Mixing Finance and Politics

 

Blog dated 13 March 2022 

 

I often, too often, decry the American education system which teaches economics and politics as if they were unrelated ; while most other countries have ‘political economy’  in their core curriculum.  Seldom have I extended the meme to finance, but it is true that  financial activity is only connected to politics when corruption is involved.

 

Now a pair of long article from the team at the Financial Times  has  presented a very practical case study of Finance being  weaponized for political ends.  Both parts are outside the firewall and thus free to read. They were published April 6 and April 7.

 

Weaponisation of finance: how the west unleashed ‘shock and awe’ on Russia

.This is the first of a two-part FT series on the sanctions on Russia’s central bank and a new era of financial warfare....

War in Ukraine: free to read

Financial warfare: will there be a backlash against the dollar?

Providing some answers

 

 I have beenwrong about most events in 2022...here ismy attempt at penance....

Why does it take so long to ramp up chip production? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/technology/intel-chip-shortage.html?smid=url-share

 

Who pushed Putin into this madness? https://www.ft.com/content/69853fce-dbfd-470f-ad41-8b321d8cb739  Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 1946-2022: a far-right Russian firebrand

[and we learned the term ‘xenophobic pugilism’]

Can Putin be stopped?  Bill Browder on Putin, Sanctions and How to End the War - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

When did financial sanctions evolve into weapons?

Weaponisation of finance: how the west unleashed ‘shock and awe’ on Russia

...By the evening, agreement had been reached.The weaponisation of finance This is the first of a two-part FT series on the sanctions on Russia’s central bank and a new era of financial warfare....

 

Are we tempting WW III? Slovakia gave its S-300 air-defence system to Ukraine, following entreaties by Mr Zelensky for more Western military equipment. In response the Biden administration said it would deploy a Patriot missile-defence system to Slovakia, to be operated by American soldiers. Earlier the Czech Republic sent Soviet-made tanks to Ukraine and Britain promised an additional £100m worth of “high-grade military equipment”.

 

How stupid are US politicians?  Covid Updates: At Least 53 People Test Positive After A-List Dinner in Washington

Deconstructing voices in Media

 

The twin swords of Cognitive Bias and Hyper-objectivity dominate discourse and media.

Nice to have all the world’s ills packaged into tidy bundles.  No more wondering if aging politicians and their followers are crazy – everyone , according to current wisdom, has gravitated to extreme cognitive bias in their opinions. [ see Wikipedia reference below]. Their views slot nicely into twenty clusters of, by my count, 191 documentable observed biases. Beyond an amusing tavern exercise, these categorizations seem to make sense and fit [ also a bias called, I believe observational dependency].

Is everyone obsessed?  Of course not, nor are they what we arrogantly wrote off as ‘true believers’.  By gravitating to their extreme posture, they display a concentration on clear objectives [again see references] that are much larger than we, apparently, can appreciate. Fortified by clear hyper-objectivity, these self-anointed ‘spokespeople’ offer us views which:

o   Speculate

o   Exaggerate

o   Reference selective information

o   Oversimplify

o   Alarm

Someone like myself clearly cannot fathom the energy that their moral clarity offers.  We continue to drift along in our attempt at neutral objectivity.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg?utm_campaign=mb&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic