Things are going to break and central banks are going to have to respond, but the mental frame that most people will be using is not well suited for understanding how the world now works
history
Why does the apparently prescient and correct “key currency” view remain an embattled minority view?
In his June 1945 Congressional testimony in opposition to the new Bretton Woods institutions, John H. Williams outlined his own “key currency” view of the postwar international monetary system, which he explicitly tagged as quite definitely a “minority” view (1947, p. 266). Money is inherently hierarchical, not multilateral, and the central monetary problem for postwar reconstruction was to stabilize the dollar-sterling exchange rate as the core of a new global dollar system, which other currencies could join as they were able.
Anzac Parade in Canberra is Australia’s major ceremonial avenue, a grand boulevard commemorating (heroic) service and sacrifice. Yet at least one of its monuments represents war crimes, racism, torture and murder. Few nations are as strident about their military history as Australia. There is no more admired symbol in our national psyche than that of Continue reading »
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‘As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
‘When profound ideas are introduced to the world for the first time,’ writes Professor Marcia Langton, in her foreword to The First Astronomers, ‘our world is fundamentally changed and the previous understandings consigned to history. There are those who continue to deny the intelligence and scientific traditions of Indigenous people. The idea that the only true science is that of Western thinking must be consigned to history.’
In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’