This Friday, a new essay at Freedom Frequency highlights the role of women’s digital activism in confronting Iran’s repressive autocratic regime; Lee Ohanian and Bill Whalen provide an update on the California governor’s race; and Michael Spence explains the options countries and companies have to make their supply chains more resilient amid geopolitical shocks—as well as the high costs such measures are likely to carry.
Freedom Frequency
From childhood, Iranian women learn where they’re allowed to be, what they’re permitted to do, and how completely the country of their birth controls every aspect of their lives, Mohadeseh Salari Sardari writes at Freedom Frequency. Even women with a talent for science are directed back into the domestic realm—the place where women’s activities are circumscribed with a “protection” that’s merely a form of imprisonment. Crossing the invisible borders that oppress Iran’s women, she writes, often involves crossing actual borders to seek freedom abroad. But even within Iran, Sardari shows, women determined to resist state control can carve out spaces for themselves, including through the use of the internet. Read more here.
California Politics & Policy
On the latest California update episode of Matters of Policy & Politics, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian and Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen, both contributors to Hoover’s California on Your Mind web channel, join guest host Jonathan Movroydis to discuss the latest in the Golden State, including the public ostracization of labor icon Cesar Chavez after a New York Times exposé revealed a number of allegations of sexual assault. The panelists also cover Los Angeles’s penchant for spending follies, with a focus on the recent example of an eight-mile bike bridge to nowhere. Whalen and Ohanian also discuss flawed ballot measures, including a “mansion tax” that has snarled Southern California housing construction. The episode concludes with an analysis of what three recent polls say about the Golden State’s next wave of political leaders—and if former vice president Kamala Harris will be a part of that cohort. Watch or listen here.
Global Macroeconomics
Using the ongoing disruption to global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as a point of departure, Senior Fellow Michael Spence writes at Project Syndicate about “a well-known vulnerability of our complex networked global economy: a single point of failure can create massive and costly disruptions.” Spence considers single points of failure in terms of geography, excessive market concentration, supply chains, and technological and financial systems. The Nobel laureate in economics argues that “when markets undersupply resilience,” countries can step in to either “onshore” production of critical goods or cooperate with allies to secure stable supplies of those inputs. Spence says current geopolitical instability has heightened the need for countries to consider these options. “Whatever approach countries choose, eliminating or mitigating points of failure will be expensive,” he concludes. Read more here. [Subscription or registration required.]
Finance and Banking
In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Senior Fellow Amit Seru and coauthors explore the stability of private credit funds, utilizing evidence on their capitalization, funding structure, and performance. They find the average private credit fund is highly capitalized, with assets spread throughout “industries, geographies and credit strategies, reducing exposure to correlated shocks.” Seru and coauthors conclude that currently, private credit funds are “unlikely to pose systemic risks.” But the paper also explores longer-term risks facing credit funds, including governance issues, periods of economic instability, and their ties to traditional banks. Read more here.
In a new episode of Capitalism & Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, Policy Fellow Jon Hartley and Columbia Business School professor emeritus Charles Calomiris discuss banking crises and the prospects of stablecoins. Hartley asks Calomiris about the Diamond-Dybvig model, deposit insurance, and the history of bailouts and public subsidies for banking. The conversation also dives into a comparative history of the American and Canadian banking systems and discussions of quantitative easing and ample reserves banking, non-bank lenders, and Calomiris’s magnum opus, Fragile by Design. Read more here.
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