Saturday, June 22, 2013

Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from Its Trillion-Dollar Meltdown - Gillian Tett

The culture of Wall Street tended to focus on the present, not the past, since it assumed that the world could be constantly remade anew, that it was possible to rebound from a defeat and start again. That was not how most Japanese viewed the world: To them, the present was inevitably anchored in the past, with ties that could be ignored in polite company, but never entirely severed.

Saving the Sun is a great book. Product of years of hard work and more than 200 interviews, this book tells the story of how Long Term Capital Bank, one of the most important banks of Japan after World War II, became Shinsei Bank, "the most profitable private equity deal of all time."

Saving the Sun is a book about Japan's history, finance, and management, and can be seen as a case study for inter-cultural mergers. All that for 0.99 in the Kindle Edition.

No será la Tierra - Jorge Volpi

En alguna ocasión, Luis González de Alba escribió que dejó de leer a Carlos Fuentes cuando éste, a fin de atraer lectores extranjeros, subió sus notas al pie de página al texto principal.

Jorge Volpi, hijo literario de Fuentes, ha empleado la misma “técnica literaria” desde el inicio de su carrera, y en ese sentido se le adelantó a su papá: no tuvo que esperar a que el mercado mexicano de lectores le quedara chico.

En su “trilogía de la maldad”  Volpi mezcla situaciones de vida de personajes históricos no mexicanos con artículos enciclopédicos un poco por encima del nivel de Wikipedia y los adereza con detalles novelescos. Así, Volpi ganó el Biblioteca Breve con En busca de Klingsor, su primera novela, y durante muchos años fue presentado como el primer escritor mexicano que no se miraba el ombligo al momento de redactar desde tiempos de Alfonso Reyes. El truquito le funcionó… hasta que dejó de funcionarle. La fórmula se le agotó, como suele suceder. En su vida post-escritor, Volpi empezó a hacer política y a vivir del presupuesto, dirigiendo la tele pública y fungiendo como agregado cultural en varias embajadas mexicanas hasta que, emulando de nueva cuenta a Fuentes, escribió un artículo en contra de su jefe, Felipe Calderón.

No voy a decir que No será la tierra es un libro aburrido. A mí me entretuvo, a pesar de haber leído otros libros de Volpi, y creo que a los que no han descubierto a este escritor, la fórmula les puede parecer novedosa. Pero No será la tierra tiene limitaciones considerables: al empezar con la conclusión de la historia, se pierde todo elemento sorpresa, que fue lo único novedoso que Volpi le dio a la literatura mexicana con En busca de Klingsor: la dignificación del thriller policiaco. Para ser un libro que trata sobre tres mujeres (o 5, Volpi nunca deja claro quiénes son las protagonistas), hay demasiada testosterona y muy pocos estrógenos. Volpi podrá argumentar que eso se debe a que el narrador es un personaje masculino, pero como quiera que sea el personaje resulta poco creíble: un periodista que conoce la intimidad de varias personas con las que ha hablado, en el mejor de los casos, tres veces en la vida. 

En breve, No será la Tierra tiene muchos problemas de diseño para que merezca ser tomada en serio, pero es muy largo para que se la pueda considerar una novela ligera. Recomiendo este libro con la mínima aprobatoria.

Freak Show - Enrique Bunbury

Qué buenos son los discos de Bunbury en vivo.


Thursday, June 13, 2013

Sigur Rós - Með suð i eyrum við spilum endalaust

And one day, Sigur Ros came back to earth


Japan's Great Stagnation - Hans-Werner Sinn (ed.)

Edited in 2006 by Michael M. Hutchinson and Frank Westermann as part of the CESifo Seminar Series in Economic Policy, Japan's Great Stagnation presents 9 papers trying to explain the reasons behind Japan's prolonged economic downturn.

Though it might seem outdated, I recommend this book for three reasons:


  • Prophetically, the book's subtitle is Policy Lessons for Advanced Countries. In light of the recent developments taking place in the West since 2008, this book is a must read: the U.S. and Europe shouldn't spend more than 20 years with suboptimal growth.
  • In the introduction, Hutchinson, Ito, and Westermann mention that the Germany is the most likely country to follow Japan's steps. With hindsight, that statement was clearly a mistake: Germany is the only advanced economy growing at relatively decent rates. The Euro and the common monetary policy explains most of that: what the common monetary policy has implied is that the Greek people pay the lack of transparency of the German banks.
  • In their paper, Kunio Okina and Shigenori Shiratsuka argue that the zero interest rate policy failed because it was unable to change inflation expectations among bond traders. It is too early to say whether  Abenomics succeeded changing expectations, but if the developments of the last week are worth something, I'm afraid somebody will update Okina and Shiratsuka's work with more recent data...

Graph of Currency Exchange Rate - USD vs. JPY
The introduction touches tangentially the issue of misalligned property prices as one of the drivers of the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990's. I think that the role of property prices in the economy has not recieved all the attention it deserves. Stephen Ceccheti issued a fantastic paper in 2008 on the topic, but I haven't too much since then. The BIS presents time series of property prices for free here.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Joseph Schumpeter

It is too tempting to say that Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is a must read these days. In fact, the Wall Street Journal just did that a couple of months ago, and I am sure that the Financial Times and The Economist praised this book recently, more than 70 years after its first edition. One of The Economist's featured columns is after called "Schumpeter".

As tempting as it is to recommend Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy to everybody, some parts of the text will result either too arcane or too outdated for the regular reader.  Particularly, Part I ("The Marxian Doctrine"), most of Part IV ("Socialism and Democracy"), and Part V ("A Historical Sketch of Socialist Parties") will be of interest only to academics. 

The three things you need to read from this book are:

  • The discussion on how capitalism is a victim of its own success. Schumpeter argues that enterprises grow so large that eventually capitalism turns into corporatism: a state of the World in which markets are, at best, divided among rival oligopolies, or, at worst, a collection of monopolies. Monopolies result in larger profits for shareholders but particularly for managers. This creates the environment for intellectuals hostile to capitalism to put political pressure on government, who increase the levels of taxation on enterprises, which in turn reduces growth and profits (unless, of course, enterprises captures the State). Higher levels of taxation eventually result in a socialist society ("welfare state", in modern jargon). The problem with this is that a socialist state is too expensive to maintain and, with lower rates of growth and increasingly large levels of taxation, crisis are likely to be recurrent. If you think this looks a lot like the World of today with its too-big-to-jail  bankers, its over-extended Western governments, and its principal-agent problems across the industrial World, you're right. And that's why you need to read this book.
  • The discussion on creative destruction, a term popularized by Schumpeter and widely used today to describe how innovation is the source of growth in capitalism. Libertarians and neoliberals totally misunderstand the way in which Schumpeter presents this term. "Creative destruction" is used today as a catch-all term to sell the idea that deregulation, small government, and persistent lay-offs will regenerate markets over and over in a virtuous cycle. Schumpeter thinks that creative destruction will actually destroy the capitalist system. If you want to understand what the Apple - Samsung mess is all about, you need to understand what creative destruction actually is.
  • The discussion on how and why politics became a profession. If you want to know why Occupy (U.SA.), 15M/Indignados (Spain) #Yosoy132 (México), the guys of Tahrir Square (Egypt) and Qasbah (Tunisia) failed miserably (and why the Turkish of Taksim will fail as well), you need to understand that politics became a profession a long time ago, just like teaching, or law practicing, or typing. Politics has been the affaire of a small well-practiced elite for a long time and those who don't have the skills required for the job need not apply. This is not necessarily a bad thing: the only thing worse than being in the hand of professionals is being in the hands of improvised...
You can download Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy here.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Un viaje - Café Tacvba

Para celebrar su 15° aniversario, en 2004, Café Tacvba dio dos conciertos en el Palacio de los Deportes. Los 3 discos y el DVD de Un viaje recogen lo mejor de ambas presentaciones. Los fans de la banda desde su inicio obviamente ya tienen esta producción y la han oído y visto cientos de veces en los últimos 8 años.

El DVD es bastante lamentable: es un engendro entre grabación de concierto en vivo y collage que da la impresión de que la banda está tocando playback. La calidad de la grabación también es mala. Si alguien quiere arriesgarse, el concierto completo está disponible aquí. Lo único recomendable del DVD son las entrevistas con los miembros de la banda, particularmente con el cantante, ese que un día se llama Rita Cantalagüa, otro Anónimo, al siguiente Cosme, y así.

Los tres discos, por el contrario, valen mucho la pena, particularmente para las nuevas generaciones de fans de la banda. Aunque la mayor parte de las canciones de Un viaje son de la etapa post-Avalancha de éxitos, y por lo tanto, más fresas que las canciones "viejas", las personas que han descubierto a Café Tacvba recientemente pueden darse una idea de lo que hacía la banda hace mucho tiempo, en los 1990s...


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

The Best of 1980-1990 - U2


Issued in 1999, this was U2's first greatest hits collection. Since then, they have released 2 or 3 more "greatest hits", always repeating the same songs.

This album is recommended only to those fans who don't have the b-sides of the band.

Like other U2 albums, the album's booklet recommends fans to join Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and War Child...

Sunday, June 2, 2013

The Apartment - Billy Wilder

Mad Men makes modern audiences get acquainted with a time when drinking and smoking in the workplace was not socially reprehensible. Films like The Apartment reminds us that the 1960's and the 2010's are completely different Worlds.

A winner of 5 Academy awards (including best picture), The Apartment hasn't aged well. Its jokes seem either moronic (the lead male trying to conquer the lead female preparing pasta using a tennis racquet) repetitive (saying "-wise" at the end of almost every sentence), or both. More importantly, today audiences simply can't relate with the lead characters: an elevator girl who  falls in love with a married big shot of a finance NYC-based company and expects him to divorce; and a guy who  lends his apartment to his superiors of  a finance NYC-based company as a way to get promoted but then falls in love with the elevator girl. Over the last 50 years, cultural codes have changed in such a way that modern audiences understand that an elevator girl (or her equivalent these days) who dates a married is probably doing it for the money, or at least doesn't expect him to divorce; likewise, it is assumed that executives can lease their own apartments for extra-marital affairs and, in the unlikely case they have to ask a subordinate for a place, writers and directors make sure that the subordinate is a despicable guy.

While The Apartment was seen as an innovative romantic comedy at the time it was released, modern audiences would consider it as a sub-par combination of noir film with a chick-flick: this is probably the first romantic comedy I've seen with an attempted suicide and existentialist reflections after it. 

The only thing that leaves uncomfortable with the idea that The Apartment was dated is the fact that other movies from that time (or even before) are still understandable and enjoyable. Probably The Apartment was overrated from the beginning. It wouldn't be the first time that the Academy creates a legend out of thin air...


Saturday, June 1, 2013

Discipline - King Crimson

This great album is what happens when prog-rock meets punk from the early 80's.

Discipline is considered one of King Crimson's most complete albums.