Oooh la la! The news that a new biopic movie about General Charles de Gaulle is about to be released showing him making love to his wife Yvonne shortly before the Germans invaded France in 1940 has left the normally-relaxed French all of a fluster.
Covid-19 is make or break for the euro. The only way the European Central Bank can convince markets that it will do whatever it takes to save the single currency in the current crisis is to abandon the self-imposed political constraints on the assets it can buy under its Quantitative Easing program.
Until recently, most casual conversations about current television would arrive at the same conclusion: “There’s just too much! You can’t watch it all!” That diagnosis is now being put to the test. But not only are the sequestered multitudes going to consume more television, they’re likely to digest it differently. And there are few better examples of that than “Niall Ferguson’s Networld.”
Let’s take a break from COVID-19 and talk books. Last year I read Andrew Roberts’ biography of Winston Churchill, and enjoyed it. I didn’t realize that he also wrote a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte in 2014 until one of my daughters gave it to me for Christmas. It is a terrific book–long, at 800 pages, but so absorbing that it could easily have been longer.
The other day a friend posted a picture of a Churchill figurine with the caption: What would Winston say? It’s a good question. As the world reels from a frightening pandemic, people everywhere are looking for strong leadership. Most are not getting it. Churchill’s legendary turn as a wartime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom offers an invaluable example of how to lead in a time of danger and dread.
Russian propaganda, going back to czarist and Soviet times, often claims that Western powers are encircling Russia, forcing Moscow to be belligerent against its wishes. Russia is the perennial victim of aggressive foreign powers trying to keep Moscow locked in the steppes and, in the worst case, to install themselves in the Kremlin.
Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, warns of defaults in the credit sector. To dampen the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic, he argues for targeted economic measures, and he explains why he views Switzerland as a role model for the revitalization of growth in the industrial world.
