Highlights 6: Strike! Say French University Presidents; Any Return from the Asset Economy?

Notre Dame de Paris on December 3, 2024

WHEN THE CALL TO STRIKE COMES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

 

“All sites closed in Lille, the alarm ringing in Evry, a suspension of classes in Nice... Everywhere, in red and black letters, the slogan is displayed on the buildings: ‘Universities in danger’. At the call of France Universités, an association which brings together heads of establishment, the universities are mobilizing each in their own way, Tuesday December 3, to mark their ‘refusal to see themselves condemned to degrade the quality of their training.

 

“While the finance bill for 2025 shows a budget for higher education and research at half mast – an increase of 89 million euros, but a decrease in constant euros – the time must be to ‘take of conscience’ of a reality on the ground that the public authorities pretend to ignore, according to the association. Already on Thursday, November 21, around thirty university presidents converged on foot towards the Ministry of Higher Education, and invited themselves to the office of the minister, Patrick Hetzel.

 

“In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Friday November 29, which Le Monde obtained, France Universités now calls for ‘personal arbitration’ on the part of Michel Barnier so that the French university can respond to the ambition of the country’” [N.B. Barnier has now been forced to resign by a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.]

 

“Expressing its “anger”, the association specifies that “the meeting with [Patrick Hetzel] did not dispel the fears resulting from an unprecedented situation of a shift towards a very degraded functioning of the universities”. Eighty percent of them will be in deficit by the end of 2024 and ‘projections show that the situation will be worse in 2025,’ warns France Universités.”

 

SOURCE: Soazig Le Nevé, Le Monde.

 

 

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS WAS INVENTED BY ST. PAUL

 

“His book is certainly timely. As he notes, there are certain epochs, and surely we are slap bang in the middle of one, when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. “Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” There, encapsulated in a sentence, is the predicament we face in our present-day social and political lives. . . .”

 

“At the heart of the book is an invigorating excursus on St Paul, the founding father of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. Lilla knows his man: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.’ He is ‘the cultured despiser of culture’, ‘a learned fanatic of the highest order.’ who ‘held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue.’ If the next resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in need of a patron saint, surely Paul is the one:

 

“’For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent … If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’”

 

SOURCE, John Banville, review of Mark Lilla, The Observer

 

A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN TRUMP-WON V. HARRIS-WON STATES

 

 

SOURCE: The Intellectualist, X

 

CRYPTO ADVOCATE PAUL ATKINS PICKED AS SEC CHAIR BY DONALD TRUMP

 

“Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.

 

“’Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins ‘also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.’ . . .”

 

“In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

 

“The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.

 

“Gensler targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear. He branded the sector a “wild west” rife with fraud and investor risk.”

 

SOURCE: Stefania Palma, Financial Times

 

UK UNCOVERS VAST CRYPTO LAUNDERING SCHEME FOR GANGSTERS AND RUSSIAN SPIES

 

“A UK-led operation has uncovered a multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme run out of London, Moscow and Dubai that enabled Russian spies and European drug traffickers to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency.

 

“The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that its ‘Operation Destabilise’ investigation centred on two companies — Smart and TGR — that acted as a financial hub for cash-rich global criminals and sanctioned individuals relying on cryptocurrency outside the banking system.

 

“The NCA said the network had been used by clients including the Kinahan cartel, Irish cocaine traffickers linked to numerous contract killings, as well as funding ransomware groups, and ‘Russian espionage operations’ from late 2022 to summer 2023.

 

“The illicit network, operating across more than 30 countries, illustrates the growing interaction between hostile states and organised criminals as economic sanctions have forced countries such as Russia to find new ways of operating in the west. The case also shows the increasing use of cryptocurrencies by those cut off from the global banking system.

 

“Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, said the investigation ‘is the most significant money laundering operation’ that the NCA had ever undertaken.

 

“’It targets . . . a laundromat that brings together at scale street cash and cryptocurrency,’ he said. It ‘takes you from McMafia, through to Narcos, through to le Carré, where you have espionage, where you have transnational organised crime and you have elite Russian-speaking money launderers and cybercriminals.’

 

“The network used couriers to collect physical cash from criminals in one country such as the UK in exchange for cryptocurrency, with Tether the most favoured. The cash would then be laundered through companies and the equivalent value made available in other countries.

 

“This two-way, mutually beneficial trade meant that cash rich cocaine kingpins simultaneously helped Russian cyber criminals and elites to launder stolen crypto and access cash while evading western sanctions.”

 

SOURCE: Miles Johnson and Suzi Ring, Financial Times

 

OVERSHOOTING WITH DONALD TRUMP  

 

 

SOURCE: Simon Evans, X

 

ANY RETURN FROM THE ASSET ECONOMY?

 

“One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according not just to conventional statistical measures (such as GDP or life expectancy) but also to the preferred measures of the governing party. What would those measures be? Since George Osborne, who made debt and deficit reduction his central economic goals, departed the Treasury it has been difficult to know what kind of future Tory governments have been aiming at, or how we’d know if we were to arrive in it. Real wages have stagnated, no higher today than when the Cameron-led coalition first came to power in 2010, while the scant growth in GDP since then has been largely an effect of high immigration – GDP per capita has barely risen. The national debt, which Osborne elevated to the indicator par excellence, climbed above 100 per cent of GDP last year, up from around 65 per cent in 2010. Business investment and trade in goods have both collapsed as a consequence of Brexit.

 

“House prices, however, have risen handsomely, up from an average of £170,000 in 2010 to £280,000 today (or, for Londoners, £280,000 to £500,000). More than a decade of the lowest interest rates in the Bank of England’s history – driven even lower than they might have been by multiple rounds of quantitative easing – converted torrents of cheap credit into asset price appreciation, for those fortunate enough to benefit. By withdrawing demand from the economy (through reduced public spending) and forcing the Bank of England to hold interest rates down (to stave off deflation), Osborne ensured that Britain became the textbook example of an ‘asset economy’, in which collective and productive progress is sacrificed for capital gains. This has produced an eerie temporality: society stands still, while certain households seem to pull away magically from others.”

 

“Between 1974 and 2007, Britain’s average rate of productivity growth (the clearest gauge of prosperity) was more than 2 per cent per year; since then, it has been less than 0.5 per cent per year. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of the political economy of the 2010-24 era – with its zero-sum conflicts over the public purse, rising in-work poverty, highest tax burden since 1945 and increasing influence of inherited assets – stems from the inability to build wealth through investment in people, ideas and technology. When Adair Turner, then chairman of the Financial Services Authority, declared in 2009 that much of what banks did was ‘socially useless’, this was viewed as an extraordinary attack on one of Britain’s last globally competitive sectors. In 2024, it would almost be surprising to discover that great wealth (or even a basic level of financial security) could be achieved by doing something socially useful.

 

The expanded remit of the Bank of England, now encompassing responsibility for the overall health of the financial sector, is the outstanding constitutional and political consequence of the financial crisis in the UK. The use of quantitative easing to stimulate a stagnant economy during the post-2008 years, to boost it a couple of months after the Brexit referendum, then to put it on life support under Covid, was the distinguishing economic policy of the era. The distributional effects of QE have been sharply regressive, pumping up asset portfolios, but because the policy was enacted outside the democratic arena by an independent Bank of England, party-political and media attention to these effects has been minimal.”

 

SOURCE: William Davies, London Review of Books

 

 

HONG KONG IMPRISONS DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS, LAUNCHES NEW CULTURE STRATEGY

 

“The road map is part of government efforts to create new economic drivers while also offering more opportunities in professions popular among young people, in a bid to make Hong Kong a more appealing global city.

 

“The blueprint will also outline the city’s efforts to align with the mandate from Beijing’s 14th five-year development plan for Hong Kong to become an “East-meets-West” centre for international cultural exchange. . . . “

 

“The insiders also said the latest version of the blueprint mapped out four key positions: promoting Chinese culture; developing diverse creative industries; building an international platform for East-meets-West cultural exchanges; and refining the ecosystem for creative industries.

 

“The push to promote Chinese culture will cover the intangible heritage of the country’s south and involve collaborations with the Greater Bay Area.

 

“The bay area is an emerging economic zone that combines Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland Chinese cities and has a population totalling about 87 million.

 

“The road map also covers 71 measures to bolster the development of industries such as the performing and visual arts, music, animation, dance, film and fashion, among other sectors. . .  .”

 

“The same source said the government would also put the existing funding schemes under review so that grants could reflect market demand.

 

“’It does not necessarily mean that funding is market-driven, at least, a performance or a show has to include some market elements,’ the insider said.

 

The source explained that some shows that received government funding sometimes were too niche, and did not have a clear market.

 

SOURCE: Denise Tsang, South China Morning Post