Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive

by | Dec 19, 2011 | Global system, Influence and networks

Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive. He is staring into his mirror each morning, and repeating to himself: ‘I am a strong, confident, powerful currency. I am A TIGER!’ He’s so positive, he’s sent out a hefty tome called The World Book of Happiness to 200 world leaders, with this extraordinary letter. I’m quoting from the letter he sent to Barack Obama:

Dear Mr President Barack

I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness…with my best wishes for a ‘Happy New Year’ but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people’s happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um…what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]

Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today’s global world we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street….

People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.

[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is ‘to release this positive energy, people need oxygen’, though I also like the idea of ‘a religious or philosophical rooting’ – ‘rooting’ is a slang Australian word for shagging].

Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path, we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You’ve lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.

Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]

Happy New Year!

Herman Van Rompuy

Chairman of the European Council

Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: ‘Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?’ You betcha Leo!

Now, a cynic might suggest Herman is reminiscent of the conquistador hero of Werner Herzog’s movie Aguirre Wrath of God, who dreams of ruling over new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that’s a cynical thought. Think positive. Think Belgian. Find a happy place!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO8H01i2Low[/youtube]

Riot police become part of Occupy Portland (unintentionally)

by | Dec 19, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks

This account of tactical innovation at Occupy Portland is pretty funny:

We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us…

After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we’d been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic)…

H/t John Robb.

They can’t both be right

by | Dec 16, 2011 | Economics and development, Global system

The Economist’s World in 2012 publication captures one of the big uncertainties for next year – and this one’s a straight either / or, they say:

Somebody is going to be proved wrong in 2012 and will lose a lot of money. Either the bullion market or the Treasury bond market is mistaken about the long-term inflationary outlook.

By early September 2011, gold was trading at around $1,900 an ounce, an indication that investors felt inflation was set to soar. Such an outlook would normally be bad news for government-bond markets. But the ten-year Treasury bond was simultaneously yielding less than 2%, an indication that the “bond vigilantes” were far more concerned about deflation than inflation. Although the gold price fell and bond yields rose in October, the underlying contradiction didn’t disappear.

Gold’s been falling since World in 2012 went to press, especially this week, and is currently below $1,600 an ounce – in large part, market watchers say, because of perceptions that the Fed won’t be turning on the QE printing presses (and hence driving inflation up) any time soon. The deflationary side of the argument will presumably get added momentum from the apparent slowdown in emerging economies: Brazil had zero growth in Q3, Indian growth is falling too, and it’s the same story in China – where as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observes,

It is hard to obtain good data in China, but something is wrong when the country’s Homelink property website can report that new home prices in Beijing fell 35pc in November from the month before. If this is remotely true, the calibrated soft-landing intended by Chinese authorities has gone badly wrong and risks spinning out of control.

The growth of the M2 money supply slumped to 12.7pc in November, the lowest in 10 years. New lending fell 5pc on a month-to-month basis. The central bank has begun to reverse its tightening policy as inflation subsides, cutting the reserve requirement for lenders for the first time since 2008 to ease liquidity strains. The question is whether the People’s Bank can do any better than the US Federal Reserve or Bank of Japan at deflating a credit bubble.

All this, plus Christine Lagarde warning of a 1930s style slump. Are the goldbugs headed for a massive loss?

Maybe – but I still wonder what will happen next year on the QE front. The European Central Bank keeps disappointing market expectations of large scale bond purchases for now, including after last week’s summit; but it may not be able to continue to do so if the Eurozone’s travails worsen dramatically next year. And the same may be true of the US as well, if things worsen there too. Admittedly, as the Economist notes,

[QE]  has become controversial [in the US], with Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the American presidency, describing the idea as “almost treasonous”. Nor is it clear that previous rounds of QE did much to help the real economy.

But Rick Perry (and indeed the Republicans generally) look less of a threat to Obama now than they did when World in 2012 went to press; and while QE may indeed not have made that much of a difference, there’s also the fact that policymakers have pretty much run out of other ideas for stimulating the economies (I keep thinking of emergency room movie scenes… “Clear!”… BZZZZT…. beeeeeeeep…)

So on balance I’m still with the goldbugs rather than the T-billers, just about. But who the hell really knows anything about the future, anymore…