Weekend Edition.

An unparalleled map of the night sky.

“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

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1. Gillian Tett:

(T)he story of the last two decades is that everything that wasn't on the balance sheet or in the model is what's really blown up everyone's forecasts and become increasingly important.

So what we're seeing now, in my view, is the fifth big swing in the intellectual zeitgeist since 1900. And by that, I mean that up until 1914, you had imperialism. imperialist free market capitalism in the world. Then, between the wars, you had protectionist, populist, and nationalist visions of the economy. Then, after World War II, you essentially had Keynesianism, the idea that the state could jump in and direct things for the good of all. And that was sort of international Keynesianism. Then you had the neoliberal age, starting in the 1980s.

And now you've got a swing of the pendulum back towards effectively geoeconomics: the world's woken up and discovered what they always knew back in the 1920s. And they also sort of knew back in the Keynesian period, which is that power matters; politics matters.

[T]he period of time that we all grew up with when free market ideals were taken for granted is actually a historical aberration—if you look across societies and most points of history, it's not the case that the world we're moving into now is weird. We were the weird ones for the last 40 years. (Source: Odd Lots/bloomberg.com, via paulkedrosky.com)

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2. The United States has entered Israel’s war against Iran. American warplanes dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran, bringing the U.S. military directly into the war after days of uncertainty about whether President Trump would intervene. “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” Mr. Trump said in an address to the nation from the White House on Saturday night. Mr. Trump said American bombers had hit Iran’s two major uranium enrichment centers: the mountain facility at Fordo and a larger enrichment plant at Natanz, which Israel had struck several days ago with smaller weapons. A third site near the ancient city of Isfahan where Iran is believed to keep near-bomb-grade uranium was also bombed, he said. He also threatened more action against Iran if it did not return to diplomatic efforts. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” Mr. Trump said in an address to the nation from the White House on Saturday night. “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” (Source: nytimes.com)

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