Reading the Globe: A weekly digest of the most important news, ideas and culture around the world.
Temporada 1
por Michael Washburn
People generally do not embark on a career at Goldman Sachs expecting “work-life balance.” For junior bankers and traders, the Goldman environment is known as especially competitive and demanding. Given the sacrifices that junior employees have to make to stay alive at the firm and the singular focus on making money, it may surprise some to learn that pay for people starting at Goldman falls short of industry standards. As reported this past weekend in a Financial Times article, “Goldman wrangles over whether to pay junior bankers higher salaries,” you can expect to make less in your first year at Goldman than at other Wall Street firms. The article cites Wall Street Oasis figures indicating that first-year Goldman analysts on average earn a little under $86,000 in salary along with a $37,500 bonus, compared to a median $91,400 salary and $39,700 bonus elsewhere on Wall Street. The rationale for this discrepancy is that Goldman rewards based on performance, not some arbitrary median, but the article details how Goldman’s executives are in a somewhat awkward position. The question is how to maintain merit-based pay while avoiding the poaching of young talent by higher-paying rivals. JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Citigroup are offering base salaries in the $100,000 range, while Wells Fargo and Bank of America have recently offered handsome raises. As the Covid-19 pandemic turned life everywhere upside down, one of its most distorting effects on day-to-day life stemmed from the policy, undertaken by the administration of New York’s progressive mayor Bill de Blasio, of moving homeless people out of crowded shelters, and into luxury hotels. The arrival of hundreds of homeless people in an upscale neighborhood like the Upper West Side can catch residents totally off guard and, given the prevalence of substance abuse and severe mental health problems among the homeless population, can degrade the quality of life and endanger the safety of ordinary people unprepared for the onslaught. With the pandemic finally on the wane, efforts have at last been underway as of June 16 to move the homeless out of hotels and back to shelters, but activists for the homeless have met these efforts with a flurry of spirited street protests and legal challenges. A report by Molly Crane-Newman in the New York Daily News on July 14 quotes Diane Smalls, a lawyer representing the homeless, saying that she and other plaintiffs who have successfully blocked the Department of Homeless Services’ relocation plan do not seek to stay resettlement of the homeless permanently, but simply to put the plan on hold until DHS has a better plan in place that will not uproot people in a matter of minutes from the hotels in which they have lived for a year. Political science as we understand the term today is said to have originated with Machiavelli, but the truth is that every age has had its diplomats and ambassadors, and the high point of ancient Mayan civilization is no exception. Archaeology magazine’s July/August issue contains a fascinating article by deputy editor Eric A. Powell, “Autobiography of Maya Ambassador,” which details the career of an official named Aipach’ Wall, who made his home in the city of El Palmar in what is now Mexico, near the border with what is now Guatemala. Aipach’ Wall held the official title of lakam, or bannerman, and carried out highly important diplomatic functions as an envoy between city-states. And more...
The European Union is pushing hard to gain the legal clearances necessary to slap sanctions on Lebanon’s ruling elite. Lebanon is in a state of crisis following the explosion at a Beirut port last August that killed more 200 people. As Reuters reported, the country is on the verge of financial ruin and daily life is a nightmare with rampant blackouts and shortages of food and fuel. The E.U.’s leaders intend the sanctions, which look set to go into effect by the end of this month, to put pressure on Lebanese politicians to get their act together and lift the nation out of crisis. Reuters cites an unattributed diplomatic note listing corruption, human rights abuses, and the failure to form a new government as triggers that would incur travel bans and freezes of the assets of Lebanese officials. My own story in Book and Film Globe about the shooting of fearless Dutch journalist Peter de Vries unfortunately turned from an attempted assassination to a successful assassination. Right after the Dutch author and crime reporter exited a TV studio in Amsterdam on July 6, an attacker opened fire on a busy street, hitting de Vries in the head. Police swiftly made three arrests, but then released one detainee. De Vries died of his injuries on July 15. The 64-year-old de Vries became what so many others in the journalistic profession rarely dare to try to be: a writer producing articles and commentary important and influential enough for certain people to want him dead. Matt Taibbi has famously complained about the inability or unwillingness of journalists these days to put themselves or their livelihoods at risk in pursuit of the truth, and said that “All journalists are cowards,” but at least one reporter gives the lie to that generalization. In the race to vaccinate as many people as possible against Covid-19, few countries feature a more admirable record than Portugal. A July 3 report in The Portugal News, the English-language newspaper of Portugal, indicates that by the first week of July, the Directorate General of Health had released figures showing that 5,335,683 Portuguese had received at least one dose of the vaccine and 3,295,132 had gotten full vaccinations. Among the most vulnerable segments of the population, 666,831 people over 80 years old, a full 98 percent of men and women in that age bracket, had gotten at least one dose and 634,488, or 93 percent, were fully vaccinated. And more...
Welcome to the second episode of Reading the Globe, a new original weekly podcast produced by AudioHopper. Host Michael Washburn summarizes, synthesizes and criticizes the week’s most important and fascinating stories. This week, Reading the Globe considers: CNN’s story by Matt Egan noting how Robinhood got hit with the largest fine ever levied by the Financial Industrial Regulatory Authority. FINRA accused the trading platform — which feels like a video game and thus has attracted and probably addicted tons of young people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing — of harming millions of customers. “The fine imposed in this matter, the highest ever levied by FINRA, reflects the scope and seriousness of Robinhood’s violations,” said the agency’s head of enforcement Jessica Hopper (no relation to AudioHopper). As is usual in these kind of financial settlements, Robinhood “neither admitted to nor denied the charges.” But Hopper seemed to take a swipe at the famous Silicon Valley ethos when she said, compliance with FINRA’s rules “is not optional” and cannot be ignored in an attempt to “‘break things’ and fix them later.” FINRA paid special attention to the suicide of 20-year-old Alexander Kearns, who died in June 2020 after seeing a balance of negative $730,000 in his trading account, which was a mistake on the platform’s part and cast unfavorable light on the videogame-like nature of the colorful interface of the platform. National Review’s fascinating July 1 issue is devoted to the theme of Occupied Wall Street: Woke Capitalism and the Radicalization of Corporate America. As David L. Bahnsen details in an article, “The Jack-of-All-Trades Fed,” the body is now expected to pursue social goals in addition to an already vastly expanded roster of functions related to monetary policy, interest rates, and the solvency and stability of banks and financial institutions. Under President Biden, a body once charged with pursuing sound fiscal policy in a politically neutral manner now is also supposed to address the racial wealth gap and deal with climate change. In the eyes of some progressives, those twin imperatives may already represent the real “dual mandate” the Fed must pursue at all costs. For years, the world had relied on the tiny island nation of Nauru for its rich deposits of phosphate, the key ingredient in fertilizer. By the 1990s, strip-mining has depleted its easy-to-access resources so the country re-invented itself as a tax haven and quickly became a center for money laundering. Now, to re-enter the good graces of the first world, the tiny nation — just 8 square miles — faces a choice. As a story in the Cook Island News details, Nauru can clean up its banking laws and turn to environmentally devastating deep-sea mining. Or it can starve. The world’s wealthy countries face the kind of “environment vs human misery” that will surely become more common in the coming decades. And more...
Introducing Reading the Globe, a new original weekly podcast produced by AudioHopper. Every Thursday, host Michael Washburn summarizes, synthesizes and criticizes the week’s most important and fascinating stories. This week, Reading the Globe considers: The crackdown on press freedom in Hong Kong. As reported in the Economist’s new issue of June 19, 2021, the so-called national security law that China forced on Hong Kong a year ago has led to one of the most aggressive crackdowns on press freedom in living memory. Police have arrested Ryan Law, editor of the Apple Daily newspaper, and conducted a massive raid on the publication’s offices. The law school of the University of Illinois at Chicago has taken the step of dropping the name of John Marshall, the fourth SCOTUS chief justice. The reason for this step has to do with Marshall’s problematic record on slavery and his ownership of slaves, but history is always more complex than some would like it to be. San Francisco’s crime problem is due, at least according to another editorial, to San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin largely refused to go after petty crimes like shoplifting. This refusal is in keeping with the spirit of a 2014 proposition that made thefts of property worth under $950 a misdemeanor in California. The result? A shoplifting epidemic that led to the closing of 17 Walgreens stores around the city in the past half decade. The Wall Street Journal features a lengthy cover story about French president Emmanuel Macron’s aggressive enforcement of a national law regarding laicité, or the official secularism of the French polity. Eric Adams’ strong performance in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor reveals a city much more concerned with law and order than many expected from the progressive metropolis. On Tuesday, June 22, the New York Post ran a front-page story endorsing Adams in the primary, who got 31% of the vote. Finally, an article in the New York Daily News on Wednesday, June 23, 2021, details how, after having expressed concerns about the challenge that Netflix poses to cinemas, Steven Spielberg’s production firm, Amblin Partners, will work with Netflix to develop feature films.