The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

And, in Spanish only... The Socialists call on the citizenry to "defend themselves" against the government.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

If it were not for a little meeting in Paris later this week I'd probably be in Bamberg or Munich today, but I can wait.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Governments across Europe have lost power in the past two years as German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushes for austerity to prevent the euro area from breaking up.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will meet his Cabinet today to discuss a strategy for passing a budget that meets European Union targets. Early elections will probably be called after the Freedom Party withdrew its support for the minority government on April 21.

...

The Czech coalition broke up over Cabinet personnel decisions and trimming the deficit as Necas's 20-month-old administration prepares tax increases and a cut in spending on pensions to bring the fiscal gap to within the EU limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product next year. The fiscal goals have attracted investors into Czech bonds, pushing the government's borrowing costs to a record low.

This looks like a bombshell announcement to me (I'm not aware of the internal politics behind the announcement, but I'm presuming that Robert Darnton's fingerprints are all over it). Discuss.

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. ... The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. ...

The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $99 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would more than offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

Let me start by asking, what is your first association when somebody talks to you about 'the economy'? Is the image you get: factories working, supermarkets full of people, busy Wall St., or, what? For today's purpose, I would like you to think of the economic system, first, as a web of contracts, contracts and understandings among agents in the economy.

Now, this is a web of contracts where, any given day, some of them are fulfilled, expired, others are renewed, the web is constantly renewed. The problem is, in this renewal of the web of contracts, the whole web can develop instability. The instabilities come in different sizes, if you want. So, we have first, of course, just an individual isolated default. It's taken care of, the law takes care of it and so on, it happens all the time. Some promises are broken. But if some promise is broken in the web, there's at any given time a probability that that will cause somebody else to default. So, in a reasonably robust credit system these chains of defaults will be very short. But the web can develop into a state where one default will trigger an avalanche of defaults and those avalanches differ in size, taking down as it were bigger or smaller portions of the web.

You can think of some loose analogies of phenomena that have a similar dynamic structure, for example power grid blackouts may wipe out all the north eastern states or just a local community, or Per Bak's famous sandpiles. You may remember that mental experiment: you have sand running at a constant rate onto a pile and the pile keeps growing and at intervals, random intervals, you get avalanches in the pile and these differ in size and you have a given size distribution, and so on. So this is true of default avalanches in an economy as well, but a highly fragile economy, a Minsky-fragile system, has the possibility of crashing altogether.

One of the guests took me aside and told me that two musicians would be arriving at 8.30, as a birthday surprise. BH was somewhat nonplussed when Rhoslan turned up with his violin case, claiming to be a "friend of Michel" (Russian mafia hit man?). He claimed that five more musicians and a sound system were on the way. In the end, Sergei turned up with his guitar, they tuned up and struck up. They played a variety of styles, but the overall effect was a Django Rheinhart / Stéphane Grappelli thing. Ties and collars were loosened, and the rythm of drinking adjusted to that of the musicians (no ethnic stereotyping intended, but you all know what I mean).

At around 11, there was a knock on the door, I opened to a vaguely familiar face, so I pulled him inside and kissed him on both cheeks. As you do. It turned out to be the neighbour from upstairs, come to complain about the noise. He ended up staying till after midnight.

Not bad for a Monday night.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}