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“I’ve got a house that’s a show place/still I cant get no place with you” Readers may know the novels of Louis Begley Jr or the stories of John Cheever which portray lost worlds, times now as remote as those of Musil, when well-dressed men managed
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“Whirl is king” — McGuane The World Bank has published a Venezuela reconstruction report in record time[1]. It is a valuable report. The Bank’s team deserves credit, as do the official, scientific, and civil society organizations who contributed. The report nonetheless suffers from several fatal weaknesses, as I will
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Seventeen months ago, I argued [1] that the Trump regime would let tariffs, spending cuts, and changes in institutions, regulations, and laws, as planned under Project 2025, fall wherever they happened. The regime’s planners gave little initial thought to distributional effects, probably assuming that their cultural base was strong
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2026-07-04 Introduction Commentary is growing on the legal, procedural, and political aspects of restructuring Venezuela’s external debt1. That commentary works in something of an artistic void on the economic aspects, of which much is said and little is known. The FT reports (June 24, 2026) estimates of
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On the false philanthropy of the AI barons
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Don’t say I never warned you
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I thought that Mieko Nishimizu had retired the lifetime award for “highest ratio of vapid ambition to genuine accomplishment in an international organization” but she must accept second place (for now; this is a race in which the competition will always be fierce). Ajay Banga, who is, for the moment,
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The featured speakers for the World Bank’s 2026 Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) are like a quiz for third-graders … “Which of the four is not like the other ?” We see the distinguished World Bank Chief Economist, a Nobel winner, a likely Nobel winner, and a climate
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How will this play down the street ?
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The Washington Post’s economic views have tended to follow neoliberal orthodoxy in the manner of Goldilocks, seeking a center that would attract serious readers without greatly disturbing the ignorance of the less serious ones. In the case of Argentina a 2018 editorial warned that country might be in “deep
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Money doesn’t talk, it swears – a Nobel Laureate
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“In the end, there is no one who will drink with you to the bottom of the bowl” — Mailer