For the first time in all of time, men have seen the Earth. 

Seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depths of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small… 

To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know that they are truly brothers.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. 

Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. 

The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. 

This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. 

The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. 

And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."

Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years. 

According to various Roman historians, he commissioned the assassination of Agrippina the Younger—his mother and sometime lover. He sought to poison her, then to have her crushed by a falling ceiling or drowned in a self-sinking boat, before ultimately having her murder disguised as a suicide. 

Nero was betrothed at eleven and married at fifteen, to his adoptive stepsister, Claudia Octavia, the daughter of the emperor Claudius. 

At the age of twenty-four, Nero divorced her, banished her, ordered her bound with her wrists slit, and had her suffocated in a steam bath. 

He received her decapitated head when it was delivered to his court. He also murdered his second wife, the noblewoman Poppaea Sabina, by kicking her in the belly while she was pregnant.

Nero’s profligacy went beyond slaughtering his nearest and dearest. He spent a fortune building an ornate palace, only to have it burn down, along with the rest of the city of Rome, in a conflagration that lasted for more than a week.  Nero watched the destruction from a safe elevation, singing of the decimation of Troy. 

He was famous for never wearing the same garment twice. He sought out sexual thrills like a hog snuffling for truffles. 

He had a favored freedman, Sporus, castrated, then married him in a ceremony in which Sporus was dressed in the traditional garb of a bride and Nero played the groom. 

Later, Nero repeated the ceremony with another of his freedmen playing the groom while he adopted the role of bride, sans castration; the pseudo-nuptials were consummated on a couch in full view of guests at a banquet. 

He was attention-seeking, petulant, arbitrary. He had the senator Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus murdered on the ground that his expressions were overly melancholic.

No wonder Nero’s name became a byword for degeneracy. “Let not ever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom,” Hamlet reminds himself as he prepares to confront Gertrude over her marriage to Claudius, resolving to “speak daggers to her but use none.” 

In the twentieth century, Nero was memorialized by the lurid, Academy Award-nominated performance of Peter Ustinov in the 1951 Hollywood epic “Quo Vadis,” in which Ustinov wore purple robes, kicked servants at will, and plummily insisted that Seneca, his tutor turned adviser, acknowledge his omnipotence. 

In a more recent popular depiction, a TV movie directed by the late Paul Marcus, Nero is represented as a pretty-boy prince traumatized by having witnessed his father being murdered by the emperor Caligula; Nero starts his reign with good intentions before embarking upon his own program of Caligula-style excesses. 

His popular reputation even features in that comprehensive catalogue of humanity “The Simpsons,” in an episode in which Homer takes his evangelical neighbor, Ned Flanders, to Las Vegas for an experiment in depravity. 

After a night of boozing at the tables, they wake to find that each has married a cocktail waitress from the hotel casino where they are staying: Nero’s Palace.

All of this, according to some recent scholars, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a fabrication: a narrative derived from biased histories, written decades after Nero died, that relied on dubious sources. 

Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and these posthumous accounts were calculated in part to denigrate this dynastic line and burnish the reputations of its successors. 

Depictions of Nero as notorious are “based on a source narrative that is partisan,” Thorsten Opper, a curator in the Greek and Roman division of the British Museum, told me recently. 

The museum has just opened an exhibition that, if not quite aiming to rehabilitate Nero, challenges his grotesque reputation. 

“Anything you think you know about Nero is based on manipulation and lies that are two thousand years old,” Opper, the show’s lead curator, said. 

Indeed, some of the stories told about Nero, such as the saying that he “fiddled while Rome burned,” are patently absurd: violins weren’t invented until the sixteenth century.

Most of what has been passed down about Nero comes from three historians: 

Tacitus, who portrays him as having “polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence”; 

Cassius Dio, who describes Nero skulking incognito through Rome at night while “insulting women,” “practicing lewdness on boys,” and “beating, wounding, and murdering” others; and 

Suetonius, who claims that Nero, having run through the usual roster of vices, invented a perversion of his own at public games that he hosted, in which he would put on an animal skin and “assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.”

Modern scholars have determined that many of the tropes used to characterize Nero’s depravities bear a remarkable similarity to literary accounts of mythical events. 

Opper said, “The whole thing is based on literary techniques that were taught in Roman rhetorical schools.” 

Tacitus’ and Dio’s accounts of the Great Fire of Rome, in 64 A.D., in their detailed evocations of citizens wailing and mothers grabbing their children, closely echo earlier accounts of attacks on cities, especially the siege of Troy. 

Nero wasn’t even in Rome when the fire started. Moreover, much of what was destroyed was slum housing constructed by exploitative landlords. During the fire, Nero “led the relief effort,” in Opper’s words, and afterward instituted a new building code.

Descriptions of Nero as unhinged and licentious belong to a rhetorical tradition of personal attack that flourished in the Roman courtroom. 

Opper told me, “They had a term for it—vituperatio, or ‘vituperation,’ which meant that you could say anything about your opponent. 

You can really invent all manner of things just to malign that character. And that is exactly the kind of language and stereotypes we find in the source accounts.” 

The scholar Kirk Freudenburg, writing in “The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero” (2017), argues that the lurid account of the collapsing ship—Nero is said to have sent Agrippina off with a grand display of affection, only to have his plot foiled when she swam to safety—“begs to be taken as apocryphal, a contraption of the historians’ own clever design.” 

Cassius Dio’s history of ancient Rome suggests that Nero was inspired to build a trick vessel after seeing a play in which a prop boat suddenly opened up, but Opper argues that the historian himself likely borrowed the idea from the play. 

Similarly, when Tacitus writes that Agrippina’s final gesture was to offer her womb up to an assassin’s blade, his words mirror a passage from Seneca’s “Oedipus” in which Jocasta seeks to be stabbed in the womb “which bore my husband and my sons.” 

Seneca wrote the play around the time of Nero’s rule, and it’s possible that his retelling of the mythic story was inspired by the actual manner of Agrippina’s death. 

But it’s more probable that Seneca engaged in a dramatic invention, and that, as Opper suggests, it colored Tacitus’ later account of how Agrippina died.

Some of the current revisionism can seem tendentious. In the 2019 book “Nero: Emperor and Court,” the British classicist John F. Drinkwater addresses the even more heinous death of Poppaea. 

He accepts the historical sources that describe an argument between Nero and his wife—Suetonius says that she was angry with him for coming home late from chariot racing—but proposes that the blow to Poppaea’s belly may have been merely the climax of a “matrimonial row that got out of hand,” adding, “If so Nero was at worst guilty of manslaughter.” 

Opper sees no need to downplay domestic abuse; rather, he contends that the over-all account of the marital argument conforms to an established pattern in earlier histories of powerful leaders. 

For a tyrant, “killing your pregnant wife is a topos,” he told me. “It’s applied in Roman and Greek history. It’s just such an evil deed—how much worse can someone be?” Opper said that Nero was deeply in love with Poppaea, and desperate for an heir; the couple’s only other child, a daughter, had died recently. 

In ancient Rome, pregnancy was a hazardous affair, and could prove fatal even without an assault. 

Opper told me, “You can’t prove it either way, but the evidence, I think, isn’t at all strong to say that he was to blame for it.”

The British Museum seeks to build a less sensationalist account of Nero through the placement and elucidation of objects: statues, busts, coins, inscriptions, graffiti. 

A portrait emerges of a young, untested leader at the helm of an unwieldy empire that is under enormous stress. 

The show’s tenor is established by the first object on display: a statue of Nero as a boy of twelve or thirteen. 

The statue, on loan from the Louvre, depicts Nero on the cusp of manhood, his status indicated by what would at the time have been legible symbols: a bulla, an amulet worn like a locket, confirms that he is a freeborn boy who has not yet come of age. 

The occasion for the statue’s manufacture might have been the marriage of Nero’s mother to his granduncle Claudius, then the emperor, in 49 A.D., eight years after the death of Nero’s father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. 

More likely, the object commemorates Claudius’ adoption of Nero as his heir in 50 A.D., the year Nero turned thirteen. 

The statue would originally have been displayed on a high plinth, but at the museum it is presented at ground level, so that the viewer is eye to eye with a child. The lighting design casts a long shadow: an imperial giant looms.

By the time Nero became emperor, in 54 A.D., the empire’s grip had long been weakening, and the senatorial and knightly classes of Rome often challenged the authority of the emperor, who was only the princeps—the leading member of their class—rather than a hereditary ruler. 

In this light, Nero’s construction of the Domus Aurea—a lavish palace that he built after the Great Fire, with three hundred rooms decorated with frescoes and gold leaf—can be seen less as the expression of a luxurious appetite than as a necessary investment in the perpetual entertainment of senators and knights. 

(That said, the Domus was a bit much; according to Suetonius, the building’s ceilings had secret compartments from which flower petals or drops of scented unguents were released onto guests’ heads.)

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Henry proclaims:

“Plataginet, I will; and like thee, Nero, Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn.”

The contemporary Indian writer Jeet Thayil wrote in his buzzy Bombay based book Narcopolis:

“The world is on fire; time is a bomb. Ten thousand years are not enough when so much remains to be done.”

The Pandemic and Political Order @ForeignAffairs @FukuyamaFrancis

Another reason for pessimism is that the positive scenarios assume some sort of rational public discourse and social learning. 

Yet the link between technocratic expertise and public policy is weaker today than in the past, when elites held more power.

Belgrade’s Republic Square is one of the cultural and social hubs of the Serbian capital, a popular meeting point lined with cafés and the site of the National Museum and the National Theatre.

It is also now at the centre of an international debate about the export of Chinese technology, authoritarian surveillance and cyber security.

The square is under constant observation by equipment made in China. 

A surveillance camera system installed by Huawei, the Chinese technology group, has the capacity to monitor the behaviour of people in the square and elsewhere in the city, recognise their faces, identify their vehicle number plates and make judgments on whether suspicious activities are afoot.

The cameras in central Belgrade represent the first among some 8,000 that the city plans to install as part of a comprehensive “safe city” partnership with Huawei.

When the project was unveiled in 2019, Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s former interior minister, boasted that every street and building in the area of the square would be covered by cameras. 

“We will know from which street [a perpetrator] came, from which car, who was sitting previously in that car,” he said.

You will all be no better than fields of garlic chives, giving yourselves up to being harvested by the blade of power, time and time again. @ChinaFile #COVID19 

[ “garlic chives,” Allium tuberosum, often used as a metaphor to describe an endlessly renewable resource.]

What is thriving, however, is all that ridiculous ―Red Culture and the nauseating adulation that the system heaps on itself via shameless pro-Party hacks who chirrup hosannahs at every turn @ChinaFile #COVID19

Karim, Ibrajim and Yusef Bukele Ortez constitute the most influential circle of power surrounding President Nayib Bukele. 

The three men are his brothers, sons of Armando Bukele Kattán and Olga Ortez, and, together with the president, are four of Bukele Kattán’s 10 children. 

Although they don’t officially hold public office, numerous sources and even they themselves confirm that they’re the main strategists, lobbyists, and emissaries of this administration.

Global case and death incidences continued to decrease with over 3 million new weekly cases and over 73 000 new deaths, a 15% and an 8% decrease respectively, compared to the previous week 

Despite the downward trend in global case and death incidences for a sixth and fifth consecutive week respectively, many countries across all six regions have reported rises in the number of cases and deaths.

The highest numbers of new cases were reported from 

India (914 539 new cases; 33% decrease)

Brazil (449 478 new cases; 7% increase)

Argentina (212 975 new cases; 3% decrease) 

Colombia (175 479 new cases; 17% increase)

United States of America (99 103 new cases; 35% decrease).

"However, we still see a mixed picture around the world.” 

Deaths went up in Africa, Americas and Western Pacific last week.

The fall in the benchmark 10-year yield since it peaked two months ago has now been equivalent to a rate cut by the Federal Reserve, and Wednesday saw it drop below 1.5% for the first time since March.

That this seems shocking owes much to the human tendency to extrapolate existing trends into the future, and also the market’s tendency to stage “tantrums” in which yields rise in a hurry as bond investors (once known as “vigilantes’) storm out. 

As marked on the chart, the 10-year yield appeared to follow a clear trend from last summer until this spring. 

Then, in February and March, there was a vintage tantrum. Yields shot up, and suddenly predictions that they would rise above 2% in short order were popular. 

Very few at that point would have predicted that the market would revisit 1.5% before a trip to 2%. But that is what has happened:

Yields dipped sharply after the publication of non-farm payroll data at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning (ringed on the chart).
They have fallen further since. When the data came out, yields were still solidly in the middle of their range for the last few months. Since then, they have dropped below 1.5%:

#Giacometti 'Walking Man' #sculpture

The World is pirouetting on the pinhead of the Yield of the US 10 YR

However, It is a Game of Chicken.

On 28th March when the Bears had gotten hold of the US 10 Year, I wrote that I expected the 10 Year to target 1.45% well we got real close on Friday before the market reversed 

Ten- year yields initially plunged to a more than two-month low of 1.46%, then reversed to end the day at 1.58%. However, I am resetting my target Yield to 1.25% now.

Given the volume of money Printing and the extraordinary stimulus I have to say that the US Recovery is actually really weak and I believe it will be very short lived and the Penny will drop soon with the Bond Market and the Shorts will be forced to cover.

The Consensus View appears to be that the Global economy is going to accelerate big time and that its going to BOOM! 

I beg to differ

Furthermore The Central Banks are in a corner. 

They have fired a lot of bullets and even if there was a meaningful bounce they cannot raise rates.

Here is why central banks are trapped and cannot raise rates even if inflation rises: @dlacalle_IA Feb 2 

Euro 1.2160

Dollar Index 90.193

Japan Yen 109.497

Swiss Franc 0.8960

Pound 1.4079

Aussie 0.7731

India Rupee 73.01

South Korea Won 1115.80

Brazil Real 5.063

Egypt Pound 15.6697

South Africa Rand 13.73

Fads, Bugs, Bubbles and Bitcoin

Robert Shiller, the Yale University economist who shared the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, is famous above all else for his role in spotting the dot-com bubble before it burst in 2000. 

The title of the book he published the year before, Irrational Exuberance, has passed into the financial lexicon. And yet he dislikes the concept of a “bubble” and would prefer something else. 

That was perhaps the most surprising finding when we discussed his latest book, Narrative Economics, on the terminal with him Tuesday. 

The point of a real bubble is that after it reaches a certain size, all it can do is burst. After that there will be nothing left. There’s no chance to release some air and see it deflate gradually, as there might be with a beachball. 

The word swiftly attached itself to the scandal of the South Sea Bubble in early 18th century England, and its twin the Mississippi Bubble in France. Even Isaac Newton lost his savings before the South Sea Company was revealed to be one big scam.

The answer Shiller gave when we asked him if we agreed that the stock market today is in a bubble was surprising:

The term bubble, or “boule” in French, appears to have suddenly appeared in 1720 -- it was called the Mississippi event. 

Speculating on Mississippi became a name for the first really big stock market crash, 75 years before the New York Stock Exchange was founded.

Somebody called it “boule” and it has persisted to this day. But it suggests something that is factually wrong, which is that they end in a crash, a one-day event, but that’s not historically accurate.

So I wish we could have another name for a bubble, maybe call it a fad, fads can come back again in a different form

We had a Kewpie doll fad in the 1920s, I think, then we had Beanie Babies, people were buying them thinking they had collectors’ value like an investment

I asked if non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were also a fad rather than a bubble.

Yeah, fad is a better term but it’s not as unique. People would imagine if we ask them that the 1929 Crash was all over in one day. It fell on Oct. 28 and then came almost all the way up by 1930 and then went down by 1932. 

But the narrative emphasizes the all-or-nothing crash. We learned it wasn’t the case with Bitcoin, it’s on its third-wave, like disease epidemics that go in waves.

After a year of watching charts of epidemics in different countries, comparing R-0 rates, cases, vaccinations, excess deaths and all the rest, and applying moving averages to sinister lines snaking across graphs, maybe we should now use our new-found familiarity with epidemiology to give us a new mental model for how markets work, and how they become overpriced. 

Epidemics are, as we all now understand, an intensely social phenomenon, born of the way in which we interact with each other, and sometimes thwarted by our choices not to interact with each other — just like market manias. 

As Shiller put it when he was asked about the possibility that exogenous shocks could interact with narratives generated within the market:

Epidemiologists speak of “co-epidemics,” like AIDS and tuberculosis, which reinforce each other. Epidemiologists also study narratives in some cases at least, in trying to understand the progress of disease. 

The economy was hurt by some Covid-19 narratives, and the economy affected mitigation efforts that limited the disease.

One can, however, seek out mutations, both in the virus and the narratives about it, that seem to be largely exogenous. 

No one would have predicted that Kanye West would suddenly help the Trump campaign and then switch to run for president! 

Milton Friedman called such events “quasi-controlled experiments” because they seem unconnected with any economic channel of causation.

Remarkably, the first chapter of the book, published in 2019 before most of us had any reason to have heard of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is full of the language of epidemics, mutations and contagions. 

So when I asked if he preferred the concept of an epidemic to a bubble, the reply was clear. Even the Romans, who had a stock market, used epidemic analogies for it:

Yes, “epidemic” would be better than “bubble.” In Ancient Rome, they referred to “contagio,” or contagion. Their word for meme in Latin was “rumor.” They were aware of contagion and meme.

So if we are now using the words “epidemic” or “fad” rather than bubble, does that help? 

Meme stocks at present are a fad, and it’s certainly possible to claim that there is an epidemic of enthusiasm in the stock market as money pours in. Both of which speak to the social element of markets. 

The environmental, social and governance, or ESG, phenomenon is another example of a narrative that has mutated more than once; once known as ethical investing, it morphed into socially responsible investing, or SRI, and then came back as ESG. 

Much criticized, there is something about the ESG narrative, as with bitcoin, that is genuinely appealing, and that people truly want to believe.

Asked if a fad like bitcoin could become an asset class, Shiller pointed out that there is a precedent:

It’s definitely possible, how did we arrive at the gold standard? Gold is this relatively useless metal, mentioned something like 300 times in the Bible. 

You can have both long-term and short-term contagions, the contagious idea that gold has value has been going around for thousands of years.

To reiterate, the word “bubble” implies a phenomenon supported by nothing but air that can only burst. That’s a fitting description for a Ponzi scheme, or any deliberate fraud. 

It is also an apt word to capture what the economist Hyman Minsky called the “Ponzi finance” stage of speculative excess, when people are buying into an asset solely because they believe someone will pay them more for it, rather than because they believe in its ultimate worth. 

Thus many “me too” dot-com stocks behaved just like Ponzi schemes back in 1999 and 2000, even though their backers were honest and sincerely believed they had a business model that would make money.

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”- Malcolm Gladwell

“The threat of a third wave in Africa is real and rising,” Moeti said.

The African Region reported just under 66 000 new cases, a 25% increase compared to the previous week, and over 1100 new deaths, a number similar to that of the previous week. 

The region reported an increase in weekly case incidence by over 20% for a second consecutive week, while death incidence increased for a third consecutively, though by a lower rate. 

The highest numbers of new cases were reported from 

South Africa (32 421 new cases; a 22% increase)

Uganda (5745 new cases; a 137% increase)

Zambia (4789 new cases a 191% increase).

DR Congo & Namibia at peak

Uganda 99% of peak

Eritrea 94%

Liberia 93% 

Several crucial meetings today to press Govt of #Ethiopia to unblock aid and end conflict.

Conclusions

This could prove highly problematical 

The added expenditure is fueled by Kenyatta’s need to continue investing in expressways, ports and railways as he nears the end of his second term in office next year.