Category Archives: History

City on Fire

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On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a fire below turned into an explosion that produced a mushroom cloud reminiscent of an atomic blast. The Texas City waterfront was also home to chemical plants, and storage facilities for numerous petrochemical products. Many of these also caught fire and exploded in part. Several hundred people died; the exact total is unknown because of the completeness of the destruction at the explosion’s center.
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One Hour, Four Minutes and Ninety Years Ago

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The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.

Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.

Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still difficult to fathom. On the columns of the memorial at Thiepval are carved the names of more than 70,000 Allied soldiers who fell in the area between July and November 1916, and who have no known grave. I was pointed to the photo by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose excellent posts on successive Armistice Days are moving, full of informative links and followed by astute commentary.

Though the events themselves are passing from living memory, the world shaped by the war is still all around us.

Update: Two more from TNH, 2002 and 2008.

Really Sick Buildings

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The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin

The bell, Olympiastadion, Berlin

An artefact is an ideology made manifest. The bell in this picture is the one made for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, installed in the bell tower you can see behind it, brought crashing down when the damaged tower was demolished shortly after the second world war, repaired, and eventually rededicated as a monument “against war and violence”. But it’s not only that.

The bell was forged by the Gussstahlfabrik in Bochum, the heart of the Krupp steelworks, and the plant which made the Prussian and German armies’ gun barrels. Its owners and top managers were a crucial influence in German politics, from the turn away from Bismarckian conservatism in the 1890s all the way to 1933. It was there that the revolutionary centrifugal casting process – spinning molten steel from a tube turning at thousands of RPM outwards like candy floss – was invented in the 1930s, that made the Nazi army’s 88mm long-range antitank guns. Ordering the bell from them was political architecture in many ways – not only did it please the heavy industry lobby, it explicitly reminded everyone of the real sources of the state power the whole master plan was meant to celebrate. The bell tower itself grows out of a war monument; but the bell grew out of the military-industrial complex.

Even its later history is telling. Despite the RAF bombing, which damaged the structure, it was still standing when the Olympic stadium was taken over by the British army, just as the bombers could never really finish off the steelworks that made it. The British blew it up for fear it would fall down unpredictably. Later, in the 1960s, it was restored – by none other than Werner March, the original architect of the project. No wonder people worried about faschisticher Kontinuitat. The bell itself was then, rather uneasily, plonked in its current position with its new and vaguely glib, but undeniably well-meaning mission; it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s been a lot like Germany.

Strangely enough, the Reichssportfeld is the only stone building that scares me. All my associations for it are wrong; I’m used to the stuff as a material which weathers, grows moss, turns black with industrial smoke, gets sandblasted back to its original colour by ambitious mayors. Although the stadium is limestone, like a Yorkshire hill, it’s still terrifyingly perfect.

Not much light

Not much light

Barack O’Bama

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Apparently a great-great-great grandfather of his came from Ireland, and at least one visitor reports that this is all the rage right now.

From the chorus: “O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara/There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.” The verses are pretty funny, too.

We’re only making plans for Nigel

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Via Crooked Timber, French Politics has interesting things to say about the Sarkofund:

In France it’s hardly unprecedented for major capital spending to be directed by the state, whether under the Commissariat au Plan, through state-controlled or -influenced enterprises, or directly by the Ministry of Finance. Sarkozy always danced nimbly between the neoliberal and state-capitalist camps. If the last two decades were the neoliberal decades, the coming two are likely to consecrate the hegemony of state capitalism. Sarkozy has been quicker than most to draw that conclusion and try to get ahead of the tsunami.

In a sense, there have been two really interesting consequences of the crisis, one short- and one long-term. The short-term one is that the vast quantity of risk transferred into the shadow banking sector…well, was it?

What we do know is that a hell of a lot of risk was transferred off the banking system’s books, into the hedge funds, into SIVs, and through securitisation. However, we also now know that the banking system itself was a counterparty to much of this; the proprietary trading desks and fund management arms consumed quite a lot of the paper the investment banking groups produced from the loans the retail mortgage lending ones originated. I wouldn’t be very surprised if a bank turns up holding some hundreds of millions of its own mortgage securities that its mortgage arm thought were safely off the books. Let’s just say that the risks were moved into the twilight zone, where they didn’t officially appear on anyone’s books – rather like some of Enron’s special purpose vehicles, come to think of it.

Now, as the risks turn out to be real and greater than anyone wished to believe, this stuff is being brought back on the banking sector’s balance sheets. As human nature would suggest, of course, the stuff transferred into the Zone was preferentially the riskiest stuff, so this process is extremely painful and capital-sapping. So the financial sector’s fundamental role – intermediating the allocation of capital – is going to be paralysed for a while to come, as the Mortgage Pig makes its way through the pecuniary python.

The other, longer-term issue, is that the financial system’s validity in assessing risk and allocating capital is itself in question. Capital was more abundant than ever before, as were liquidity and demand; and the system misallocated it spectacularly, diverting a great river of money, the savings of all the world’s industrial exporters, into the single purpose of inflating housing markets in certain districts of California and Ohio. This function has to be carried out by somebody, and just as for some time the Eurozone’s wholesale lending market has been replaced by operations at the European Central Bank, perhaps a large fraction of the industrial capital market will be replaced by….what? It seems unlikely that it can all be state portfolio investment, but given the combination of plunging activity and the incredible appetite for treasury bonds, a hell of a lot will be.

One for the economists among us

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Thought this article made for interesting reading:

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

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A Moment of Blatant Self-Regard

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Five years, one month and one day ago, A Fistful of Euros went live with its first posts.

Thanks to David, for getting the ball rolling and keeping it rolling; thanks to Tobias for keeping the back end running and the front end looking good; thanks to all of the writers; thanks to the commenters, for keeping us on our toes; thanks to the advertisers for keeping this little venture self-financing; thanks to the politicians and other public types for giving us such rich material to work with; and thanks to the readers, hope that you keep coming back for more.