Big Girl’s Blouse

This is my (loose) translation of a poem written by Vladimir Mayakovsky almost 100 years ago. The original is underneath.

I’ve decided to sew myself black pantaloons
from the velvet of my voice; a yellow shirt
out of sunset. Like Don Juan, on the world's
main drag I'll strut my stuff and flirt.


And going to pot, let the earth exclaim:
“But you'll ravish the verdant spring!”
I'll fling at the sun: “But it's good to loaf
on the tarmac”—me with an insolent grin.

O, it isn’t because the sky is blue
or the world is my love in this festive clean
that I give you poems as bright as “tra-la-la”,
or like toothpicks, essential and keen.

So, girls who would call me brother
and girls who my flesh would arouse—
drench me, a poet, with smiles and I’ll sew them
with flowers onto my big girl’s blouse!

Кофта фата
Я сошью себе черные штаны
из бархата голоса моего.
Жёлтую кофту из трёх аршин заката.
По Невскому мира, по лощёным полосам его,
профланирую шагом Дон-Жуана и фата.

Пусть земля кричит, в покое обабившись:
"Ты зелёные вёсны идёшь насиловать!"
Я брошу солнцу, нагло осклабившись:
"На глади асфальта мне хорошо грассировать!"

Не потому ли, что небо голубо,
а земля мне любовница в этой праздничной чистке,
я дарю вам стихи, весёлые, как би-ба-бо
и острые и нужные, как зубочистки!

Женщины, любящие моё мясо, и эта
девушка, смотрящая на меня, как на брата,
закидайте улыбками меня, поэта,-
я цветами нашью их мне на кофту фата!

(1914)

The Alligator Club

Chapter 12

The Alligator Club was tucked away to the side of a double-helix stairway that wound up through the multiple floors of the Palace of Culture. When Galkin arrived at the bar, two little girls in blue leotards and pink leggings were standing on tiptoes ahead of him; bunking off a gymnastics class, they were buying with their attendance money a tasty snack of crisps, coconut sweets, fizzy drinks.
Shapiro was sitting at the other end of the bar, peering out of a large window into Lenin Square. He was nibbling on a few thin shreds of dried calamari laid out on a saucer and was most of the way through a beer.
As the children counted out their precious coins, Osip waited his turn. When the girls left, skipping, pleased with their haul, he ordered a couple of bottles of Obolon Light lager from behind a half-sized, glass-doored fridge.
“Arkasha,” said Osip, approaching his associate along a short central aisle. Placing the cool, perspiring bottles down on the tabletop, he pulled up a chair and sat down. “How’s things?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain,” said Shapiro, grinning. “Small victories!" he said, raising his glass half-heartedly.
“Sorry I’m a late,” said Galkin, “there was some paperwork.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady. “To life,” he said, and they clinked together the fresh bottles of beer. Behind them, on a TV mounted against a yellow wall above the stencilled outline of a blue palm tree, a sports broadcaster was reading the football scores. Wild-eyed, Arkady leaned on his elbows over the table, took a few swift sips as he squirmed uneasily in his chair. “Enjoy yourself while you can,” he said, “you can’t take it with you when you go.” Then he offered the investigator a cigarette from a depleted carton.
“Not for me,” said the officer.
“Can't tempt you, then? Good for you. Never look back, that’s my motto. But with me, if you live, you live. O, and, by the way, how’s the wife?”

Both men’s spouses were fine. Vita Ivanova, Osip’s second wife, was fine—still at the hospital, working long hours. They seemed to cross paths less and less, now that the boys were growing up. And Katya Ramizovna, Arkady’s third wife, was fine—still running the second-hand clothes shop he'd bought her, and which she liked to call a “boutique”. But for some reason the doctor had put her back on tranquilisers.
Osip weighed up his companion for a moment. What age was he? He guessed that he was in his mid-30s. He had on what must once have been a good grey woollen suit, but it was too loose about the shoulders, as if he was wasting away inside it. When he smiled, which was often, faint wrinkles appeared in concentric half-circles on his cheeks, at the corners of his mouth, surrounding everything he said in multiple brackets, asides within asides.

Clutching their beers the two men peered out into the square, which was bright as a desert, each finding one of those rare, separate moments of serenity, or perhaps its was just easeful oblivion, non-consciousness. At the other end of the room the stocky barman, slouched on a stool, was flipping a matchbox over and over on the wooden bar top. “I wish he’d stop that,” said Shapiro, “it’s getting tiresome.” Along Heroes’ Alley, the outlines of youthful soldiers’ faces lined the path on a series of small terracotta tablets, above their dates, and there were intermittent sprigs of wilting daffodils dug into the flowerbeds. In the metallic basin of the desiccated fountain, a pigeon hopped, hot-toed, over the scorching tin.

AD-AS & IS-LM-BoP 2

The money market
As with the analysis of any other kind of market, that of the money market focuses on theories of the main factors affecting (money) demand and (money) supply, and on the self-correcting chain of economic adjustments that could be set off when these are out of balance. As the supply of money is often taken to be more of a practical, institutional policy question of monetary control, bound up with the money-creating function of modern banking systems, the theory of money markets tends to focus more on the issue of money demand.

Why have money? To buy things or "just in case"
The theory of money demand comes down to this: since one of the main reasons for having money is to carry out transactions (ie to pay for things), when the volume of activity in the economy rises, and/or the prices of goods and services rise, a larger sum of money will be needed to accommodate this. That is, the transactions demand for money is a positive function of changes in economic income (like consumption in the goods market) and of the price level. This is only one source of monetary demand, however—money conceived as the oil that keeps running smoothly the process of purchasing production so that production itself can continue.

Why have money? For safety
A second source, which is a bit more complex to grasp, sees money as the asset that wealth-holders will favour to avoid capital losses when they anticipate changes in interest rates. Bonds—which promise to pay a specified sum of money at regular intervals—stand in for "all other kinds of assets except money", such as the ownership of property, or of shares in firms. Thus, money is conceived one of the two possible assets in which wealth can be held. This ingenious step greatly simplifies the analysis of the financial sector for the purposes of assessing the likely outcomes of real-world economic policies.
Bonds are sold by companies and governments to raise finance for investment projects. They come with a "face value" (the capital value) and a coupon (the interest rate, or return on the capital value), and can be sold on by the original purchaser to raise cash. For example, a bond with a face value of $100 and an annual coupon of 10% would bring to its owner an income of $10 per year. But if the market interest rises above 10%, a bond with a coupon of 10% will be worth less than its face value of $100. On the other hand, if the market interest rate falls below 10%, a bond with a coupon of 10% will be worth more than its face value of $100. Thus, bond prices move in the opposite direction to interest rates. From this point of view, the advantage of keeping your wealth in money is that its value is certain, uninfluenced by changes in interest rates, even if it is not earning its holder any additional income. In contrast, bonds come with a definite income stream attached—as indicated by the face value and coupon—but are more risky, since the market interest rate could change unfavourably, inflicting a capital loss.
To understand what's supposed to be going on, a very important distinction must be made between what happens on average in the money market when interest rates are expected to change and when they actually change. As more wealth-holders expect interest rates to rise (perhaps because inflation is starting to rise too rapidly and the government is signaling its intention to take remedial measures), more of them will begin to sell their bonds, forgoing the return in order to avoid a capital loss implied by a fall in bond prices. The selling of bonds implies an increasing the demand for money. However, as the market interest rate actually rises, creeping further above the norm for more people, larger numbers of wealth-holders will be tempted to switch back to bonds by the prospect of holding an interest-bearing asset and of making a capital gain. The movement back into bonds implies a corresponding reduction in the demand for money. This is the same as saying that speculative demand for money is a negative function of interest rate changes (like investment in the goods market).
Because people are thought to be concerned about the quantity of goods and services they can obtain for their money, rather than merely the volume of cash they hold, money demand is always conceived of as a wish for real money balances. In contrast, money supply is assumed initially to be a nominal variable, and hence is affected by changes in the prices level: if average prices rise and the nominal money supply stays fixed, its real value—the quantity of goods and services that it can command—falls. Additionally, the money supply is one of the policy variables that governments and central banks use to influence interest rates, and hence other key macroeconomic indicators, such as output, employment and inflation.

Balance and imbalance
In a money market in which the price level and income are fixed—two assumptions that can hold only for a short time—any adjustment because of a mismatch in money supply and money demand takes place by means of changes in the composition of speculative money holdings in response to changes in interest rates. If the interest rate is too low to equate the two, there is an excess demand for money and an excess supply of bonds, meaning that some wealth-holders want to convert bonds into money and some hold back from buying bonds. The glut of bonds pushes their price down and interest rates go up.

Loosening the two assumptions on prices and income—as we move the frame of reference to a slightly longer time period—a rise in prices, taken on its own, will reduce the real money supply, pushing up the interest rate, whereas a fall in prices will increases the real money supply, bringing interest rates down.
A factor that could shift the demand for money is a change in economic income, implying that there are different possible combinations of national income and interest rates in which the money market is in equilibrium. And in fact, this how, on the basis of this outline of the workings of the money market, we construct of the LM curve.

Pulling the rug

More notes from May 2009

The possible impact of the global economic crisis on political instability in Central Asia and the Transaucasus
The level of trust in a range of political institutions across the counties of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was low even before the onset of the ongoing global financial and economic crisis, but it will make the situation worse.
In broad terms, the consequences of the crisis have been transmitted to the countries of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus through the impact of the financial meltdown and fall in hydrocarbon prices on the region's leading economies. For many former Soviet countries, the consequent fall in trade, remittances and investment inflows has already started to be felt, although not evenly, in terms of declining incomes and rising unemployment—two factors that tend to presage outbreaks of social and political unrest. However, economic stress on its own would not usually be enough to cause an outbreak of unrest. Rather, it is the interaction of economic stress with specific political and social factors already in place that is crucial.

Much in common
The states of Central Asia, the Transcaucasus and Russia share a number of these underlying factors associated with political upheaval. For instance, all of them, except Russia, have had a limited existence as independent states, all emerging as national entities only with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In many, low levels of public trust hinder the effectiveness of political and governance systems, all of which are also mired by high levels of corruption. Finally, all of them, except Russia and Kazakhstan, are surrounded by countries that are also prone to the structural causes of unrest. This is the so called bad neighbourhood effect, which is one of the main causative factors behind political stability, according to the political science literature.

Most exposed
Those states most at risk because of pre-existing structural weaknesses—the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Georgia—share a number of relevant traits in common. The Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan exhibit a high degree of ethic fragmentation; for example, conflicts between the ethnic Kyrgyz majority and the Uzbek minority, which is concentrated in the south of the country, have been a persistent source of political tension in the Kyrgyz Republic since independence. Tajikistan and Georgia have both experiences of at least two major episodes of political instability in the recent historical past. Tajikistan, for instance, suffered two bouts of all-out fighting in its five-year civil war of the 1990s, in which at least 50,000 people were killed (fuelled, among other things, by ethnic rivalries). For its part, not only has Georgia seen the outbreak of armed conflict as a part of it effort to bring its breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under control—most recently and disastrously in August 2008—but the existing political order has been overturned by force more than once. The first time was in the early 1990s, when the nationalist president, Zviad Gamsakurdia, was ousted in a coup. His successor, Eduard Shevardnadze, was kicked out in turn in a peaceful, large-scale social protest following a falsified election in the so-called Rose Revolution of November 2003. (Demonstrations in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, ongoing since April 2009 against the authoritarian drift of the current president, Mikheil Saakashvilli, have suggested to may observers that a similar pattern may be about to be repeated.)
Another important factor, shared by the Kyrgyz Republic and Georgia, is that they are held to be regimes of an intermediate type. That is, they benefit from neither the public consent necessary for the working of a consolidated democracy, nor the combination of institutions and resources for repression necessary to maintain wholly authoritarian rule. Additionally, Georgia's susceptibility to the underlying causes of unrest is greatly heightened by the combination of its intermediate regime type and a fractional polity (mainly reflecting the inability of the central authorities to exercise political control over the country's breakaway regions, which make up 10-15% of Georgia's territory). On the other hand, Georgia's better economic starting point puts it in a healthier position to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis than either Central Asian country. The likely impact the regional economic downturn on unemployment rates in the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan thus put them at highest potential exposure to political instability overall.

Look at the fine print
Finally, at the beginning of 2009, suffering electricity shortages and blackouts, facing factional fallouts within the ruling group, a unifying opposition and a looming economic downturn, the government of the Kyrgyz Republic began to look vulnerable to a financial crisis. However, a large aid package from Russia in February has since turned the situation around completely. This shows the importance of looking at detailed country case studies, in combination with quantitative comparative models, when assessing vulnerability to political unrest in specific cases.