House of War

VoxEU launches a free book compiling all of its columns on the subprime crisis. Extensive in scope and filled with contributions from economists like Stephen G. Cecchetti, Willem Buiter, Charles Wyplosz and Marco Onado. A must read: The First Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century.

Essential macro forecasting from Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economonitor. Referencing a recent paper, Roubini predicts, and lists ten reasons for, the downfall of the Bretton Woods 2 system. Will the Bretton Woods 2 (BW2) Regime Collapse Like the Original Bretton Woods Regime Did? The Coming End Game of BW2.

From The Guardian, news of a secret World Bank report, according to which biofuels have pushed up global food prices by some 75%. The WSJ Environmental Capital blog puts this hard to believe figure in some kind of context, then demolishes it. Turns out that the “secret report” was nothing more than an unpublished exploratory working paper, which, due to the interest generated from The Guardian “leak”, will be published by the World Bank at the end of the week with a much more reasonable figure for biofuel influence.

Doug Noland of Prudent Bear — after his invaluable weekly “credit bubble bulletin” round up — explains in Starbucks, the “Core,” and Conventional Mortgages why the closures of 600 Starbucks coffee shops in the US is emblematic of the troubles facing corporations after the credit boom has bust and the era of easy money has come to an end.

Alan Greenspan on The Roots of the Mortgage Crisis in OpinionJournal, in which the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve lays out the case for the defense.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, advises that It’s time to abolish the CIA.

Noah Shactman writes solidly on the controversial Human Terrain Teams: Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan, Make Enemies at Home.

Paul Romer talks about growth, technology, human capital and the rise of China in a great EconTalk podcast.

Jacob Sullum has a wise article in reason about the dangers and difficulties of trying to interpret the actions of Muslims in light of the Koran.

The Times reports on new research by Professor Harpending of the University of Utah, which suggests that, “races have evolved away from each other over the past 10,000 years”.

Charles Krauthammer makes some good points in the Washington Post about the disturbing levels of ostensible religiosity required of the presidential candidates in the current campaign.

Paul Berman has written a long, almost book-length article on Tariq Ramadan, the French Islamist and Muslim intellectual, examining what he represents within his own current of so-called “salafi reformism” and what his widespread feting by liberal European intellectuals tells us about society today. It’s very much in the spirit of Terror and Liberalism and, as such, is not so much recommended reading as required. The article was published in The New Republic and is called The Islamist, the Journalist, and the defence of Liberalism.

The Observer, not normally a newspaper I rate very highly, published a brilliant and very brave article by Hassan Butt recently, My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror. Butt was, at one time, the spokesman for a proscribed British Islamist organisation, Al-Muhajiroun, an involved feature of what he terms the “British Jihadi Network”, and even, following his arrest under the Terrorism Act, a minor celebrity of Muslim extremism. Hassan has renounced his past positions and is using his platform to now call for an Islamic response to Islamist terror, specifically, one grounded in Islamic law.

In the July edition of Reason Magazine, Brink Lindsey has a new article, The Aquarians and the Evangelicals, which discusses the split in what he calls the “postwar liberal consensus” in American society. The split, which gave birth to the oppositional yet curiously complementary left/right political spectrum of today, severed the American polity into the socially liberal anti-capitalists, who enjoyed modern freedoms yet hated the engine of capital that generated them, and the fiscally conservative religious right, who protected the market economy yet despaired of the freedoms it created. Lindsey notes that,

On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.

Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser in the Multi-National Force - Iraq, Dave Kilcullen, has a very revealing and timely post at the Small Wars Journal Blog, Understanding Current Operations in Iraq. Kilcullen explains the rational behind the surge and the MNF’s strategy for defeating the insurgency. The strategy will not focus on chasing clandestine cells of jihadists around the desert, but will instead look to protect the Iraqi population and cutting off support (be it moral or logistical) for the terrorists. Despite the ever more shrill shouts of “failure” in the press, Kilcullen advises his readers to wait and see, because in fact the surge proper is only just starting. The activity of the previous months was merely the prepapration of forces. “This is the end of the beginning,” he writes. If you want to understand what the MNF is doing in Iraq at present, you really need to read this. Links to related commentary (Kilcullen is always worth discussing) here.