"Every vice was once a
virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in
wartime."
—Will Durant (American,
1885-1981)
Word for the day
Fructify (v)
To bear fruit; become
fruitful
Malice towards none
Does India need independent
Bail Courts, which would grant or refuse bail to an accused based strictly on
the legal provisions relating to bail, and not on the morality of the case or
socio-economic status of the accused?
First random thought this morning
The motifs used to depict India
globally are mostly Mughal and British era monuments, like Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar,
Red Fort, India gate, Parliament House, etc. Besides, some medieval temples and
other religious places and emblems are also commonly used.
The paradox is that we are
either too nationalist or too secular or too discomfited (e.g., to accept
Khajuraho as our culture) to accept these symbols as our true identity.
The tragedy compounds when we
find that we can hardly claim the Indus Valley civilization as our own, since
most of the sites now lie in Pakistan.
Is the new normal permanent?
Professor Harold James (Princeton University, New Jersy) in his
recent article, made some interesting points regarding the global financial
crisis. Since I mostly agree with these points, I find it redundant to use my
words for expressing these same thoughts. I am therefore reproducing Prof.
James words here to express my thoughts. (All rights of Prof James acknowledged
and respected)
"The legacy of 2007 is still with us. Its most devastating
and destructive effect was to put a premium on unconventional monetary
measures. Unfortunately, when policymakers scrambled in search of “big
bazookas” ten years ago, they set the stage for the return of an old character:
a strongman willing to pull the trigger.
To be sure, at the height of the financial crisis, politicians
were right to conclude that they could not rely on business as usual. Central
banks needed to provide liquidity on a massive scale, and governments needed to
complement those monetary-policy efforts with fiscal expansion. Accordingly,
China and the US, in particular, launched large-scale stimulus programs in 2008
and 2009, respectively.
.....
...overall, the response to the financial crisis was strikingly
successful, and those who led it were right to pat themselves on the back for
having prevented a repeat of the Great Depression. But, because unconventional
policies were so effective, they are now considered appropriate and necessary
responses to any problem, while constitutional safeguards are increasingly
dismissed as petty bureaucratic concerns.
.....
The post-crisis view holds that a powerful leader can and
should fix things by himself (strongmen are rarely women). This approach was
readily apparent in the Russian government’s response to collapsing aluminum
prices in 2009, when job losses and unpaid wages gave rise to large-scale
protests at a plant in Pikalevo, 150 miles (250 kilometers) southeast of St.
Petersburg.
When then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin toured Pikalevo, he
made a show of humiliating the plant’s owner, the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, by
calling him a “cockroach.” Putin didn’t announce any new policies to help
Russian workers; nonetheless, his performance in Pikalevo was hailed as a bold
assertion of state power in the face of capitalist excess.
......
Strongmen tend to present themselves as being uniquely able to
tackle a specific problem. For Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, that means
a “war
on drugs” that has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Putin
and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan justify their policies in the
context of fighting terrorism. And Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
has framed his autocratic behavior as a
necessary response to a domestic financial crisis. By focusing on one narrow
“crisis,” these leaders create a mindset in which all other problems become
crises that demand immediate, effective, and unconstrained action.
Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, held that sovereign
decision-making is the central feature of the political process. When leaders
make political decisions, they are reasserting control over the concept of
sovereignty itself, which has been gradually eroded and transformed through
various phases of globalization."
According to Schmitt, how leaders arrive at their decisions is
secondary to the fact that a decision has been made. A sovereign “needs” to act
forcefully to protect particular threatened interests. Often, this entails
symbolic gestures. In 1930, for example, America’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
singled out Swiss watches, Japanese silk products, and other nationally iconic
imports.
Protectionism today is no different. Consider US President
Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs against BMW and Mercedes-Benz: two
high-visibility brands that one immediately associates with Germany.
....
Unfortunately, this approach has created a political
environment in which established norms have been eroded, and no new norms have
taken their place. The Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev said it
best in the title of his brilliant book about post-Soviet life: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
Now that crisis has been normalized as a permanent condition,
we are all post-Soviet."
Yes, nothing is true and everything is possible is the paradigm of
policy making and governance these days.
Back home we have seen a number of examples of this - abolition of
86% of currency notes overnight, being the most glaring one.
Now if I accept this departure from conventional economics and
governance models as permanent and hence new normal, my investment strategy
would also need to be overhauled.
The dilemma is should I adjust it this morning, or wait some more
to see, if Keynesians rise like Phoenix and the 20th century economic and
governance order is restored; or may be a still newer paradigm takes shape.
Please help me, if you would, solve this puzzle!
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