.
However what actually happens is as the proportion of discretionary spending goes down and the proportion of loan repayments goes up the velocity of money is reduced.
So expanding the money supply through usury - lending for consumption - creates a deflationary negative feedback loop.
This is why you get the boom-bust cycle.
"Southern Rhodesia, which at the time was run as a kind of apartheid rogue state." Oh bollocks; no it bloody wasn't.
LOL, my sentiments exactly. A friend's father worked for Ian Smith back in the good old days. Smith pissed off the wrong people in London and subsequently Washington with his unilateral independence and Rhodesia got flushed as a result.
@anon @2:59 PM:
Thanks for the info and link on Paul Warburg! Fascinating. He had no less interesting son,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Warburg
Indeed, everything old is new again. Few decades from now, people will be reading chapters on the demise of the USA with the same astonishment as we read about the demise of South Africa.
At this point I'd like to ask the congregation to get out their copies of The Creature from Jekyll Island and turn to 20:423, and read aloud with me: "This is a method truly worthy of the monetary scientists. It is so subtle and so sophisticated that not one in a thousand would even think of it, much less object to it."
"...develop a nuanced understanding of the demographics of the White Male Power Structures during the first half of the 20th Century in South Africa and Rhodesia."
Don't miss the wiki entry on the Rivonia Trial for background on the counter-power structure.
Gilbert P.
And since Ben Bernanke has singlehandedly saved America, why not his mentor, too? Oh. Wait.
Let's talk about Rhodesia.
I mean, please.
A functioning state gets turned into a basket case in 20 years - or less.
What's going on with the white Zimbos? Are they being slaughtered? What?
(Inevitable movie observation. Leonardo di Caprio played a white Zimbo in some pulp movie. He portrayed a white Zimbabwean who pranced around Aah-free-kah like he was a native. A son of the free, un-apartheid Aah-free-kah! Are there any people like that left, if there ever were?)
I met a few white Zimbos 25 years ago. I asked them if they were going back to Zimbabwe. They beamed. "Of course!" It sounded to me as if they got off calling themselves Zimbabweans rather than Rhodesians.
Cecil Rhodes was gay, by the way.
re: "apartheid rogue state"
It was consistently referred to that way by the media. Here's an example:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/zimbabwe/fuller-text
Please define how it wasn't, dearieme, and try to do so without too much sneering. I'm just a dumb Yank and I don't understand irony.
Theuns Cloeta claims that Boers are not Afrikaaners, that in 1948 they wanted their Boer republics......btw I did not know that Hendrik Vervoerd followed in the tradition of leaders-not-born-where-they rule such as Napoleon. Vervoerd was born in Amsterdam, NL.
http://republicantrekkervolk.blogspot.com/2008/12/verwoerd-was-not-friend-of-boer-nation.html
http://iluvsa.blogspot.com/2011/04/theuns-cloete-notes-basic-difference.html
re: what happened to the white rhodesians-
There's a few different answers. There is basically two camps- stay ons and expats. We'll talk expats first as they are by far and away the biggest group.
Within the expat community, there's "Zimbos" and "Rhodies", which broadly corresponds to people who describe ZIM as being great, but they left for other reasons and people who describe ZIM as being a former paradise that got turned into a hell hole. Zimbos tend to be much more liberal and more PC, Rhodies the furthest from it. A Rhodie on a tear can make a Boer blush.
Initially, most White Zims went to ZA, because it was close and there was a very familiar culture. Some, though, went to the UK. Specifically London, as it was an easy place to get a job etc but also to Northern Ireland, as White Zims were disproportionately pro-British, good with guns and physically powerful. A fair number ended up in the RUC (police force).
Increasingly, though, as ZA itself is falling apart, Zimbos and Rhodies are leaving there, too.
Many followed on to the UK but there's now a sizable number in the US (i met quite a few in AZ).
In the UK, they are commonly called "whenwe"s, because most of their stories began "when we were in africa..." (You can imagine nostalgia runs deep. while many were nominally british citizens, few had ever actualy set foot in the UK before arriving there). There's a few good whenwe pubs scattered around London (will give advice for the curious).
Of those that stayed behind, there's again two basic cohorts. There are some REALLY unfortunate ones who stayed on and tried to farm, only to increasingly find their lives hell. The land increasingly taken, no one in their right mind will buy it off you, shipping is a nightmare (remember ZIM has no ocean access, you have to go through an antagonistic MOZ or a distant and expensive ZA to sell).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajPJ9OD7OfQ
That is a documentary which shows how they ended up. It is a really, really terrible state of affairs.
Others, those with clout, stay on as a sort of "get things done" set for Mugabe. They do *very very* well indeed. There is a lot of uncomfortability with them, as they are almost certainly breaking all kinds of laws and moral norms and the like (and i don't just mean by working with a reprehensible guy like Muggers, I mean literally doing crazy things themselves).
As an example of these, Chelsy Davy is an on-and-off lover of Prince Harry of England. It's pretty clear things were very serious but the Davy family had some very very dark skeletons and Harry was told in no uncertain terms that he could never marry her. (however, it's also really clear they love one another, something of a tragic story that).
Another example is Charlene, Princess of Monaco. Beautiful *very* well connected white Zimbabwean swimmer ends up marrying into the zillionaire Monacan royal family.
As you can see, some white ZIMs do *very very* well
@Anonymous 8:13....Please do provide details about Rhodie pubs....would love to see it for myself. Also, where could i get more info on families like the Davy's and Wittstocks? Where do you get your info? Have always been curious about that, but there seems to be a media blackout with them.....Thanks in advance.
Thanks Anon 12/11/13, 8:13 PM.
(I wish people would at least take the time to create a nick.)
Anyway thanks. You confirmed some hunches.
What doesn't seem to be real is the Danny Archer movie types, white guys who really think of themselves as Ahfreekan.
I think may be a physical impossibility since a white man is constantly reminded on a daily basis of his freakishness, unlike whites in NAmerica, which was much more thinly populated by people who didn't have frizzy hair and black skin. (Easier to intermarry w/the natives and assimilate them.) Even black Americans joke about how difficult it is to get rid of that one drop.
Zimbabwe in the past decade has had really bad years but now it's back in order. The volume of tobacco that black farmers produce is now at average levels before the the whites farms were taken. Just goes to show that the UK media was doing some serious puffery when it came to recognizing the ability of those white farmers.
@ remproo 524
See here. It's a long post, but you are asking a big question.
In short, Rhodesia did not have apartheid at all. Blacks could, in principle, vote, and they could, in principle, live anywhere. There were things like property requirements to vote, and, of course, blacks vastly disproportionately failed to satisfy these requirements. As the author of the linked post put it (he's using the word "racism" at least somewhat ironically):
South African racism is the racism of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and white nationalism, while Rhodesian racism is the racism of disparate impact, race-based quotas, and a well-governed diverse society
re: "apartheid rogue state"
It was consistently referred to that way by the media. Here's an example:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/zimbabwe/fuller-text
Please define how it wasn't, dearieme, and try to do so without too much sneering. I'm just a dumb Yank and I don't understand irony.
As I understand it, though the franchise was heavily restricted, there were no explicit race laws in Rhodesia. There were, in fact, a number of blacks who met the qualifications for the main voters' roll.
Apartheid in general strikes me as a particularly Afrikaner institution. I suppose it's attributable to either the Calvinism or the feeling of being overwhelmed by both the blacks and the English.
Charles Davy, the father of Chelsea Davy, the tragic white African girl mentioned above, is implicated in rhino horn smuggling in collaboration with ZANU-PF.
http://safaritalk.net/topic/6094-name-and-shame-charles-davy/
It will be interesting to see if any Senators ask whether there could exist any potential conflicts of interest with Israel.
I doubt anyone will ask.
Matthew Yglesias probably thinks any place where you're unlikely to be a victim of the Knockout Game is a kind of rogue apartheid state.
Thank you Anonymous & Bill for clarifying things.
I have to admit that I never knew that Rhodesia didn't have apartheid - and I think a lot of Americans didn't.
But as to the rogue state stuff, perhaps that arises from the fact that Rhodesia per se was never recognized, so the two situations have become confused.
In any case, thanks. Very enlightening.
And how many of those middle class blacks living in Salisbury did end up getting a vote?
To the anonymous poster who knows a lot about Rhodesia:
My brother (American, born 1952) was thrown out of the US Army as well as the US Marine Corps officer training programs for being asthmatic. He later joined the Rhodesian Army and served there for a year or two, returning to America (without the permission of the Rhodesian Army) after our father was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer. This was in the late 1970s. He died at age 29, leaving two toddler-aged sons.
I don't know the name of his regiment, etc., but I'm wondering if there is any way that I could find men who served with him. His sons were so young at the time of his death that they have no memories of him.
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