Our teenagers’ vampires might end up sucking our baby-boomer blood

Sir, Ms Gillian Tett commenting on the books current young read, like those with vampires, writes: “teenagers now face a world where boundaries are blurred… lines between childhood and adulthood, good and evil, friend and for, male or female are no longer clear cut”, “Teenage books with added bite” August 10.

That it is indeed scary stuff. Not so much because of boundaries being blurred, but for the fact that since humans cannot travel through life without some kind of boundaries, we are not really clear about what the new boundaries might look like… perhaps books on vampires going after baby-boomers’ blood will hit the charts soon?

But when we on the opposite side of the paper also find Christopher Caldwell having us pray not to fall in hands of a justice which allows “guilty rich people buying their way out of convictions and innocent rich people being shaken down by zealous prosecutors”, something for which we clearly must share somehow some blame for… we also know that such sucking our baby-boomer blood would not be totally undeserved, “Ecclestone’s cash tarnishes the court that sets him free”.

Listen graduates, “plastics” is long passé… now it is “bank regulations”

Sir reading Christopher Caldwell’s “The Volcker rule is a gift to banks and excludes the rest” December 14, it is easy to see whey instead of recommending “plastics” as a future to a graduate, any person with good intentions would now easily tell him “bank regulations”.

And if we already gasp at the 828 pages of the Dodd-Frank Act, we should not forget that this is without making one single reference to the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, and to the Basel Accord to which the US is a signatory.

If this regulatory frenzy is not digging us deeper in the hole we’re in, I do not know what is.

Resentment is indeed a dangerous sentiment… it not only blinds.

Sir, I cannot for my world understand how Christopher Caldwell can find “Gangman Style” to be more an expression of South Korean culture than of US culture, nor do I understand what myth of US cultural genius he sees debunked, nor what he finds so “stylishly” and not “dumbing down” about “Gangman”, “Gangman stylishly debunks myth of US cultural genius” December 29 2012. 

But no doubt Caldwell is correct when writing about how the US is often resented, as his article is in itself an absolutely perfect example of that, since how else can one otherwise explain an argument such as “iTunes is an American invention” which “magnifies US cultural advantages”. 

And where does Caldwell get that the “Americans think they are better at making popular culture than other people”? I have never really seen Americans making an effort to produce popular culture for other people, but only that other people, mesmerized with American culture or perhaps with what they perceive as the American lack of culture, often soak up more of American cultural productions than they perhaps should… but that is not America’s fault.

Bank regulators needed no new technology to turn the tables against bankers and professors… chutzpah and hubris sufficed

Sir, Christopher Caldwell in “When technology turns the tables against the punters” October 13 refers to Professor Joseph Stiglitz arguing in “The Price of Inequality” “that advances in economic and behavioral psychology have improved the possibilities for politicians and pundits to manipulate the public”.

I am not sure those advances were needed to do that. For instance bank regulators managed, as if they were some top notch risk managers for the world, using just a lot of chutzpah spiced with hubris, to set the risk weights which determined the capital requirements of the banks based on perceived risk, and turn the tables against bankers and Nobel Prize winning professors alike.

Could we have avoided the crisis if Mandelbrot had gone to Basel?

Sir Christopher Caldwell writes how the recently deceased Benoit Mandelbrot “zeroed in on the besetting flaw [with financial] models that understated risk” and references The (Mis)behaviour of Markets a book that Mandelbrot co-authored with Richard L. Hudson in 2004, “Mandelbrot tips of the market”, October 23.

I do not have sufficient memory to recall it but it is very possible that it was the referenced book that, in October 2004, as an Executive Director of the World Bank, made me make a formal written statement that contained: “We believe that much of the world’s financial markets are currently being dangerously overstretched through an exaggerated reliance on intrinsically weak financial models that are based on very short series of statistical evidence and very doubtful volatility assumptions.”

The world could have benefitted incredibly from ascertaining the presence of skeptics like Mandelbrot at the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision. I am absolutely sure he would have been horrified at what its members were up to managing risks with truly faulty models and conceptions of the reality and tried his utmost to stop their regulatory nonsense in time.

But since even after its evident failure, the Basel Committee is not going back on anything, but is instead forging ahead and scaling it up, as if nothing has happened, now even wanting to tackle cyclicality and systemic risk, it is most likely that Mandelbrot would not have been heard at all by the self-sufficient scheming high-priests of the regulatory establishment.

Who is guilty of having seeded expectations of climate change reparations?

Sir Christopher Caldwell is right in denouncing that “many of the developing world’s representatives have come to Copenhagen seeking reparations” Climate change, the great leveler”, December 12. What we must realize though is that these representatives did not develop these expectations on their own but that these were certainly seeded there by some reparation intermediaries or vultures. There is no doubt that we should try to eliminate poverty in the world but we must have clarity in what are the prime objectives with respect to our earth-environment.

It would be an interesting challenge for any journalist to investigate the origin of the idea to open up the flank of wealth redistribution in the environmental battle. It should be possible to do so and it would also be very valuable for all to do so, especially for those now bearing groundless expectations and who now are bound to be disappointed.

The Supreme Court should order Obama to stop quitting smoking

Sir I could not agree more with the general tone of Christopher Caldwell’s “No smoke without ire” December 27.

I was a smoker and it took me years to break my habit, or at least not give in to it more, but during my quitting time of about two years, and to the extent that I was unable to write any cohesive ideas on paper, I was an impaired person.

In this respect to think of the president of the most powerful country of the world, in these extremely difficult times, impairing himself just to set an example is about the worst example he could give his country.

Maybe the Supreme Court in exercising their checks and balances should order Obama to smoke a number of cigarettes a day while his presidency last. Or is this an issue for Congress?

Obama will be risking his life. In the line of duty? As a Commander in Chief? You’ve got to be joking!

There are indeed many financial issues that are up for long overdue reviews

Sir Christopher Caldwell in “Time for some morality trades” December 20, discusses whether the whole financial system should be up for a moral review. If so may I suggest we start by looking into the whole concept of placing borrowers in special high-interest rates corrals, with the help of tools that are not overly transparent, and then pushing the corralled into an impoverishing anticipation of consumption, all in order to make a profit from financial intermediation. From a societal point of view, without even discussing morality, driving an unnecessary wedge between people does not seem the smartest thing to do.

By coincidence in the same issue Dr. Milford Bateman in “Microfinance’s ‘iron law’ – local economies reduced to poverty” suggest that those lending money for marginal and most often informal entrepreneurial activities are digging the poor deeper in the hole they’re in, since those resources could have been used to finance some much better development ladders. Indeed this possibility and that for the development community must sound as a real shocker, also qualifies the microfinance sector for an urgent moral and practical review.

Financial traffic jams are also caused by financial Global Positioning System

Sir we are grateful to Christopher Caldwell for drawing our attention to "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt, "Caught in the human traffic", August 23. From what we see that book should urgently be made obligatory reading to all bank regulators in Basel, so that they learn what happens when you impose credit rating agencies as the Global Positioning System supposed to direct the financial flows of the world.

That "Predictions about traffic become 'self-destroying'" is exactly what lies behind that systemic risk that brought us the subprime mess. They should have known it!

"Once everyone gets the same reliable real-time information about traffic everyone mobs the same route" questions the whole underpinnings of our current bank regulations, namely that you are able to measure risks without affecting the risks.

When the book quotes German physicist Michael Schreckenberg "telling them the whole truth is not the best way" we begin to understand Angela Merkel's request for a purely European credit rating agency.

Would shorting England be acceptable?

Sir Christopher Caldwell concludes his “Why Kerviel is so unsettling” February 9, saying “The problem is not the rise of the super-empowered individual. It is that the super-empowered individual tends more and more to be an amoral individual.” He is right of course but how did we get here?

We have currently a system that allows for the creation of all kinds of amoral vested interests…like making profits out of an increased mortgage default rate, something not much different from having allowed Englishman to short England and created a group of nationals with a transparent and legal vested interest in Hitler winning the war.

Also when Caldwell refers to “What is striking here is the contrast between the mediocrity of the trader and the scale of the catastrophe” this is really peanuts when compared to the contrast between the super-sophistication of the financial wizards and the credit rating experts and the scale of our current catastrophe.

Unsettling indeed is how we settle to focus on Kerviel as our convenient scapegoat. Hang Kerviel we’re innocent!

We must help people to go where they feel they belong… alive

Sir Christopher Caldwell in “Rioters vs state in a test of will” December 1, quotes the Socialist leader Malek Boutih saying “they are whole populations here that don’t feel they belong to this country” and informs that the bodies of the dead boys “will be flown to Morocco and Senegal, respectively, for burial”, which leaves us all with the question of why could they not have been flown there alive?

The poor in developing countries frequently face no other choice than to emigrate to richer countries in order to survive physically but many alienated and frustrated citizens of developed countries do not really have the choice to emigrate somewhere else in order to survive emotionally, and perhaps they should have.

For instance if these dead boys had had the option of selling whatever French citizen’s rights they had to a foreigner truly interested in coming to France and with that money could have financed their resettlement to Morocco or Senegal perhaps we could have solved the problems on two fronts.

Clearly it is not as easy as that but the world needs to find new and different ways to fight violence originated from deep sentiments of alienation with other means than violence.

Christopher Caldwell risks being sent to Speaker’s Corner.

Sir, Christopher Caldwell’s “Healthcare as horror movie”, July 7, where he discusses Michael Moore’s latest film Sicko dares to touch upon something that is clearly more sickening than what a truly horrific healthcare system could be, namely the big business present in feeding the insatiable and bias craving radical extreme misconceptions with even more bias so as to allow them to be even more extreme and hungry.

This reinforcement of beliefs business which has created and promoted stories such as the 9-11 incidents having being carried out by the US government itself; or the migrants workers plotting to assassin, rape and take over countries; and so many other lunacies, are slowly leading us into neo dark ages characterized not by the lack of information but by a massive overload of it, and that has us all screening in terms of what best tickles our preconceptions. Now, why do I qualify Caldwell’s comments as daring?

In 1872, the British Parliament decreed Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park of London as a place reserved for free expression, and initially it attracted all those extremists who, although qualifying as nuts, still had the right to vent their opinions. Lately though, we have all witnessed how the original Speaker’s Corner speakers moved into Speaker’s Studios and now radicalism, anarchy, or fundamentalism is voiced on prime-time television. All of us others, modest low-key analyzers or rational in-betweens, have to settle gratefully for slots in after-midnight cable television, dubiously sponsored by the most traditional professional services.

As rationality could soon be viewed as symptomatic of a modern nut, we might all have to line up at Speaker’s Corner… and so we’ll see you there Christopher Caldwell.

The ‛rights of children’ is anything but a juvenile concept.

Sir, if the average life length of a person in UK were 80 and our democracies had anything to do with representation of interests, as in companies, then a new born should have 80 votes, a middle age 56 year old like me 24 votes and someone over eighty should count his blessings if he is allowed to keep his single vote. Of course the previous is clearly just an exaggeration, but it serves to argue in favor of the one-child-one-vote concept, in which the votes of the children are to be exercised by their mother, father or older siblings.

I say this loudly protesting the title of grownup Christopher Caldwell’s “Why the ‛right of the children’ is a juvenile concept”, February 17 and some of it contents, among it his authoritarian conclusion that “Rights over to children will either belong to parents or to the state”.

Sir, with many of our current problems such as the climate change begging for longer perspectives than next quarter’s results, is it not high time that the children, who are the ones who could really have to live in the heat, should have their interests better represented in our societies? Also, the democracies that are now turning into baby-boomer dictatorships, it could truly behoove them to allow their young to have more say, before they all in frustration decide to carry out a coup and thereafter, hopefully politely, show their elders the way to the nearest “ättestupa”, those cliffs from were supposedly the Vikings threw themselves when they became burdens to the society.

Two nightmarish possibilities

Sir, Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant “Youth and war, a deadly duo”, January 6, based on the probably even more brilliant book Söhne und Weltmacht by Orell Füssli, and that now has me brushing up on my 35year´s never more spoken and originally bad German, brings me two visions. The first is about a clash-of-generations pitting the baby boomers and other older people all over the world, wielding their wealth and political power, against hoards of desperate barehanded youths, and the other, of a big global arena were a mass of old Neroes are enjoying the spectacle of young gladiators killing each other. Let us pray we are wise enough to spare ourselves either nightmare.

Caldwell Füssli Söhne Weltmach youth

Thankfully the victims in Darfur do not read FT

Any poor victim of Darfur’s genocide like killings who might have invested his last few hopes in someone coming from abroad to save him, would have collapsed in despair had he read Christopher Caldwell’s “It is best to stay out of Darfur”, December 16. Of course we must agree with Caldwell that no country should be expected or even have a carte blanche to enter anywhere for anything but, if the world cannot find an expeditious way of taking care of the worst kinds of political hooliganism, then it will stand precious little chance of solving the many other challenges that are increasingly posed by a globalizing world. And so Mr Caldwell do you really not believe that your XXI century country with 37.600 per capita GNI, together with some others likeminded, do not have in them the capability of designing an effective plan of what to do in the XIX century 640 per capita GNI Darfur? If no, then, if it is not too late, may I humbly suggest that it is also best for you to stay out from bringing new children into this world.

Christopher Caldwell Darfur genocide