Livres: les recommendations de la revue L'Histoire: impossível não lamentar não estar na França (mas das livrarias, não das ruas)

 

La Lettre H.- Avril 2023 L’Histoire a lu

Chaque mois la newsletter « La Lettre H. – L’Histoire a lu » propose des comptes rendus d'une large sélection de livres d'histoire. Si cela n'est pas déjà fait, inscrivez-vous pour la recevoir directement dans votre boîte mail et ne rien manquer de l'actualité des ouvrages historiques. ► S'abonner aux newsletters de L'Histoire.     Livres du mois     Un Empire de circonstances  L’Empire de la paix. De la Révolution à Napoléon. Quand la France réunissait l’Europe, Aurélien Lignereux, Passés composés, 2023, 408 p., 23 €. Après les avoir conquis par la force, la France napoléonienne s’est adjointe, à certaines conditions, des territoires de l’Adriatique à la mer du Nord. Ce livre étudie, pour la première fois de façon globale, les fondements et les ressorts de l’expérience éphémère des 44 départements réunis […] ► Lire la suite   L’État mobile des Mongols  La Horde. Comment les Mongols ont changé le monde, Marie Favereau, Perrin, 2023, 320 p., 35 €. Pendant plus de deux siècles, la Horde, émancipée du reste de l’Empire mongol, a dominé l’ouest de l’Eurasie au rythme de ses pérégrinations et suscité une prospérité éclatante à l’échelle du continent, redessinant durablement la carte politique de l’Europe orientale. Cet ouvrage passionnant de Marie Favereau montre de quelle manière les Mongols ont redessiné l’Eurasie à partir de la steppe […] ► Lire la suite   Afrique : restituer l’héritage perdu  La Longue Bataille de l’Afrique pour son art. Histoire d’une défaite postcoloniale, Bénédicte Savoy, Seuil, 2023, 304 p., 23 €. Déjà, dans les années 1970, la question du retour dans leur pays des œuvres d’art spoliées pendant la colonisation se posait avec force. Bénédicte Savoy réinscrit dans le temps long le débat sur les restitutions qui ressurgit depuis 2017, rappelant ainsi qu’il a aussi une histoire, et qu’elle est éminemment politique […] ► Lire la suite     Antiquité     Une Athènes mélangée  Athènes en partage. Les étrangers au sein de la cité, Ve-IIIe siècle avant notre ère, Romain Guicharrousse, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022, 488 p., 32 €. Les étrangers à Athènes, soit le quart ou le cinquième de la population libre, ne jouissent d’à peu près aucun droit et font partie des exclus. Romain Guicharrousse corrige cette vision trop strictement politico-juridique. Une enquête passionnante autant qu’érudite […] ► Lire la suite   Perversions  Débauches antiques. Comment la Bible et les Anciens ont inventé le vice, Christian-Georges Schwentzel, Vendémiaire, 2023, 312 p., 24 €. Ne nous laissons pas abuser par le sous-titre un brin racoleur, le livre de Christian-Georges Schwentzel est un livre sérieux, tout comme l’est son auteur, universitaire distingué. En huit chapitres l’auteur fait le tour des perversions antiques […] ► Lire la suite   Socrate au jour le jour  Socrate l’Athénien. Un essai, Pierre Brulé, Les Belles Lettres, 2022, 512 p., 35 €. Dans le titre du livre que Pierre Brûlé lui consacre, la mention d’origine compte plus, finalement, que le nom de Socrate. Il s’agit de nous aider à comprendre Socrate par le quotidien, le banal d’une vie. On pourrait craindre une enquête prétexte dont Socrate ne serait que l’involontaire héros, là où n’importe quel anonyme pourrait faire l’affaire. Ce n’est pas le cas […] ► Lire la suite       Moyen Age     Confession d’un médiéviste  Dernière visite chez le roi Arthur. Histoire d’un premier livre, Michel Pastoureau, Seuil, 2023, 176 p., 19,90 €. En avril 1976 paraît chez Hachette le premier des quelque 80 ouvrages écrits par Michel Pastoureau :  La Vie quotidienne en France et en Angleterre au temps des chevaliers de la Table Ronde. Plutôt que d’en donner une nouvelle édition, revue et augmentée, Michel Pastoureau a préféré raconter comment et pourquoi il l’avait écrit, « puis comment l’ouvrage fut publié, reçu, apprécié, critiqué, dépassé et enfin oublié ». Excellente idée ! ► Lire la suite     XVIe-XVIIIe siècle     Le roi et ses prélats  Henri IV roi. Le pari de l’Hérétique, Lana Martysheva, Ceyzérieu, Champ Vallon, 2023, 344 p., 27 €. Henri IV n’est pas au centre de ce livre, dont le titre peut prêter à confusion. Lana Martysheva y étudie les hommes de son entourage et avant tout un groupe de onze prélats qui, minoritaires, le suivent dès 1589. L’analyse de leur rôle dans la reconstruction de la légitimité royale est un bon moyen de relativiser le mythe d’un Henri IV héros seul maître du jeu, et de montrer en quoi la monarchie est œuvre collective […] ► Lire la suite   Culture sceptique  Les Voyageurs du doute. L’invention d’un altermondialisme libertin, 1620-1820, Stéphane Van Damme, Fayard, 2023, 380 p., 24 €. Quel est le point commun entre le baron de Lahontan, qui parcourt les forêts canadiennes à la fin du XVIIe siècle, et François Bernier, médecin philosophe pendant douze ans dans l’Inde moghole, presque à la même époque ? C’est, explique Stéphane Van Damme, d’avoir été les acteurs d’une culture sceptique qui mettait en question l’imposition au monde des cadres épistémologiques européens, du XVIIe au début du XIXe siècle […] ► Lire la suite   Un noble égalitariste  Le Marquis de Bonnay. Le père oublié de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme, François Duluc, Passés composés, 2022, 416 p., 24 €. Le marquis Charles-François de Bonnay n’avait jamais jusqu’alors trouvé son biographe. Il n’en pouvait rencontrer de meilleur que François Duluc, ancien haut fonctionnaire de l’Assemblée nationale. C’est là en effet que le député du Nivernais capta la lumière, le 10 avril 1790, par son élection à la présidence de la Constituante […] ► Lire la suite   Les « instituteurs »  Le Maître d’école au village au temps des Lumières et de la Révolution, Côme Simien, Éditions du CTHS, 2023, 490 p., 32 €. Que signifie être maître d’école dans un village rural au temps des Lumières et de la Révolution française ? Côme Simien livre un essai aussi passionnant que bien écrit, tiré de sa thèse de doctorat. Sans éluder les débats qui ont beaucoup polarisé les historiens de la Révolution française, l’auteur propose une démarche nuancée […] ► Lire la suite   La paix civile  Policiers de Paris. Les commissaires de police en Révolution, 1789-1799, Vincent Denis, Ceyzérieu, Champ Vallon, 2022, 484 p., 27 €. Que signifie maintenir l’ordre et être policier à Paris, dans la « capitale des révolutions » ? Depuis une bonne dizaine d’années, la police n’est plus vue par les historiens, à commencer par Vincent Denis, comme une institution extérieure ni opposée par nature à la dynamique révolutionnaire. La Révolution n’est, quant à elle, plus décrite comme un désordre permanent, mais comme une période d’affrontements entre différentes conceptions de l’ordre social […] ► Lire la suite       XIXe-XXIe siècle     La nation ukrainienne  Aux portes de l’Europe. Histoire de l’Ukraine, Serhi Plokhi, trad. par Jacques Dalarun, Gallimard, 2022, 560 p., 32 €. Cette synthèse magistrale sur l’Ukraine depuis le Xe siècle, publiée une première fois en 2015, fut traduite en français au moment de l’invasion russe. Son auteur, Serhi Plokhi, détenteur de la chaire de l’histoire de l’Ukraine à Harvard, met au service de ses lecteurs son grand savoir pour tordre le cou à une vision essentialiste, quel que soit le camp dans lequel elle serait élaborée […] ► Lire la suite   Brésil : « un tout petit monde »  Letras Pátrias. Les écrivains et la création d’une culture nationale au Brésil (1822-1889), Sébastien Rozeaux, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2022, 396 p., 26 €. En Amérique latine, on a coutume de dire que l’indépendance précède la nation. Celle-ci serait donc une construction postérieure à l’événement fondateur : dans ce processus, qu’en est-il de la littérature et des écrivains ? C’est la question que, pour le Brésil, Sébastien Rozeaux se pose dans sa thèse aujourd’hui publiée […] ► Lire la suite   Drogues grecques  Poisons sociaux. Histoire des stupéfiants en Grèce (1875-1950), Konstantinos Gkotsinas, Athènes, École française d’Athènes, 2022, 383 p., 50 €. Le projet de ce livre est inattendu ; sa réussite complète. A partir d’une étude de la production et de la consommation des drogues en Grèce, Poisons sociaux révèle une histoire inédite des Balkans de la fin du XIXe siècle au milieu du siècle suivant. Cette enquête passionnante s’appuie sur des sources très variées […] ► Lire la suite   Tactique ou stratégie ?  Conduire la guerre. Entretiens sur l’art opératif, Benoist Bihan, Jean Lopez (dir.), Perrin, 2022, 400 p., 22,90 €. C’est sous la forme d’un dialogue que Benoist Bihan et Jean Lopez – l’interviewé et l’interviewer – ont choisi de présenter au lecteur le fruit de leur réflexion commune sur l’art opératif, cette « discipline élaborée par des soldats pour des soldats » dans Strategiia en 1927 par le général soviétique Alexandre Sviétchine, continuateur de l’œuvre de Carl von Clausewitz […] ► Lire la suite   Enquête sur un massacre  L’Affaire Henny. Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge et les massacres de Paracuellos del Jarama. Novembre-décembre 1936, Sébastien Farré, Genève, Georg, 2022, 207 p., 20 €. Comme dans une intrigue policière, le livre de Sébastien Farré commence par l’analyse d’une balle de mitrailleuse. Elle avait atteint le docteur Georges Henny, délégué suisse du Comité international de la Croix- Rouge (CICR) à Madrid au moment du siège de la capitale espagnole par les troupes franquistes, fin 1936 […] ► Lire la suite   Vouée à Vichy  Au service du Maréchal ? La Légion française des combattants, 1940-1944, Anne-Sophie Anglaret, CNRS Éditions, 2023, 338 p., 25 €. La Légion française des combattants (LFC) naît le 29 août 1940 de la volonté du maréchal Pétain de rassembler tous les anciens combattants autour de sa personne, après la dissolution des associations préexistantes. Anne-Sophie Anglaret nous livre ici une radiographie complète de cette organisation tentaculaire, structurée en sections, déployée jusque dans la moindre commune du pays […] ► Lire la suite   Résistants de terrain  L’Armée du silence. Histoire des réseaux de résistance en France, 1940-1945, Guillaume Pollack, Tallandier, 2022, 543 p., 25,90 €. Ce sont les réseaux de Résistance, considérés pour eux-mêmes, qui font l’objet de cette vaste et novatrice étude. Il s’agit bien ici des réseaux et non des mouvements de Résistance, deux organisations dont Claude Bourdet a établi les différences après-guerre […] ► Lire la suite   Diriger l’ONU au temps des indépendances  Dag Hammarskjöld. Une vie au service du monde, Henrik Berggren, Éditions du Félin, 2022, 224 p. 22 €. Il n’existait pas de biographie en français de Dag Hammarskjöld, charismatique secrétaire général de l’ONU (1953-1961), qui sut, en pleine guerre froide et dans le contexte des décolonisations, donner à l’organisation internationale de la substance et de la crédibilité […] ► Lire la suite   Profession : diplomate  La Fin des diplomates. Le risque et l’honneur, Alain Rouquié, Rue de Seine éditions, 2023, 180 p., 19,90 €. Alain Rouquié, éminent politologue spécialiste de l’Amérique latine, est l’un des très rares universitaires à avoir eu une seconde vie dédiée à la diplomatie. Ambassadeur au Salvador, au Brésil, au Mexique, en Éthiopie, il tire de sa double expérience une analyse que son « hybridité » a favorisée […] ► Lire la suite       Général     L’histoire entre global et planétaire  Après le changement climatique, penser l’histoire, Dipesh Chakrabarty, préface de François Hartog, Gallimard, « Bibliothèque des histoires », 2023, 396 p., 28 €. Sous un titre pas vraiment sexy, c’est un de ces livres éprouvants qui saisissent le lecteur. Et son auteur est un de ces diables d’hommes comme on les aime, un peu comme un ami d’amis : ce n’est pas un hasard si François Hartog préface son travail et si Bruno Latour converse avec lui en post-scriptum […] ► Lire la suite   Le besoin de droit  Une brève histoire du droit en Europe. Les 2 500 dernières années, Tamar Herzog, trad. de l’anglais par Métissa André, Toulouse, Anacharsis, 2023, 384 p., 24 €. L’histoire et l’histoire du droit sont deux disciplines qui ne se rencontrent qu’en quelques moments comme les règnes de Justinien ou de Napoléon. On ne peut donc que se réjouir de la traduction de ce volume qui considère le droit comme une réponse à des besoins sociaux exprimés à une époque particulière. Un ouvrage très accessible mettant l’accent sur les grandes inflexions depuis l’époque romaine jusqu’au droit de l’Union européenne […] ► Lire la suite   Les métamorphoses de la sorcière  Démonologie littéraire et autres sorcelleries. Rationalité et imagination (1436-1862), Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, Hermann, « Échanges Littéraires », 2022, 464 p., 42 €. Depuis La Fourmilière (Formicarius, 1436-1437) de Johan Nider et le Marteau des Sorcières (Malleus maleficarum, 1486) de Sprenger et Institoris, les discours qui forgent les représentations de la « sorcellerie démoniaque » sont théologiques, démonologiques, juridiques, philosophiques, médicaux et littéraires […] ► Lire la suite   « L’ère du soupçon »  Une histoire inquiète. Les historiens et le tournant linguistique, Jacques Revel, Sabina Loriga EHESSSeuil-Gallimard, 2022, 380 p., 25 €. Si vous n’avez pas encore parfaitement compris ce qu’est le Linguistic turn, lisez ce livre important que nous proposent Jacques Revel et Sabina Loriga. Leur mise au point est magistrale, argumentée et stimulante […] ► Lire la suite   Maladroits, les gauchers ?  Histoire des préjugés, Jeanne Guérout, Xavier Mauduit (dir.), Les Arènes, 2023, 480 p., 24 €. En partant du principe que les préjugés qui perdurent sont le « fruit pourri » d’une longue histoire, cet ouvrage s’applique à en déconstruire une cinquantaine, décortiquant l’origine de ces représentations à l’emporte-pièce […] ► Lire la suite   « Sociologie de la mémoire »  La Mémoire collective en question(s), Sarah Gensburger, Sandrine Lefranc (dir.), PUF, 2023, 304 p., 25 €. Cet ouvrage collectif rassemblant politistes, sociologues, anthropologues et quelques historiens est un efficace hommage aux travaux menés depuis quelques décennies par Marie-Claire Lavabre autour de la mémoire collective. Ce domaine des sciences sociales a connu un essor considérable […] ► Lire la suite   Identité chinoise  L’Invention de la Chine, 5 000 ans d’histoire, Bill Hayton, trad. de l’anglais par Louis Vincenolles, Éditions Saint-Simon, 2023, 320 p., 23,90 €. Alors que, sous Xi Jinping, l’angoisse des autorités chinoises autour de l’identité nationale et le contrôle dont elle fait l’objet sont plus exacerbés que jamais, c’est une synthèse utile des recherches sur la question que propose ici le journaliste Bill Hayton, sensibilisé à ces crispations identitaires par ses travaux sur les revendications chinoises en mer de Chine méridionale […] ► Lire la suite   L’Église noire  Black Church. De l’esclavage à Black Lives Matter, Henry Louis Gate Jr., trad. de l’anglais par Serge Molla, Labor et Fides, 2023, 304 p., 22 €. « Un peuple proscrit doit posséder un centre social, et ce centre, pour le peuple noir, c’est l’Église noire », écrivait W.E.B. Du Bois. Le dernier essai d’Henry Louis Gates Jr. livre une réflexion à la fois personnelle et documentée sur l’Église noire comme pilier de la communauté africaine-américaine aux États-Unis […] ► Lire la suite   Pour avoir accès à toute L’Histoire en ligne et à toutes nos archives vous pouvez vous abonner au site internet. ► En savoir plus Pour ne rien manquer, suivez-nous sur Facebook et Twitter : Magazine L'Histoire    @maglhistoire

Wanted, dead or alive: Mr. Putin; Address: Kremlin (that's the easy part) - Washington Post

 The big idea

The Washington Post, March 24. 2023

Actually, 'wanted’ world leaders often face justice, new study finds

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine.

It’s been a historic week for world leaders accused of atrocities:

On March 17, judges for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges.

And on March 20, the world marked 20 years since the U.S.-led war in Iraq to topple dictator Saddam Hussein, who was deposed, arrested, tried and ultimately executed in 2006.

The ICC news about Putin drew understandable skepticism.

After all, he’s the leader of a nuclear-armed country that is a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. The ICC doesn’t do trials in absentia, so he’d have to be handed over. And, as Bloomberg reported, “of the two dozen people against whom the ICC has pursued war crimes cases, about a third remain at large.”

JUSTICE OFTEN SERVED?

But now comes a new study from Tom Warrick, who served as deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the Department of Homeland Security and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. It publishes this week, but The Daily 202 got an early look. You should be able to read the whole thing here.

Warrick’s conclusion? It’ll surprise skeptics (including, in all honesty, The Daily 202), but in recent times, high-profile targets of war-crimes prosecution mostly do not evade justice and certainly don’t die peacefully in their sleep. With some exceptions, of course.

“Heads of state and major political or military leaders wanted by international courts have faced justice far more often than not,” he found. “If modern history is a guide, the ICC arrest warrant has dramatically changed Putin’s fate.”

The Daily 202 readers are surely familiar with the Nuremberg trials of Nazi military and political leaders. But the modern era of war-crimes accountability began in 1992 with the U.N. Security Council’s establishment of mechanisms for punishing atrocities in the former Yugoslavia.

That was followed by a wave of other actions, some of them country-specific, like an international tribunal for Rwanda or domestic courts in places like Cambodia or Iraq, as well of course as the creation of the ICC. (The China, India, Russia and the United States, notably, don’t recognize ICC jurisdiction.)

Warrick looked at 18 heads of state or leaders or major military forces sought by international justice for genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes. (They’re all men.)

Of the 18, he wrote:

15 (83 percent) have faced justice of some kind before a tribunal.

Two were acquitted “for lack of evidence under less-than-ideal circumstances” but still appeared before ICC judges.

Two others were killed before they could face trial (meaning 94 percent have either faced a tribunal or were killed before that could happen).

Just one of the 18 is still at large.

And here’s the mic-drop: “Of the seven who have died, 0 percent died in their beds at home as free men.”

THE ADMINISTRATION’S HAND

President Biden’s administration this week looked to leverage the ICC warrant for Putin, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying Wednesday European countries should detain him and hand him over to the ICC if he visits their countries.

“Anyone who is a party to the court and has obligations should fulfill their obligations,” Blinken said, my colleagues John Hudson and Missy Ryan reported.

The ICC warrant “is not just a symbolic action, it has consequences that are going to change the trajectory of Putin’s life, said Warrick, who has decades of experience as an international lawyer, including years of work in the State Department on war-crimes issues.

It could restrict his travel options, it could restrict what world leaders choose to meet with him or associate with him — though obviously his recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping shows some of the limits to the limits, so to speak. And many ICC signatories have declined to sign on to condemnations of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The warrant could also “fundamentally alter the way other Russians deal with him,” Warrick said.

How?

In Russia, “there will eventually come to power a group of people who want to break with the crimes of the current leadership [and the international price to pay] and so putting someone like Putin on an airplane to The Hague becomes an option that solves several problems,” he said in an interview with The Daily 202.

Warrick pointed to Putin’s widely reported revulsion at images of ousted Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi being killed in a ditch, seeing his brutal and bloody end as a lesson in what happens to leaders who play by the West’s rules.

“If there’s not a measure of accountability for mass murder, there will be vengeance,” he told The Daily 202. Qaddafi’s fate was evidence of that. So was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s. Or that of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator.

“The world has changed since 1992,” said Warrick, “and it’s time everyone catch up.”

Uma próxima crise financeira global: How the Bank Collapse Goes Nuclear - Ashley Rindsberg (Scroll)

Meu amigo e colega Tomas Guggenheim resume o artigo abaixo: 

"O artigo anexo descreve a situação ilustrada pela falência do SVB e os problemas de liquidez de outros bancos, inclusive em outros países. 

A linha do raciocínio é clara: durante mais de uma década o sistema financeiro americano (não só) foi irrigado por emissões de moeda, quantitative easing e juros zero, ou quase. Essa enorme liquidez levou o sistema bancário a comprar títulos do tesouro e outros instrumentos de renda fixa de longo prazo com a baixíssima remuneração vigente ao longo do período. Com o surgimento da onda inflacionária, o FED aumentou substancialmente os juros (acima de 4%) e, em consequência, o valor presente dos títulos está tendo um deságio, segundo o autor, de 10 a 50%. Isso provoca uma perda substancial de capital das instituições financeiras, que - podemos presumir - é agravada por operações de alavancagem em que os citados títulos foram dados em garantia.

Como ressalta o autor, criou-se um impasse, em que a manutenção da política monetária anti-inflacionária tende a criar uma crise financeira que pode chegar a ser global. "

How the Bank Collapse Goes Nuclear

This isn’t a Silicon Valley problem, it’s a global debt crisis

By Ashley Rindsberg, Scroll, March 22, 2023

 

It should go without saying that we are now in a financial crisis. We have just witnessed the collapse or near-collapse of five banks, including Credit Suisse, an institution of systemic importance. And yet it still needs to be said in light of the glib reaction following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) earlier this month, which many pundits claimed was only a problem for rich “tech bros.” But SVB was the 16th largest bank in the United States and its speed-of-social-media implosion left observers and regulators grasping for answers, which made it easy to blame the bank’s failure on corrupt venture capitalists trying to cheat the system. After SVB, the San Francisco-based First Republic bank also started to meltdown, while the crypto-focused Signature and Silvergate banks went into closure, a pattern that reinforced the notion that this was a Silicon Valley phenomenon being hyped up by wealthy venture capitalists looking for a government bailout.

As New York University Professor Scott Galloway wrote on March 19 in a sneering tweet (since deleted but still cached), “Hunger games on the way up, Denmark on the way down,” a reference to scathing commentary he’d made on Face the Nation. There he argued that venture capitalists seem to want less government when times are good but government intervention when things go south. This was a tidy, retweet-friendly way of packaging the disaster in an easy to digest narrative primed for social media’s us-versus-them binaries.

Then Credit Suisse happened. After rapid outflows of deposits and a nose dive in its stock, Credit Suisse was acquired at the polite but firm suggestion of Swiss regulators by rival UBS, a development that put to rest the narrative that this was a Silicon Valley phenomenon and exposed the global nature of the banking failure, while pointing to its underlying causes.

While the current crisis has echoes of the 2008 global financial crash, the reality is that it’s more a toxic byproduct of the government’s response to the ‘08 crash. It also has the potential to be considerably worse. When the U.S. government bailed out banks that had taken outrageous risks in the housing market, it ignited an era of loose monetary policy. To fund the $800 million dollar Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and similarly sized American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as to stimulate the economy (though these two efforts were essentially one and the same) the Fed cut interest rates to 0% for the first time in history. While there was an expectation that interest rates would stay ultra-low for some time, the Fed kept them under 1% for almost ten years. By 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet had swollen to $4 trillion. But the public, which enjoyed soaring stock markets, low mortgages and car loans, and the lush fruits of easy money, was placated.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that the Obama Administration, with the enthusiastic backing of the media, successfully messaged the idea that the government had recovered the funds used for the 2008 bailouts. “We got back every dime used to rescue the banks,” Obama said in a campaign speech in 2012. This was later shown to be false, since the actual taxpayer cost of the bailouts was around half a trillion dollars.

Then Covid hit, and the Fed began printing money like it was going out of style—and now it might be. In 2020 alone, the Fed created $3 trillion in virgin money compared to 2019 when it injected $115 billion into the economy—a nearly 30-fold increase. It would print another $2 trillion in the two years after that. As a result, the money supply has increased more in the past three years than in the preceding decade. Put another way, more dollars were put into circulation between 2014 and 2022 than in the entire recorded history of the dollar.

And where did the Covid trillions go? Into the banks, primarily, which invested some of that money in long duration treasury bonds, since that is the sensible thing to do when you come into trillions of dollars. The catch, however, is that when banks began investing the money in those bonds, the Fed was forecasting the interest rate would remain unchanged into 2023, which meant the value of bank-held long term bonds would hold steady. (When interest rates go up, bond prices go down and vice versa.) But interest rates didn’t stay low. They went up. And it wasn’t just that they “went” up, as if by some natural force of economic antigravity. They were driven up by the same institution that created the tidal wave of new money while forecasting low rates into 2023: the Fed. For its part, the Fed was doubly betrayed by reality when inflation, which it (along with many media and political figures) had dutifully labeled “transitory,” started to look a bit more permanent.

The Federal Open Market Committee is the key Federal Reserve committee responsible for setting the federal funds rate, which is the rate that banks can loan each other money. In other words, it sets the benchmark interest rate for the economy, which also determines how much money flows through the system. Far from the 0.1% rate that was predicted by the Fed in 2020, rates have risen to 4.7%, which means the Fed missed its own estimate by 47 times. What this means is that banks behaving with the Fed’s projections in mind now have a Titanic-sized hole in their books. The value of those long duration bonds banks snapped up in 2020 (when it was the safe thing to do) has plummeted, worth up to 10-50% less than they were supposed to be worth. Meanwhile, banks have incurred liabilities in the form of loans and investments predicated on 2020 bond prices. The banks are, in simple terms, underwater—and not just in Silicon Valley due to greedy tech bros but, as The Economist recently reported, across the country.

The Fed’s rate hike on Wednesday delivered a hybrid message, increasing the federal fund rate by .25% but also signaling this will be the last, or second to last, increase. “Recent developments are likely to result in tighter credit conditions for households and businesses and to weigh on economic activity, hiring, and inflation. The extent of these effects is uncertain. The Committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks,” the Fed Open Market Committee wrote. But with the banking sector in crisis mode, even this modest rate increase—coming in place of a pause in raising or a drop in rates—could inflame the debt crisis, putting more banks at risk.

Despite the expressions of public shock in the days after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, the writing was on the wall. The investor Ray Dalio argued that SVB’s collapse, far from being an unforeseeable “black swan,” represented “a very classic event in the very classic bubble-bursting part of the short-term debt cycle.” Describing the mechanics behind the breathtaking risk the economy is now facing, Dalio wrote: “Tight money [employed] to curtail credit growth and inflation leads to a self-reinforcing debt-credit contraction that takes place via a domino-falling-like contagion process.”

What Dalio means is that the Fed can no longer raise interest rates without causing the value of long-duration bonds held by hundreds (if not thousands) of banks to drop again. But if the Fed lowers rates and loosens the money supply it risks creating more demand, increasing wage growth, and sending inflation even higher, which, after 15 months of rising prices, could morph into the kind of runaway inflation that might trigger an even more severe economic crisis. The Fed has placed itself in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.

Dalio is not alone in his doomsaying. Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the 2008 crash, told Bloomberg, “It’s an extremely dangerous moment, because there’s now significant stress in some parts of the U.S. banking system at a time when inflation is still too high.” In an interview earlier this month, Roubini—who called the current scenario a “debt trap” weeks before Silicon Valley Bank went under—described how the situation could realistically unfold:

The Fed will have to keep raising rates in spite of what happened with SVB. Then we will have a recession. That recession is going to cause more defaults, because as income falls, people who have too much debt are going to default. And then the increase in bond yields and market spreads is going to cause a recession [that’s] even more severe. So it will be a negative feedback between the real economy and the financial markets with an economic crash leading to a greater financial crash making an economic downturn more severe.

Roubini noted that the total equivalent of fixed income long duration assets (basically, long-term debt instruments, of which bonds and certificates of deposit are examples) in dollars is a staggering $20 trillion, of which, he says, $10 trillion could be wiped away by raising the interest rate by enough to bring inflation down. Moody’s has downgraded the entire US banking system from stable to negative, citing a “rapidly deteriorating operating environment.”

It’s this that led famed “Black Swan” investor, Mark Spitznagel, to say last year that we might witness “the greatest tinderbox-timebomb in financial history,” with repercussions not unlike what was experienced during the Great Depression. The reason for the extreme language is that in the globalized economy, the debt crisis is global. Foreigners hold $1 trillion in U.S. currency and around $12 trillion in long term debt. With bond prices plummeting, this places foreign banks and other debtholders in the same situation as American debt-holders. More importantly for the future of the U.S., it incentivizes foreigners to dump the dollar. With China, Russia, Iran and other countries who have suffered the wrath of the U.S. Treasury acting as the pointy end of America’s geopolitical stick—banding together to create new methods of trading outside the dollar, this exigency is now turning into a reality.

This is where disaster could cascade into catastrophe. A flight from the dollar would soak the economy in even more currency as foreign investors sell their dollars in exchange for more stable options. In such a scenario, no amount of interest rate raising could contain the damage without creating even more destruction--higher unemployment and more bursting bubbles. After twenty years of comforting ideas about infinite, easy money, the U.S. is now hoping that someone will be left to bailout the bailers. 

Gays do mundo inteiro, uni-vos, contra os retrocessos legais, em Uganda, na Rússia e em dezenas de outros países discriminatórios - Ishaan Tharoor (WP)

The Washington Post, March 24. 2023

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email

The U.S. connection to Uganda’s ‘kill the gays’ bill Member of parliament from Bubulo constituency John Musira, dressed in an anti-gay gown, leaves the chambers in Kampala, Uganda, on Tuesday. (Abubaker Lubowa/Reuters) The global backlash to Uganda’s new anti-LGBT law, approved by the East African nation’s parliament Tuesday, has been scathing. Widely seen as one of the most extreme forms of anti-homosexuality legislation in the world, a draft version of the bill expands existing restrictions and punishments for same-sex activity, criminalizes doing business with LGBT rights groups and calls for the application of the death penalty in certain cases for gay sex carried out by “serial offenders.” The law is awaiting the assent of the country’s long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni, who only last week described homosexual people as “deviations from normal.” Officials elsewhere are calling on Museveni to reconsider. “The passing of this discriminatory bill — probably among the worst of its kind in the world — is a deeply troubling development,” Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement. He added: “If the bill is signed into law, it will render lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Uganda criminals simply for existing, for being who they are. It could provide carte blanche for the systematic violation of nearly all of their human rights and serve to incite people against each other.” The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has spoken this week to Museveni, expressing her “deep concern” about the legislation, CNN reported. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that the bill “undermine fundamental human rights of all Ugandans and could reverse gains in the fight against HIV/AIDS.” At the White House, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said if the law was enacted, it would “have to take a look” at imposing economic sanctions on Uganda, adding that would be “really unfortunate” since the bulk of U.S. aid to the country of nearly 50 million people comes in the form of health assistance. The irony, though, is that the United States has also played another role in the situation. While right-wing Republican lawmakers in various U.S. states are currently engineering a new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation, a slate of proselytizing, activist U.S. religious groups have for years campaigned in parts of Africa, especially in countries like Uganda, and sown the seeds for even more hard-line measures there. Uganda is one of at least 67 countries that criminalizes same-sex relations. Like other former British colonies in East Africa, it draws on colonial-era statutes that maintain that homosexuality is an offense “against the order of nature” and punishable by life imprisonment. But the extremism and fervor behind the current legislation marks a discernible intensification of the region’s politics around LGBTQ rights, with analysts and rights group pointing to a concerted regional trend of discriminatory rhetoric and political action. Earlier this month, Burundi’s President Evariste Ndayishimiye advised his compatriots to “curse those who indulge in homosexuality because God cannot bear it” and said the LGBTQ community “must be banished, treated as pariahs in our country.” His remarks came around the same time that 24 people were charged by local authorities with “homosexual practices” for attending a seminar organized by an HIV/AIDS charity organization. In Kenya, top politicians reacted in anger after the country’s Supreme Court recently ruled against a petition that sought to bar activists from registering an LGBTQ rights organizations. President William Ruto used the moment to reiterate that Kenya’s laws, where penal codes still criminalize same-sex relations and bar same-sex marriage, have not changed. “It is not possible for our country Kenya to allow same-sex marriages,” he said. “It will happen in other countries but not in Kenya.” According to the Agence France-Presse, governments in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania have also all recently embarked on campaigns to suppress efforts to spread awareness about the LGBTQ community in their nations’ schools. Tanzanian activist Fatma Karume told the Agence France-Presse that authorities are searching for easy scapegoats at a time when the broader region is gripped by economic crises. “They want to use this minority group to distract people,” she told the news agency. Uganda’s drive toward punishing this minority has a long history. “This is not the first time the government in Uganda has pushed for extreme legislation against LGBTQ people,” my colleagues Niha Masih and Rael Ombuor explained. “Versions of the bill have been around since 2009, and in 2014, Museveni’s government passed a similar law, whose first iteration included the death penalty for HIV-positive people and for engaging in gay sex with a minor. It was ultimately struck down by the court for not following due parliamentary process.” At the time of that earlier wave of legislation, rights advocates pointed to the direct hand of U.S. evangelical organizations, many of which tread a well-beaten path through parts of Africa. In Uganda, in particular, U.S. Christian groups have invested millions of dollars, building schools and orphanages. But they have also left behind a profound ideological imprint. In 2020, London-based OpenDemocracy found that more than 20 American religious organizations advocating against LGBTQ rights, safe abortion, access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education had spent at least $54 million furthering their agendas in Africa since 2007. Close to half that figure was spent in conservative, predominantly Christian Uganda alone, where religious advocates advocate for gay “conversion therapy” and tout supposed success stories of “ex-gay” people. While anti-LBGTQ attitudes have long existed in countries around the world, we are seeing in countries like Uganda the sharp end of a broader right-wing culture war over gender rights and identities. Frank Mugisha, director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a leading LGBTQ rights organization, made the argument in 2014 that political criticism of the “gay agenda, of recruiting people to homosexuality” was not prevalent before 2009, after U.S. evangelical pastor Scott Lively and a group of American colleagues delivered a series of lectures in the country. Lively is a notorious homophobe who advanced the theory in the 1990s that Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazi colleagues were gay, and that their sexual orientation somehow fed into the atrocities of the Holocaust. Lively, in an address to Uganda’s parliament, suggested homosexuality was a Western-imported “disease” that could be spread to the country’s children. “This recasting of homosexuality as akin to pedophilia, alongside the widespread use of similar language, is meant to legitimize the response and crackdown by governments and institutions,” noted Caleb Okereke, a Nigerian journalist. Similar tactics are on show in the United States, where, fueled in part by a mobilization of right-wing religious groups, Republican lawmakers are pushing through legislation targeting members of the transgender community, casting them as duplicitous “groomers” and pedophilic threats. The stakes in Uganda are, for now, even higher. No matter the international opposition, Museveni has tremendous popular backing for signing off on the new law. “Ugandans have been radicalized into hatred for LGBTQ persons,” Mugisha told a British radio station Wednesday.