Ukraine’s current stalemate with Russia has frustrated many people, including the former’s military chief. A largely stymied counteroffensive this year gained little ground, especially as Ukraine still lacks certain technology that could help with meaningful breakthroughs. But one important aspect of the struggle against Russia has been surprisingly absent from the recent debate on how Ukraine can win.

I’m talking about the Russian economy—and the people who hold it together, like Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank of Russia. It’s tempting to say that Nabiullina is often overlooked because she is a woman, but then again, talented Nazi economist Hjalmar Schacht is not exactly the star of many documentaries, either. Economists may keep the wheels of a war machine greased, but because they’re not the people in snappy uniforms, it’s easier to disregard them.

As an economist, Nabiullina has a long track record of saving Russia from sanctions following Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014. Her decisions, which included inflation targeting, and, more specifically, floating the exchange rate, earned her fawning interviews with the International Monetary Fund even as her bosses continued to kill Ukrainians prior to the mass-scale 2022 invasion. She was furthermore praised as an effective communicator of Russian economic policy—thus helping prevent panic.

Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Russian sources rushed to tell Western journalists that Nabiullina tried to resign but was not allowed to do so by President Vladimir Putin. Gossip, as ever in Russia, resulted: as I heard the stories, Nabiullina had been blackmailed, people close to Putin terrorized her, they showed her pictures of her husband in bed with another woman in order to break her spirit, and so on.

A lot of the more salacious information was later deleted from gossip websites, which makes it seem more plausible. I found this exercise in PR very interesting, as it echoed the narrative of Schacht himself—whose defense at Nuremberg rested on his insistence that he was not powerful enough to stop Hitler, and that he furthermore was in touch with the resistance.

I don’t buy the narrative of a trapped and martyred Nabiullina. She has done her job too well for it to be reality. I spent the first year of Russia’s war analyzing tension between the Kremlin and the Central Bank—the Kremlin being where the blood-crazed fascists are, and the Central Bank being where the pragmatists who don’t want to see the Russian economy destroyed are—and there’s plenty of evidence that the Central Bank had room to sabotage the Russian war machine if it had chosen to do so.

A lot of that evidence was shown to me by anonymous sources who don’t want to get snatched by the Russian secret police, but you don’t need to be speaking to terrorized economic experts on a burner phone to see just how hard Nabiullina has fought to keep the ruble afloat. Her strategy has included bold rate hikes and constant communication with the Russian public, as she knows the cost of panic. As she executes her vision, Nabiullina suffers constant attacks from conservatives and religious extremists in Russian politics and media, but she has not let that deter her.

The struggle to keep the ruble afloat is one that the Central Bank will likely lose, but not fast enough. Innocent Ukrainians continue to die, while demagogues and Putinists alike are seizing this moment in the war to call on Western governments to abandon Ukraine entirely.

But the gap between the Central Bank’s relative technocratic efficiency and the demands of the war machine is there—and can be exploited. The Russian fear of slipping into poverty is a powerful force. Millions of Russians are already there, of course, with many more joining them constantly—the zealous falsification and manipulation of data on that front belie the problem.

Even many of the older Russians who live relatively comfortable lives today retain painful memories of defaults and economic chaos in the 1990s, the same chaos that helped Putin seize power. The devaluing of the ruble is a particularly triggering scenario for them, but potential defaults even more so.

This fear finds its way into everything, from political rhetoric—as Putin and his minions regularly seek to remind Russians that they were “saved” by his administration—to Russian popular culture and beyond. It is evident in wealthier Russians’ fanatical, embarrassing love of obscene luxury. It can be both a motivating factor and a destabilizing factor. They may support the war, but economic anxiety makes their contract with the Kremlin a fragile one.

This fragility is evident in the deep suspicion most ordinary Russians exhibit toward economists, technocrats, and other people they consider unreliable. These societal fissures are deepened by the fact that Russian economic statistics are already completely unreliable.

The Kremlin boldly lies about its economic prospects both to the West and its own people, but it’s Russians who are actually more capable of recognizing the lies. They know the duplicity their government is capable of much better than most Western analysts. This knowledge creates additional opportunities for instability, because the groundwork for mistrust and rebellion has been laid by the Kremlin itself.

The Central Bank and the Kremlin are in league. But there is a paradoxical element to their relationship, wherein the Central Bank wants the Russian economy to be more transparent and to function normally, while the Kremlin is in a protracted fascist spiral that threatens these goals. Emphasizing those discrepancies, and tightening the screws on the economy, can cause the fissures in the relationship to fracture.

Conservative Russian zealots will be eager to blame Nabiullina once even falsified economic data can no longer distract the population from what’s happening, but as financial hits continue to pile up, both the Kremlin and the Central Bank lose. There are political wedges here to widen in the meantime, as ingrained mistrust of the Central Bank makes its position fragile, and fragility exists to be exploited in a time of war.

Conflicted or not, Elvira Nabiullina should not get to have her war and keep her economy.

𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓦𝓲𝓽𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓢1: 𝓐𝓮𝓵𝓲𝓾𝓼 𝓕𝓮𝓻𝓰𝓾𝓼 𝓡𝓲𝓪𝓷𝓷𝓸𝓷 in Chainborn { Coming Soon}

A year before the death of Princess Pavetta and her husband Prince Duny, they welcomed a son into the world whom they called Aelius meaning Sun. Unlike his sisters, the young Prince took more after his father Prince Duny and was every bit of the Niffagaerd as his father was.

Prince Duny was happy to have the long son he had longed to have. While, his sisters were favored by his grandmother he was often looked by her, and forgetten most of the time.

The young Prince was only a few months old when he tragically lost both of his parents to a shipwreck. Wreck with grief and anger, Calanthe couldn’t bare to be around the young Prince for long for he had reminded him of the hedgehog that took her precious daughter from her.

Aelius grew up in the shadows of his sisters often holding resentment towards his grandmother for her ill treatment over him. He began to hate his appearance and often wished he looked like his sisters.

Emiliana and Cirilla spent majority of their time with their little brother including him in everything and often calling their grandmother out on her behavior towards him.

King Eist, who loved the young Prince as his own son corrected his wife’s behavior towards Aelius. In truth, the Lionesses Queen did held love for the young Prince, admiring his bravery and courage; but couldn’t find it in her heart to show her affection towards him.

As his sisters excelled in magical arts and spells, Aelius excelled in sword fighting. Like his father, the young Prince was quick on his feet and skilled like a soldier.

At the age of 10, Prince Aelius had defeated the mighty soliders of Cintra in combat and was called as the Golden Lion of the North.

A few months later, his sister Emiliana was named heir to Cintran throne, while Cirilla was bethorted to Hjalmar an Craite, rather than the Princess Cerys which the young Lion cub held deep feelings for and much rather wed her.

But male traditions would never accept such a thing and instead Cirilla had found herself in a loveless bethorted with Prince Hjalmar.

A year following the succession declaration, after going back and forth with his advisors and wife; King Eist put forth his grandson Prince Aelius as his successor to the Skellige Isles, as the Jarl of Skellige had no heirs or relative to leave behind the throne to.

Emiliana, Cirilla and Cerys among majority of Skellige high ranks and noble man support Aelius claim towards the Skellige Isle, while Prince Hjalmar disprove of it.

Meanwhile, in the south nearly almost 10 years in his rule Prince Duny now known as Emhyr Var Emreis, now the Emperor of the majority of the Continent conquering small kingdoms adding it to his Empire.

Prince Duny survived the shipwrecked by bare luck, but lost his bevolved Pavetta. Devasted and grief sicken by his wife’s death, the Emepeor turned all his focus into gaining power for himself and his kingdom.

The Emperor intially resisted taking the Niffagaerd throne back for himself, yet was convinced and persuaded by Fringilla Virgo , a powerful sorcuress and old advisor of his father King Fergus.

In 1257, Emhyr arrived in Niffagerd with a small coup of soliders and overthrew the Ursupter reinstating himself as the ruler of Niffagaerd.

Once securing his rule to his throne, Emhyr sends a letter to Queen Calanthe demanding his children be return to him. The Lionesses responded back with threats and violence claiming they were her cubs now and they belonged to her.

And so for the next couple of years, Emhyr and Calanthe would sends threatening letters to each other, each ruler demanding the other head to their words.

After going back and forth, Emhyr sent a large coup of soliders to Cintra in 1266 to conquer it and bring his children back to him, with clear instructions to not harm an inch on his children’s heads.

Within a matter of days, Niffagaerd had taken Cintra adding it to its empire, yet would find their mission incomplete as the heirs of the Lion had escaped.

Now, as Prince Aelius find himself on the run with his sisters he would find himself in a quarrel of sorts as his the entire continent had persuaded a hunt for his sisters for their special power.

The only question was how long could the young Prince keep his sisters from danger?

In this storyline, King Eist is the king of the Skellige Isle, this does not follow the games or the books. Emhyr is not a pervert who wants to touch his daughters inappropriately over, but he is still a Villain in this, but redeemable.

He is still pretty messed up dude with schemes up his sleeves, but he does love his children deeply and just wants the best for them.

Emhyr conquering Cintra will be due to his hatred towards Calanthe and for withholding his children from him.

Cirilla will be a lesbian in this storyline because in the games she had more female lovers than male lovers, so I am sure she match more well with woman than men.

I haven’t mention this before but I will now but if you don’t like this story, don’t read it simple. I have gotten nasty comments on my A03 and Wattpad from people about portraying their favorite characters a certain way.

Everyone is open to their own opinions, but again don’t come for me because I have a different opinion than yours, let alone come after me over a fiction charcater.

They may be your favorite charcater, but to me they’re not mine. I have the right to my own opinion, and again this is alternative universe where everything is different.

As for the rest of you welcome aboard; I’m so excited to begin writing this story. I don’t really have an updating schedule I only write when I’m inspired or in the mood. So hopefully I will be able to post this story within the next week or two.

Thanks you all for your endless support and love on my stories, every comment and kudos means a lot to me.

Blessing to you all..

Love Ala

"In the eyes of many of the psychiatrists, the new methods of treatment failed to live up to initial proclamations of a major breakthrough. Several identified problems with the experiments, e.g. uncertain diagnoses and spontaneous remission, which might potentially skew the results. The question of a control group with the same diagnosis was also raised. During his experiments with manganese in 1927, Reiter had in fact used such a group—“control material of 50 patients whose conditions were similar to the ones treated with metal salt, and who – without treatment of any sort – were followed for a similar period.” However, this approach did not carry over to subsequent experiments, and neither Helweg, Ravn nor Schroeder used control groups in their studies.

The spate of sensational announcements of imminent revolutions in psychiatric therapy began to peter out in the mid-1930s, and predictions of breakthroughs became more guarded. In July 1936, August Wimmer, professor of psychiatry at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, published his major textbook Speciel klinisk Psykiatri (“Special Clinical Psychiatry”). In it, he stated that while there had been no shortage of experiments with the treatment of schizophrenia, none of the proposed methods had been convincing. There had “over time” been experiments with many different fever treatments, including “in recent years malaria fever therapy and sulfosin therapy (Schroeder),” but “the results are questionable, including with regard to schizophrenics’ susceptibility to spontaneous remissions […] Nor does metal-salt treatment (Reiter) seem to have triumphed.” Wimmer went on to conclude that “a causal treatment for schizophrenia has not yet been found.”

In the late 1930s, Hjalmar Helweg was similarly lacking in optimism about the methods that he had tested at Vordingborg. In September 1937, after 19 years as chief physician at the hospital, Helweg was appointed to succeed Wimmer in the prestigious position of professor and chief psychiatrist at Rigshospitalet. Just before he left Vordingborg, he was interviewed by the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, who wanted to paint a portrait of the new face of Danish psychiatry and hear his thoughts on the latest advances in “the fight against mental illness.”

“We psychiatrists […] have never been spoiled by luck or stunning victories, and now that I am asked directly, I must admit that no breakthrough has been made in the treatment of mental illness in my time. There have been no breakthroughs, no progress on a scale equivalent to the discovery of insulin […] and its application in the treatment of diabetes. Therefore, it is today equally miserable for a human being to be mentally ill as it was 30 years ago.” Nor did he hold out high hopes for the near future. “The truth is that, as things stand now, we might as well try tap water and beer rather than some chemical preparation,” Helweg concluded.

Several psychiatrists also expressed concern about the direction in which the discipline was heading. Like Helweg, some thought that psychiatry was the poor relation compared to other specialisations and unable to point at the same kind of progress as other forms of medicine. Nor was psychiatry at the front of the queue when it came to medical training. It was not even an exam subject at the University of Copenhagen. Medical students only had 36 hours of teaching and a month of fieldwork in psychiatry. The situation was far from satisfactory. Many psychiatrists thought the discipline deserved better, but changes in the curriculum were still a long way off.

Nor did psychiatry enjoy the best of reputations among the general public. Doctors at the hospitals often encountered “wrong-headed notions” about psychiatry and “a fairly widespread reluctance” among families to allow their relatives to be treated in mental hospitals. In 1934, Carl Clemmensen, chief physician at Bispebjerg Hospital’s Psychiatric Department, conducted a small study aimed at gauging relatives’ animosity towards mental hospitals. He asked 100 relatives what they felt about a family member being admitted to St. Hans and found that 55% were critical and had raised objections

- Jesper Vaczy Kragh, Lobotomy Nation: The History of Psychosurgery and Psychiatry in Denmark (Springer: 2021) p. 60-61.

Classic Film Festival Day 2

And we're back! For Day 2 of Cinecon 59, and although this is a 5-day festival, we don't let one minute of these precious days go to waste. So yeah, Day 2 sure was jam packed....

Boris Karloff Home Movies (1937 - 1941)

As a relative newbie to the cinephile universe, Boris Karloff is most famous to me as The Monster in Universal's classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. Frankenstein's monster, of course, but I also know he starred as assorted villains over the years - the Satanic priest Hjalmar Poelzig in The Black Cat (1934), the lumbering executioner in 15th century England in Tower of London (1939), and the original Imhotep in The Mummy (1932).

The short clips of home movies shown in this 15-minute presentation highlighted the man behind the monster, with shots of birthday parties, his very young daughter Sara (born on his 51st birthday, while he was at work on Son of Frankenstein (1939)), his large home and gardens, and a wide variety of friends. All clips were accompanied by biting-but-loving commentary by the now elderly Sara Karloff, who adored her father, but also saw there was something inane in the fact he owned.... goats.

Little Mickey Grogan (1927)

RKO Pictures

Director: James Leo Meehan

The first feature of the day got us off to a rip-roaring start, with this silent comedy about two semi-homeless kids, the eponymous Mickey (Frankie Darro) and his spitfire kinda best friend, Susan (Lassie Lou Ahern), who manage to solve an entire host of other people's problems, and still find their own happy ever after in the process.

First up is befriending kind-hearted factory worker, Winnie (Jobyna Ralston), who takes both children in and offers them food, a place to stay, and - gross! - a bath. As appreciative as they are, Mickey is listless and he is back on the streets in no time, now befriending an unemployed architect who lost his job because he is slowly going blind. Through a series of hapless circumstances, Mickey manages to get Winnie and Jeff (Carroll Nye) in the same room, where sparks fly, and Winnie becomes determined to help Jeff get his life back on track.

More shenanigans ensue - most perpetrated by a rather acrobatic Mickey - but we can all guess how this turns out, right? Winnie finds a way to get Jeff the medical help that will reverse his vision loss, he lands a job as an architect, and the two happily adopt their homeless benefactors.

Not much of a spoiler alert as the film's plot was delightfully predictable, and I do mean that, while it is clear from the start how things will end, the fun is watching this cast get to that end. Frankie Darro was especially impressive, with his many stunts, and Lassie Lou Ahern kept pace with him with her snappy one-liners. A joy to watch at 9am!

The Scarlet Letter (1934)

Majestic Pictures

Director: Robert G. Vignola

I read this book in high school, and remembered this: what's-her-name committed adultery and she wore a big red "A" on her chest for the rest of her life. I also remember not enjoying the book all that much, so I was pleasantly surprised by this recently restored version - the first sound adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel every student will undoubtedly read at some point in their academic career.

In this version, the beautiful Colleen Moore takes on the role of Hester Prynne, the 17th century Massachusetts widow who has an affair with the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale (Hardie Albright). When the unmarried Hester becomes pregnant, and will not reveal the name of her baby's father, she is forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her chest as a mark of her crime.

Hester plows onward, giving birth to her illegitimate daughter Pearl (Cora Sue Collins), and trying to make a life for the two of them in a town that shuns them. Among those who turn their backs on Hester and Pearl is Hester's long-lost husband, Roger Chillingworth (Henry B. Walthall), whom she believed died in a shipwreck years earlier, and who shows up in town the same day as her trial. Furious at her betrayal, Chillingworth makes it his mission to ruin Hester's life by letting her flail at survival.

And there's the Reverend Dimmesdale, eaten alive by guilt over the tortures inflicted on Hester by his parishioners, and her protection of him, but who can't seem to figure out a way to make things right.

It will all come to a tragic conclusion (of course - otherwise, why would the book be required reading for students everywhere?), but I still found myself enjoying the film. It was a bit slow (what classic literary masterpiece isn't?), and I did walk away with the same thought I had after reading the book - what was the point? - but I still thought the performances were strong, the set design was masterful, and there were some nice comic elements scattered throughout. Not a bad way to spend an hour or so.

Forgotten Faces (1928)

Paramount-Famous Players Lasky

Director: Victor Schertzinger

We go from dark to darker with this 1928 silent drama. And whew, I do mean dark. "Heliotrope Harry" Harlow (Clive Brook) is a successful thief and con man, who comes home early one night from a job and finds his heartless gold-digging wife, Lilly (Olga Baclanova) in bed with another man. Cool as a cucumber in the fridge, Harry whips out a gun and shoots the lover dead.

Knowing Lilly is evil, and prison is now his only destination, Harry retrieves his beloved infant daughter from a nearby bedroom, and takes her to a wealthy family, leaving her on the front step for them to find and adopt. Harry then calls on his friend and criminal partner, Froggy (a very young William Powell) and begs him to watch over his daughter, to make sure Lilly never finds her.

Fast forward 15 years, and Harry is behind bars for murder, Lilly is living in squalor, and Froggy is keeping his promise to protect Alice (Mary Brian). But that sneaky scheming Lilly - she tricks Froggy into revealing Alice's location - and Lilly can't help herself. She visits Harry in prison, and gloats that she knows where their daughter is, how wealthy her adopted family is, and she will stop at nothing to fleece Alice of everything she has.

Desperate to stop Lilly, Harry manages to break out of prison (as one could do with some ease in the 1920s), and secure a job as a butler with Alice's family. He bides his time, falling in love with his daughter all over again, and waiting for the showdown with Lilly he knows is coming.

I have to admit, I was a bit surprised at the darkness of this material. You do have it all - a heartless wife and mother only interested in money, a crime of passion (murder, no less), a family torn asunder, and a vengeful woman out to destroy her own child. It's a storyline I wouldn't expect to see in the conservative backlash of the hedonistic 1920s, but I am glad this one got made. It was fantastic. Dark. Wicked. And brutally fantastic.

What's Cookin (1942)

Universal Pictures

Director: Edward F. Cline

After two rather somber and dark films, it was time to lighten things up! And what better way to do that than with a "Jivin' Jacks and Jills" classic?

As I learned through the course of attending Cinecon, the Jivin' Jacks and Jills were a group of teenage singers and dancers that Universal Pictures cobbled together in the 1940s to put in B musicals and attract teen audiences. A very young Donald O'Connor was part of the troupe (and appears in What's Cookin'), a fact I was very excited about because I have always adored him. I grew up watching Singin' in the Rain (1952). Need I say more?

There isn't much of a plot to this film. The owners of a successful radio program, J.P. Courtney (Charles Butterworth) and his wife, Agatha (Billie Burke) are at odd over how to keep the program fresh and exciting. J.P. wants to bring in new acts; Agatha thinks the classical music that made the program popular is just fine. So by bringing in a few co-conspirators, including hapless magician Marvo the Great (Leo Carillo), the extremely popular Andrews Sisters (LaVerne, Maxene, and Patricia Andrews), and, of course, the Jivin Jacks and Jills, J.P. hopes to convince Agatha the times, they are a'changin.'

This film really was a breath of fresh air, even if it hadn't followed on the heels of two dark dramas. The musical numbers were the heart and soul, and rightfully so - they were fabulous. Why talk when you can sing and dance, I always say? I can see why these types of musicals were so popular during World War II - there really was no better way to get away from the horrors of reality than with whipped cream like this.

The Student of Prague (1926)

Sokai-Film

Director: Henrik Galeen

We close out Night 2 with probably my favorite movie of the entire weekend. I'm no student of German Expressionism (I haven't even seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)), but this movie was so stunningly beautiful. And so clever. And truly the stuff of nightmares.

Balduin (Conrad Veidt) is bored. He is the best swordsman in the entire city of Prague - no one even comes close - so dueling has lost its appeal. He doesn't care about going to parties with his friends anymore - how much beer can one guy drink before he tires of it anyway? And life is just... dull. Balduin wants to fall in love, but he is so wrapped up in his own listlessness, he doesn't notice the affections of Lydushka (Elizza La Porta), a waitress in the local bar. Plus, he probably wouldn't be interested anyway - Lydushka is poor, and Balduin craves riches.

That's why he accepts a weird offer from the mysterious Scapinelli (Werner Krauss), a wealthy stranger who promises to give Balduin endless riches, in exchange for one thing: Balduin's mirror reflection. It's a bizarre request, but who needs their reflection? And Scapinelli is going to hand over more money than Balduin has ever seen, so Balduin accepts, and it isn't long before he starts reaping the rewards of the deal.

He attends high society parties, where he falls in love with Comtesse Margit (Agnes Esterhazy), a wealthy heiress he saved from a horseback riding accident before he met Scapinelli (and, of course, who fell in love with the poor Balduin but he was so self absorbed he didn't see it).

But it isn't long before Balduin's reflection, wandering free, starts wreaking havoc, and Balduin is facing increasing recriminations for his double's behavior. When Balduin's mirror reflection ruins his budding romance with Margit, Balduin decides to put an end to it. At a terrible cost to him as well.

There isn't much words can do to describe this film, and how beautiful it was. How horrifying it was. It really is a masterpiece in every way. And should be more widely available.

Hecaball Round Five.

“Hello everyone! Augustus Cornelius Eckerman here with your round five results. We’re halfway through the season now and as always will be taking our mid-season break before returning with round six.”

“DEPLOY THE HECABALL!”

Cheshire Hounds Defeat Larsen’s Leviathans.

“Some exciting plays saw Baskerville and Ayana showing their teamwork to score the first goal. Blackfoot and Marigold came to blows and both were sent to the penalty box. De Bellis showed her agility sending a mid-air pass to Hjalmar who scored and tied it up at the half.”

“The second half was fast and furious with both teams scoring relatively quickly. Kawakami, and Gatz scoring one after the other. Blackfoot purposely continues to antagonize Marigold but Kawakami stepped in and shut it down. Hjalmar snuck by and scored another point but Baskerville returned the favor.”

“Time ticked down and in the end it was Ayana who’s brute strength blew through everyone and managed to land a last second point to put the game away.”

Cherry Hills Knights Defeat North Apricus Sharks.

“The Knights were on a mission to avenge last week’s loss while the Sharks continued to show improvement. The Knights were unable to land a point during the first round thanks to the Sharks brilliant defense. Ellis would score the one point of the first half, putting the Sharks up.”

“Unfortunately the lack of Mashiro was still something the Sharks had to deal with. Silverman and Dubhán did a tremendous job on defense but were overwhelmed which led to Ishii tying things up for the Knights early in the second half.”

“Both teams landed some hard shot against each other and at times it was hard to even keep track of the ball. Joosten would end up scoring the final point after an insane play passing between Ishii, and Bluebell. Delaney provided the final distraction and Joosten ricocheted it off a platform and into the goal.”

Solis Scarabs Defeat Apricus City Freelancers.

“The Freelancers put up a great fight against a newly motivated Scarabs. Auburn may have pulled out her share of dirty tricks in the first half. Nothing to get her disqualified but not exactly sportsmanlike either. Auburn and Dermot got into a bit of a scuffle but while the chaos took place Donnerov forced his way down the field and scored a point.

“The second half was a complete brawl between both teams. Somehow in the middle of the dust cloud, Dermot snuck away, received a pass from Ling-Ling Bang and landed a beautiful flipping kick from a platform to tie up the score.”

“Things didn’t seem to settle down in the closing moments where Gilios was shield bashed off a platform by Layla and Auburn, knocking the ball away. Gilios recovered but still received a checkup after the match. He’s alright folks.”

“Alabaster put it away after working together with Donnerov to clear a path and headbutt in the ball right before time expired.”

West Apricus Dwarves Defeat Bureau Behemoths.

“If you’ve ever wanted to see a game decided by defense, I suggest you track a copy of this one down. Words can’t describe the insanity that was Aryl Vs. Hamelin. Shot after shot, dive after dive, the defense by these teams was incredible and the crowd was roaring.”

“Seeing Aryl withstand a barrage of shots from Myte, and Banders was something to behold. Then after a short volley the defensive prowess of Hamelin was put on display as he fended off Maza, and Sterling. All the while Medvedia and Ves showed off some great footwork and passing skills. Often times having to counter each other in the middle of a battlefield.”

“The entire first half went by without a single point scored, and wouldn’t you know it..the second half did as well. We came down to overtime with Aryl against Hamelin. Both defensive stars were winded but both wanted to face the other one on one.”

“If you thought these guys were only good on defense you have another thing coming. The shots each of them pulled in overtime were a thing of beauty. It literally came down to Hamelin practically throwing himself against Aryl’s shield and spinning around him to barely kick the ball in. Both shook hands after it was over.”

Apricus University Argonauts Defeat Ciar Titans.

“A rivalry game if we ever saw one. Both teams came firing out of the gate with everything they had. Onyx took a fairly bad shot early in the game, getting knocked between Edana and Draco’s shields. She had to step off the field for a bit of time.”

“No punches were pulled here as every time you thought someone would score, they were almost destined to take a hit. We saw Night get knocked off a platform by Knight. Later on Night returned the favor and charged Knight right into a different platform.”

“The Hibikis showed their trademark teamwork, managing to work together to put up the single point in the first half. Strangely Constantine seemed a bit out of it during the first half, as if she was simply waiting for something. Turns out that may have been the case.”

“In the second half we saw what looked like a completely different Constantine. Bashing her way through the entire Titans defense, sending Knight and Draco flying and scoring seconds into the round. Constantine showed off an uncanny amount of aggression, barely paying attention to her own teammates and in some case seemingly using them as blockers and nothing more.”

“Constantine scored another early goal, almost knocking M. Hibiki into the goal. She seemed to snap out of it though and calmed down a bit after getting talked to briefly by Night. All that being said, time would expire before any other points could be scored.”

“That’s gonna do it for round five. Remember, we’ll be on a short break before coming back with the final five rounds of the season. Thanks for tuning in everyone! Remember to pick up some of the all new merchandise today! We’ve got shirts, jerseys, signed Hecaballs, signed pictures, the swimsuit calendar, collector cups, and more!”

an absolutely gorgeous gift i got from the one and only @faestorian / @everdaring!!

calanthe holding baby ciri with young hjalmar and cerys!

in other words, happy mother’s day, modron! 

relationship tags for now, good night, thats all for now ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

African Great Apes Will Soon Have Almost No Habitat Left At All, Scientists Warn

https://sciencespies.com/nature/african-great-apes-will-soon-have-almost-no-habitat-left-at-all-scientists-warn/

African Great Apes Will Soon Have Almost No Habitat Left At All, Scientists Warn

Humans are driving the extinction of our closest relatives on planet Earth, and if we don’t change our behavior, we may be the last great ape standing.

In the worst-case scenario, where human emissions and land use continue as usual, researchers predict a 94 percent loss of great ape habitat in Africa by 2050.

Even if we get our act together before then, reducing our fossil fuel emissions and keeping ecosystems protected, models show gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos will likely lose 85 percent of their range in Africa in the next three decades.

No matter which scenario ends up coming true, roughly half of all habitat loss could occur in protected areas, like national parks.

Climate change, after all, doesn’t adhere to human-constructed boundaries. As the world warms and landscapes shift, there’s always a chance great apes could flee to higher ground, but this takes time, and many species are slow to reproduce and require niche environments.

Such migration could also drive great apes out of protected areas, putting their populations at even greater risk. In fact, a series of new models estimates that future ranges for chimps, gorillas, and bonobos will shift mostly towards unprotected areas, which are subject to farming, mining, logging, hunting, and urban development.

The current predictions are based on the most comprehensive database for African ape populations to date. Using various climate forecasts, land use data, and projections of human population growth, researchers have shown just how imperiled these creatures truly are.

While there’s plenty of research to show how poorly great apes have been faring in recent decades, few studies have tried to predict what will happen to ape populations in the future.

In both Africa and Asia, great apes are all endangered, some critically so, and what’s left of their habitat is disappearing rapidly due to human disturbance. 

At this point, even the best-case scenario is not looking great. The protected areas we have designated for great apes in Africa simply aren’t cutting it.

Going forward, models predict all great apes in Africa are likely to experience massive range losses, regardless of whether protected areas remain in place or not.

Currently, many African apes live outside of these boundaries, in areas that are particularly suitable for farming or oil palm concessions. 

Three-quarters of all Grauer’s gorillas, for instance, live in unprotected areas, as well as 64 percent of mountain gorillas, 91 percent of Cross River gorillas, 80 percent of bonobos, 90 percent of Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees, 80 percent of eastern chimps, and 80 percent of central chimps.

As you would expect, these unprotected areas are also more vulnerable to human disturbance.

“The fact that the greatest range losses are expected to occur outside protected areas reflects the insufficiency of the current network of protected areas in Africa to preserve suitable habitats for great apes and effectively connect great ape populations,” says Joana Carvalho, who studies primate ecology and conservation at Liverpool John Moores University.

While climate change will no doubt make some habitats less attractive to great apes, it can also create new habitats. That said, it can take hundreds, even thousands of years, for great ape populations to disperse into new and suitable areas.

Thirty years is likely not enough. Given how quickly climate change is occurring, researchers think great apes will probably not be able to migrate to the extent that’s needed.

For many species, this could spell the end. If chimpanzees don’t shift their habitats, for instance, the new study suggests more than three-quarters of their range will be lost under future scenarios.

Mountain gorillas and Cross River gorillas, on the other hand, have virtually nowhere else to go. Even in the best-case scenario, current models found these two species of great ape are likely to experience complete loss of suitable habitat and no new suitable habitat.

“The global consumption of natural resources extracted from great ape ranges is one of the main causes of great ape decline,” says ecologist Hjalmar Kühl from the Max Planck Institute.

“All nations that benefit from these resources have a responsibility to ensure a better future for great apes, their habitats, as well as the people living in them by advancing a more sustainable economy.”

Great apes in Asia are also experiencing similar problems.

Since the 1990s, over 80 percent of orangutan habitat has been lost, and if we continue on the same track, some experts think these great apes could be extinct in a decade’s time.

“We can expect climate change to exacerbate range loss for African apes and consequently pose serious threats to species persistence, as they are anticipated to impact orangutans,” the authors of the new study write. 

By the end of the century, there’s a very real chance humans will be the only great ape left.

The study was published in Diversity and Distributions.

#Nature

Creature Feature: Giant

I don’t know if they make bread with human bones, but they definitely eat people.

Hello everyone, today we’re going to be talking about giants.

Check the tags for some warnings and look below the cut for more!

Fled one time in my life. From the Ice Giant. And know what? I'm not a bit ashamed.

– Rasmund Kvaalkje, Clan Tordarroch oarsman

This powerful, primeval monster is quite possibly the last of its race. The Ice Giant resembles a man in many respects, but is blue as frost and taller than a tree. Though it seems capable of reason, all attempts to communicate with it to date have ended the same way – in a quick and painful death.

Myrhyff Bestiary Entry

According to legend, Golyat had once been a knight who violated his vows, for which he was punished by the Lady of the Lake. Transformed into a giant, he fled into the mountains and would only descend into the inhabited lowlands when hunger forced him to it. There's no knowing how much truth lies in that legend, yet it is incontrovertible fact that this dangerous giant gobbled up shepherds and sheep alike, and was so widely feared, governesses used him to scare children into eating their vegetables. Though he came across as a wild, unthinking beast, Golyat used simple tools and any item could turn into a deadly weapon in his powerful hands. When fighting Geralt, Golyat wielded a millstone, making his every blow truly crushing. Luckily, Geralt already had some experience slaying giants and made quick work of Golyat as well, with the much appreciated help of three knights - Milton de Peyrac Peyran, Palmerin de Launfal and Guillaume de Launfal.

Golyat Bestiary Entry

Giants are extremely rare in The Witcher, but a couple do exist. I’m specifically excluding the Cloud Giant from the Blood and Wine DLC because it’s not, as far as we can determine, a real life creature.

Golyat is your first introduction to Toussaint in Blood and Wine; as you’re riding into the duchy the beast comes smashing through a couple of windmills hot on the heels of a young knight, and you and your escorts decide to help the kid out. I later rather regretted doing so, because it turns out he’s a Nice Guy, but there’s no way to know that from here and the giant is going to be a problem anyway.

You can apply Ogroid oil and get into an extended battle with the huge monster... or you can pull out your crossbow and shoot him in the one eye visible beneath his helmet, which kills him instantly. So, y’know. Up to you.

The other giant is in a secondary quest in the main story of the game; about a year before the events of Witcher 3, in 1271, a terrifying Ice Giant named Myrhyff, accompanied by a flock of Sirens that he had bent to his will, gatecrashed the island of Undvik in Skellige. Clan Tordarroch was forced to flee to Ard Skellig, where the an Craite clan took them in. However, the clan was broken, even more so by the loss of their Jarl, who stayed behind to try and fight the giant.

Hjalmar an Craite, in an attempt to win fame and prove he would be an appropriate next king of Skellige, left with a crew of men to try and kill Myrhyff and win back Undvik. Of course, he left some time ago and there’s been no word, so Crach an Craite asks Geralt to go see if his hothead of a son is dead or not.

Off to Undvik it is, although if you stop in at The New Port tavern you can speak with Axel, a Clan Tordarroch warrior and relative of Jarl Harald Houndsnout, Jarl of Undvik, who gives you some information about the Jarl.

When Geralt arrives, it’s to a wrecked island. If you land more northward you’re going to want to work your way down to the southeast to Marlin Village; you may find some graves with an Craite shields on them along the way. As you work your way into the island, you’ll see Myrhyff, accompanied by sirens, walk by an enormous under-construction ship and toss some unidentified meat up into it.

Climb up into the ship yourself and you’ll find an old man who calls himself Octo and a number of skulls on sticks. Octo explains that he and the sirens are building the boat for the giant to set sail at Ragh nor Roog, and that the giant feeds him human flesh, possibly as a cruelty. He also acts like his companions, the skulls, are still alive. Octo is in fact the erstwhile Jarl of Undvik, Harald Houndsnout, but he’s clearly in no shape to provide any particular help, apart from pointing you in the right direction. He does ask you for some twine and nails, which you can give to him if you feel like being nice. NOTE: YOU NEED SOME SPECIAL NAILS, REGULAR ONES WON’T DO. YOU CAN FIND SOME NORTH OF THE BOAT BY THE BARRICADE OR AT THE DORVE RUINS

Continue onwards and find Hjalmar’s camp, which is covered in blood and several corpses. Geralt finds a couple of sets of footprints and the signs of a boat being dragged, going in different directions. The footprints are from before the attack, he notes; two people left beforehand.

The boat is the main trail but there’s two benefits to following the footprints. There’s a trail of arrow-shot nekkers and evidence that the archer was trying to kill the other man on foot.

The archer did eventually kill the man; you find him slumped outside a cave with a Hornwall horn next to him. The horn causes sirens to just fall out of the sky, so you’re going to want it.

The archer isn’t in sight, but you find evidence that some trolls dragged him into the nearby cave. Continue following that trail and you’ll come across a group of (ice) trolls cooking something in a big lidded pot. Or, more accurately, someone. There’s a human voice yelling for help from the interior.

You can either get into a fight with the trolls or challenge them to a riddle game. You know how fighting trolls goes, so let’s cover riddles. Geralt offers himself in addition to the guy they already have if he loses, but I’m not sure he’s being sincere. And really. It’s a bunch of trolls. Riddles In The Dark this is not.

The answer to the one the trolls ask is, of course, “a troll”. You don’t even get to pick what Geralt asks, because the trolls aren’t capable of comprehending metaphor whatsoever—you win as long as you can parse what they ask.

The man in the pot is Folan, a close friend of Hjalmar and one of his crew. 

Folan details how the expedition originally went sideways; the helmsman, terrified of sirens, stuck wax in his ears and didn’t hear the crew warning him about the rocks. The group got inland but were harassed by sirens the entire way. Hjalmar used the Hornwall horn often, but he wound up causing an avalanche. They eventually reached the giant’s boat and things calmed down a bit, but Egnar of Faroe stole the horn and ran. Folan gave chase, and the rest we’ve covered.

Folan knows where Myrhyff’s lair is, and offers to come with to help.

Head back to the boat drag tracks, and start following those. You’ll come across a dead man and the boat; the boat’s broken and the man shows sign that he’d been attacked trying to run. You can find tracks that confirm the giant went after them. Follow those and you’ll come across a cave that the men fled into, and claw marks on the walls where the giant couldn’t reach. Head in and keep following the trail, including diving off a cliff into an underground lake. The giant may not have been able to get in, but his flock of sirens and harpies could and did. Eventually you’ll come across dead sirens/harpies and two bodies (Thorsten and Arvin an Tarradoch), then evidence of a cave-in and at least one other body. Keep trekking and you’ll finally come out on the surface, at Clan Tarradoch Forge. (There’s a set of tools here you’ll need to pick up in order to be able to make master level armor, so don’t forget those!)

Enter the building for a truly gruesome sight; this appears to be the giant’s butchery. Folan comments that there’s nearly twenty men here, but none of them are Hjalmar. As he says this, someone or something humanoid runs out the door.

It’s a devourer. Geralt makes a dry comment about mice in pantries, and picks up on a couple sets of footprints. The footprints split into two; follow the human ones to the Dorve Ruins. Here you’ll find Hjalmar, who is alive and reasonably well, although he’s being attacked by sirens. Kill the sirens and speak with Hjalmar; he says there’s only him and two others left of the crew. One other, once Geralt points out the one crewmember remaining in Dorve (Leif) is dead, not unconscious. The last crewmember, of course, is missing.

But! We have Hjalmar and Folan in tow, time to go kill that giant!

Geralt and Hjalmar clear the path to the cave, and Folan offers to cover them from afar.

Enter the cave and work your way over to Myrhyff. The beast is sleeping, and the last crewmember, Vigi the Loon, is locked in a makeshift cage. Vigi asks you to let him out, but Hjalmar says that you should leave him in there, as Vigi is prone to doing daft things.

Telling you ahead of time: if you don’t let him out now, he dies after Myrhyff’s down about a third of his health when the giant picks up an anchor to use as a flail of sorts and smashes right through the cage.

If you do rescue him (by sneaking over to a cabinet and collecting a key without waking Myrhyff), he promptly proves his nickname correct and wastes your surprise attack on kicking Myrhyff.

Oh well.

Actually fighting the giant is going to be tough; he hits very hard, has an extremely wide swing, and, once he picks up that anchor, has a helluva reach as well. Ogroid oil will be useful, and Quen will help too. Yrden can be used to limit his movement. Despite having been accompanied by sirens earlier, Myrhyff doesn’t appear to summon any during the battle.

When you get the giant down to zero health, a cutscene ensues where Geralt saves Hjalmar and Hjalmar slays the giant. Hjalmar says that the credit should be Geralt’s, and you’re free to accept it or say Hjalmar should get it instead. It’s mostly a cosmetic choice, so whichever you’re happy with.

You can also leave with the remaining crew or stick around to do things; you can loot if you stick around, and return to tell Octo/the former Jarl the good news. However the man won’t leave with you; he says he’ll finish the ship and use it as a funeral pyre, which is one hell of a gloomy outcome to that.

Maybe Hjalmar will have learned something about rushing in hotheadedly, though... Oh wait, no he doesn’t.

(asked about scandi lit) Cool! I think Victoria is one of my favourites as well! What is your fav period? I’m quite into modernism myself, and the whole putting things up for debate-thing they had going on. Also, did you struggle learning the languages?

Ah how nice, then we've got that in common! If I have to choose a favourite period I think I'd say the turn of the twentieth century, at that point when late romanticism and realism slowly turn into modernism. There's lots of interesting things going on at that time, Knut Hamsun for example but I'm also thinking of Hjalmar Söderberg (Doctor Glas, The serious game) and of course Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. And Selma Lagerlöf, writing around the same time but in a completely different style! 

Re: learning the languages: as a native speaker of Dutch (or any other Germanic language) it is relatively easy to learn a Scandinavian language. With a big emphasis on relatively because you need to put lots of time and work into it to reach a proficient level. I had to, at least. But I can pass as a native speaker of Swedish and can understand Danish and Norwegian as a bonus! 

Ten Interesting Swedish Novels

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives (Goodreads.com)

2. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past. (Amazon.com)

3. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health, and in one day, he turns 100. A big celebration is in the works, but Allan really isn't interested (and he'd like a bit more control over his vodka consumption). So he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey, involving, among other surprises, a suitcase stuffed with cash, some unpleasant criminals, a friendly hot-dog stand operator, and an elephant (Amazon.com)

4. Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson

Ester Nilsson is a sensible person in a sensible relationship. Until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself is in the audience, intrigued and clearly delighted by her fascination with him. When the two meet afterward, she is spellbound. Ester’s life is then intrinsically linked to this meeting and the chain of events that unfolds. She leaves her boyfriend and throws herself into an imaginary relationship with Hugo. She falls deeply in love, and he consumes her thoughts. Indeed, in her own mind she’s sure that she and Hugo are a couple.

Slowly and painfully Ester comes to realize that her perception of the relationship is different from his. She’s a woman who prides herself on having a rational and analytical mind, but in the face of her overpowering feelings for Hugo, she is too clever and too honest for her own good. Bitingly funny and darkly fascinating, Willful Disregard is a story about total and desperate devotion, and how willingly we betray ourselves in the pursuit of love. (Amazon.com)

5. Everything I Don’t Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

A young man named Samuel dies in a horrible car crash. Was it an accident or was it suicide? To answer that question, an unnamed writer with an agenda of his own sets out to map Samuel’s last day alive. Through conversations with friends, relatives, and neighbors, a portrait of Samuel emerges: the loving grandchild, the reluctant bureaucrat, the loyal friend, the contrived poseur. The young man who did everything for his girlfriend Laide and shared everything with his best friend Vandad. Until he lost touch with them both.

By piecing together an exhilarating narrative puzzle, we follow Samuel from the first day he encounters the towering Vandad to when they become roommates. We meet Panther, Samuel’s self-involved childhood friend whose move to Berlin indirectly cues the beginning of Samuel’s search for the meaning of love—which in turn leads Samuel to Laide. Soon, Samuel’s relationship with Laide leads to a chasm in his friendship with Vandad, and it isn’t long before the lines between loyalty and betrayal, protection, and peril get blurred irrevocably. (Goodreads.com)

6. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.

But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night (Goodreads.com)

7. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrick Backman

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus-crazy. She is also Elsa's best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother's stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal. When Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa's greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother's letters lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and totally ordinary old crones, but also to the truth about fairytales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other. (Goodreads.com)

8. Echos from the Dead by Johan Theorin

On a gray September day, on an island off the coast of Sweden, six -year -old Jens Davidsson ventured out of his backyard, walked out into a fog, and vanished….Now twenty years have passed, and in this magnificent debut novel of suspense—a runaway bestseller in Sweden—the boy’s mother returns to the place where her son disappeared, drawn by a chilling package sent in the mail… In it, lovingly wrapped, is one of Jens’ sandals—sandals Julia Davidsson put on her son’s feet that very last morning. Now, with only a handful of clues, Julia and her father are questioning islanders who were present the day Jens vanished—and making a shocking connection to Öland’s most notorious murder case: the killing spree of a wealthy young man who fled the island and died years before Jens was even born. Suddenly the island that once seemed so achingly familiar turns strange and dangerous… Until Julia finds herself facing truths she never imagined—about what really happened on that September day twenty years ago, about who may have crossed paths with little Jens in the fog, and how a child could truly vanish without a trace…until now. (Amazon.com)

  9. The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg

Sweden at the turn of the previous century. Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love. Lydia, however, has other suitors, and Astrid is frightened of being tied down by his emotions. Trapped inside loveless marriages of convenience, they struggle in later years to rekindle the promise of their romance with bitter and tragic results (Amazon.com)

10. Hanna’s Daughters by Marianne Fredriksson

Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents' house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word (Goodreads.com)

Those that have married in to the Royal Families since 1800

Sweden

Princess Margaret of Connaught (15 January 1882 – 1 May 1920)

Princess Margaret was born at Bagshot Park and baptised in the Private Chapel of Windsor Castle on 11 March 1882 by, The Archbishop of Canterbury. She was also confirmed in the Private Chapel of Windsor Castle in March 1898. 

When Princess Margaret of Connaught was 23 and her younger sister Princess Patricia of Connaught was 18, both girls were among the most beautiful and eligible princesses in Europe. Their uncle, King Edward VII, wanted his nieces to marry a European King or Crown prince. 

In January 1905, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught visited Portugal, where they were received by King Carlos and his wife, Amélie of Orléans, whose sons Luís Filipe, Duke of Braganza, and Prince Manuel entertained the young British princesses. The Portuguese expected one of the Connaught princesses would become the future Queen of Portugal. 

The Connaughts continued their trip to Egypt and Sudan. In Cairo, they met Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the future Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden, grandson of the Swedish King Oscar II. Originally, Margaret's sister Patricia had been considered a suitable match for Gustaf Adolf; without his knowledge, a meeting was arranged with the two sisters. Gustaf Adolf and Margaret fell in love at first sight, and he proposed at a dinner held by Lord Cromer at the British Consulate in Egypt, and was accepted. 

Margaret's parents were very happy with the match. Gustaf Adolf and Margaret married on 15 June 1905 in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. The couple spent their honeymoon in Ireland, and arrived in Sweden on 8 July 1905. One of Margaret's wedding presents was the Connaught tiara, which remains in the Swedish royal jewellery collection today. The couple had five children. Margaret was a dedicated mother to her children, and was determined to spend time with them. She was not keen on letting them be raised by nursery staff, as was the convention of the day. When Gustaf Adolf's father, Crown Prince Gustaf, acceded to the throne as King Gustaf V in 1907, the couple became Crown Prince and Princess of Sweden.

The marriage between Margaret and Gustaf Adolf is described as a happy love match. Gustaf Adolf felt great pressure from the "Prussian" military discipline with which he had been raised by his mother, and he was greatly affected by and attracted to Margaret's differing English customs. The visiting Infanta Eulalia of Spain wrote that the Crown Princess gave the Swedish court "just a touch of the elegance of the Court of St James's" and of how much Margaret loved her life in Sweden. After her arrival in Sweden, Margaret, who in Sweden was called "Margareta", received lessons in the Swedish language, and asked to be educated in Swedish history and social welfare. After two years, she spoke good Swedish. She was also eager to find out more about Sweden, and on many occasions went on incognito trips. During her first years in Sweden, Margaret behaved with great seriousness and was therefore regarded as stiff, but the view of her changed because of her great interest in sports, where she showed a more relaxed and natural manner. Margaret took a great interest in many forms of sports; she used the winters for skiing, ice skating and playing hockey (what is nowadays called bandy), and played tennis and golf during the summers. 

Margaret was also interested in art, and was an admirer of the works of Claude Monet. She photographed, painted, and took a great interest in gardening. She and her spouse received Sofiero Palace as a wedding gift, and they spent their summers there and made a great effort creating gardens in an English style on the estate; her children participated in their improvement. In 1915, Margaret as Kronprinsessan Margareta published the book Vår trädgård på Sofiero ("Our Garden at Sofiero") and two years later also Från blomstergården ("From the Flower Garden") illustrated with her own drawings and photographs, which were sold for the benefit of household schools with childcare. 

During World War I, Margaret created a sewing society in Sweden to support the Red Cross. The society was called Kronprinsessans Centralförråd för landstormsmäns beklädnad och utrustning ("The Crown Princess's central storage for clothing and equipment of the home guard"), which was to equip the Swedish armed forces with suitable underwear. When paraffin supplies ran low she organized a candle collection, and in November 1917 she instituted a scheme to train girls to work on the land. She also acted as intermediary for relatives separated by the war. With her help, private letters and requests to trace men missing in action were passed on. She was also active in her work on behalf of prisoners. She aided prisoners of war in camps around Europe, especially British nationals. 

Margaret's efforts during the war were pro-British, in contrast to that of her mother-in-law's strictly pro-German attitude. In 1917, Margaret organized Margaretainsamlingen för de fattiga ("The Margaret fundraiser for the poor"). At the end of the war, when the final steps towards full democracy were taken in Sweden, Margaret's positive attitude to reform influenced her husband the Crown Prince. Unlike the attitude of her reform-hostile in-laws, King Gustaf and Queen Victoria, this is believed to have eased political tensions and preserved the Swedish monarchy

On 1 May 1920, her father's 70th birthday, Crown Princess Margaret died suddenly in Stockholm. The official announcement said[citation needed] infection set in following a mastoid operation. At the time, she was eight months pregnant and expecting her sixth child. In announcing her death during traditional International Workers' Day celebrations, Swedish Prime Minister Hjalmar Branting said: the ray of sunshine at Stockholm Palace has gone out (sv Solstrålen på Stockholms slott har slocknat). In Britain there had been reports that Margaret was unhappy in Sweden and there were dubious rumours at her death that it actually had been a suicide

Former Atomico and Softbank VC Carolina Brochado has joined EQT to help build its new growth fund

Carolina Brochado, the former Atomico partner and most recently a partner at Softbank Vision Fund’s London office, has joined EQT as part of its plans to launch a new fund dedicated to growth-stage investments, TechCrunch as learned.

According to multiple sources, Brochado is part of a new growth fund team at EQT that will sit between its existing earlier-stage EQT Ventures and the more majority ownership-oriented EQT private equity. She’s currently thought to be out recruiting additional members of EQT Growth.

Confirming Brochado’s appointment, Lucy Wimmer, Communications Partner at EQT Ventures, gave TechCrunch the following statement:

“Carolina Brochado has joined EQT to work on the strategy and preparation of its Growth initiative, which is positioned between Ventures and Private Equity. We’re thrilled to welcome Carolina to the EQT team – based in the London office – and her background across several investment disciplines, including private equity, venture capital and growth, will be invaluable as we develop the Growth initiative”.

Meanwhile, the recruitment of Brochado by EQT is quite a coup, after things didn’t entirely pan out during her relatively short stint at Softbank (reading between the lines and given recent events, Softbank Vision Fund probably isn’t for everyone, to put it diplomatically). Well respected within the European ecosystem and beyond, and regarded highly by founders she’s invested in, Brochado led investments in a number of promising companies at Atomico, including logistics company OnTruck, healthtech company Hinge Health, and restaurant supply chain app Rekki. At Softbank, she backed gym access company Gympass and data analysis and cybersecurity company Behavox.

VCs from Accel and SoftBank talk Europe’s startup scene, what they expect in 2020, and the future of SoftBank

Brochado first came to prominence in the European startup ecosystem when she was made a partner at Atomico in 2016 but had actually been associated with the firm for six years, having first interned at Atomico in 2012 while studying for her MBA at Columbia. She then re-joined the VC firm as principle in 2014 after a stint as COO at now defunct London e-commerce startup ThePresent.Co. Prior to that she had spent time in the U.S. in corporate finance and private equity.

In late 2018, Brochado was poached by Softbank, news that TechCrunch broke. Based in Vision Fund’s London office, she focused on growth investments within fintech, digital health and marketplace startups. Things appeared to be working out, seeing Brochado promoted to partner, before reportedly resigning in April this year.

Founding partner Hjalmar Winbladh is leaving EQT Ventures

HOME SCHOOLING BENEFITS 🎉🍾! Whizz-kid Hjalmar Rall started his academic journey with the University of Pretoria (UP) in 2017. The young man who registered for a BSc in Physics at the age of 14 has completed his initial degree with cum laude and is set to graduate this autumn. Hjalmar completed Cambridge A-levels at the age of 13, after his father Heinrich took him out of school in Grade 5 to home-school him. He says in Grade 5 school activities could no longer compensate for his boredom, so his dad started home-schooling him and he accelerated through the Cambridge curriculum. “I consider myself a diligent and mature student, and my home-schooling gave me the necessary academic background to not have any great difficulty with my studies at the University,” he said. Rall, who is currently enrolled for a BSc (Hons) in Physics at UP, originally hails from the small rural town of Riebeek Kasteel in the Western Cape, but he now lives in Brooklyn, Pretoria. He says his academic journey was relatively easy, though there were challenges at times. For the full article, please go to: https://lnkd.in/gUN33j5 #education #covid-19 #mzp_news #up #homeschooling (at University of Pretoria) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_2IVdsJOK7/?igshid=1jhb4ap82iwnz

Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss

Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to fade, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear. that's effectively what humans are doing to our closest relatives—chimpanzees. Back in 1999, a team of scientists led by Andrew Whiten (and including Jane Goodall) showed that chimpanzees from different parts of Africa behave very differently from each other. Some groups use sticks to extract honey, while others use those self-same tools to fish for ants. Some would get each other’s attention by rapping branches with their knuckles, while others did it by loudly ripping leaves with their teeth. The team identified 39 of those traditions that are practiced by some communities but not others—a pattern that, at the time, hadn’t been seen in any animal except humans. it had been evidence, the team said, that chimps have their own cultures. It took an extended time to convince skeptics that such cultures exist, but now we've many samples of animals learning local traditions from each other. Some orangutans blow raspberries at one another before they are going to bed. One dolphin learned to tail-walk from captive individuals and spread that trick to its own wild peers once released. Humpbacks and other whales have distinctive calls and songs in several seas. And chimps still stand out with “one of the foremost impressive cultural repertoires of nonhuman animals,” says Ammie Kalan, of the Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But just when many scientists have come to simply accept the existence of animal cultures, many of these cultures might vanish. Kalan and her colleagues have shown, through years of intensive fieldwork, that the very presence of humans has eroded the range of chimpanzee behavior. Where we flourish, their cultures shrivel. it's a bitterly ironic thing to find out on the 20th anniversary of Whiten’s classic study. “It’s amazing to think that just 60 years ago, we knew next to zilch of the behavior of our sister species within the wild,” Whiten says. “But now, even as we are truly going to know our primate cousins, the actions of humans are closing the window on all we've discovered.” “Sometimes within the rush to conserve the species, I feel we ditch the individuals,” says Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. “Each population, each community, even each generation of chimpanzees is exclusive . an occasion might only have a little impact on the entire population of chimpanzees, but it's going to wipe out a whole community—an entire culture. regardless of what we do to revive habitat or support increase, we may never be ready to restore that culture.” Since 2010, Kalan has been performing on the Pan African Programme, an intensive effort to catalog chimp behavior in 46 sites across the species’ entire range, led by Hjalmar Kühl, Christophe Boesch, and Mimi Arandjelovic. At each site, the team checked whether chimps were completing any of 31 different behaviors, including many from Whiten’s original list, and a few that had only been recently discovered. “We had things like termite fishing, and fishing, algae fishing, stone-throwing, leaf clipping, using sticks as marrow picks, using caves, bathing, and nut-cracking,” Kalan says. After all this work, the team showed that chimps living in areas most suffering from humans were 88 percent less likely to point out anybody of the 31 behaviors than those living within the most unaffected regions. “However we divided the info, we got an equivalent very obvious pattern,” Kalan says. It’s hard to prove a negative, though, and it’s always possible that the chimps were up to their old tricks without the team noticing. But the Pan African Programme team filmed the apes using camera traps, to capture behavior without disturbing the animals. It checked surely traditions by trying to find discarded tools or checking for specific foods among the apes’ poop. And it scored the chimps generously: albeit it only saw a specific behavior once, it recorded the behavior as being present. If anything, the new results underestimate the extent to which humans suppress chimpanzee cultures. Such suppression isn’t deliberate. Chimpanzees and other apes learn skills and customs from each other, and people chains of tradition depend upon having enough individuals to find out from. So when humans kill chimps for bushmeat, they aren’t just killing individuals—they also are destroying opportunities for the survivors to find out new things. once they fragment the forests during which chimps live, they’re stopping the flow of ideas between populations. The primatologist Carel van Schaik wrote about these problems in 2002 after studying orangutans, and he predicted then that “major traditional erosion is to be expected altogether great apes.” “I realized that testing the hypothesis would be extremely difficult,” van Schaik says, but “thanks to the gargantuan efforts by this team, we have the primary data, and that they appear to totally confirm the model. It’s a really impressive study.” And it’s worrying, he adds, because many of those cultural behaviors aren’t arbitrary. They’re adaptations, and their loss could push an already species even closer to extinction. No one knows whether the hemorrhage of chimp culture is getting worse. Few places have tracked chimp behavior over long periods, and people that have also are more likely to possess protected their animals from human influence. And “not all human impacts are an equivalent,” cautions Hobaiter, the University of St. Andrews primatologist. Clearing forests for vegetable oil is extremely different from sustainably employing a forest as a food source. The Pan African Programme team clumped many indicators of human presence into one metric, but teasing them apart is vital. “Long-term conservation approaches are only getting to be effective through the support and leadership of the local communities who live there,” Hobaiter says. In some cases, the presence of individuals might create new traditions to exchange those on the team’s list. In Bossou, Guinea, chimps have started drinking the wine that's fermented on palm trees. In other areas, they’ve taken to raiding human crops. “If you’re getting tons of energy from high-nutrition human foods, you don’t need to spend half your day breaking nuts,” Kalan says. There’s certainly evidence that chimps can adapt to the presence of humans—but can they innovate quickly enough to catch up on the loss of their old ways? Even if they will, isn’t that also a tragedy? We care about the loss of our own cultures. We work to document languages that are going extinct. We store old art in museums. We establish heritage sites to guard our cultural and historical treasures. It seems shortsighted—unimaginative, even—to be so concerned with our own traditions, but so blasé about those of our closest cousins, especially when we’ve barely begun to appreciate how rich their cultural landscape is often. Parts of that landscape could be lost before anyone realizes why it exists. In 2016, the Pan African Programme team reported that some West African chimpanzees habitually throw stones against an equivalent tree, creating buildups of rocks that are like human cairns. nobody knows why they are doing this. “We’re still investigating it,” Kalan says. “And we'd be running out of your time .” Other animals also are likely losing their ancestral knowledge at our hands. When poachers kill an elephant matriarch, they also kill her memories of hidden water sources and anti-lion tactics, leaving her family during a more precarious place. When moose and bighorn were exterminated from parts of the U.S., their generations-old awareness of the simplest migration routes died with them. Relocated individuals, who were meant to replenish the once-lost populations, didn’t know where to travel, then did not migrate. These discoveries mean that conservationists got to believe saving species during a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions also as bodies and genes. “Instead of focusing only on the conservation of genetically based entities like species, we now got to also consider culturally-based entities,” says Whiten, who made an identical argument last week during a paper co-written with many scholars of animal cultures. Kalan and therefore the Pan African Programme team even think that conservationists should recognize places connected with unique traditions as chimpanzee cultural-heritage sites. “When we encounter a nut-cracking site that’s been used for several generations, that site is a component of the cultural heritage of this one population of chimps,” Kalan says. an equivalent concept might apply to orangutans, whales, and other cultured creatures. “What we've learned about culture also can be applied to how we conserve animals,” Whiten adds. When people raised endangered whooping cranes in captivity, that they had to point out the naive birds the way to migrate by hopping into ultralight aircraft and showing them the way. “Where animals are to be reintroduced to areas during which they earlier became extinct, we've to form special efforts to reinstate the cultural knowledge they lost,”

Macroeconomics in Germany: The forgotten lesson of Hjalmar Schacht

Despite facing many of the same challenges, Germany’s current macroeconomic policy is substantially different to those of other countries, in part due to the economy legacy of Walter Eucken. This column considers the economic policy of Hjalmar Schacht, whose ‘MEFO-bills’ monetary solution ended the years of economic struggle caused by the Treaty of Versailles’ reparations commitments. By tying the bills to output, Schacht was able to stimulate output, and eliminate unemployment. This historical implication has clear modern-day implications, with parallels to ‘helicopter money’ policy and Italy’s recent ‘fiscal money’ proposal.

By Biagio Bossone, Stefano Labini 01 July 2016

In a very enlightening Vox column, Bofinger (2016) explains why the macroeconomic debate and macroeconomic policy in Germany differ so widely from other countries, despite the same academic textbooks and models being used as elsewhere. Bofinger traces the root of the difference to the deep influence the paradigm of macroeconomics developed by Walter Eucken (1891-1950) has had on the German formal theoretical apparatus, and to his living heritage. Eucken’s focus on balanced budgets, price stability and structural reforms, and especially his neglect of aggregate demand explain German economic policy in Germany as well as at the European level.

As Bofinger well characterises it, Eucken’s vision of the German economy was – and remains – one of a relatively small-open economy which relies on the rest of the world to sustain its aggregate demand. But what is rational for a small economy may turn out to be irrational for a large one.1 If Eucken’s vision epitomises the economic success of Germany, its underlying fallacy of composition exemplifies as much the failure of the Eurozone – a large economy that, thinking of itself as small, refuses to use its internal potential to propel growth, and yet it is too large to piggyback on the rest of the world, especially when the latter gets weak and slow. As a result, the Eurozone has deprived itself, and the world, of the full use of its very powerful economic engine, most notably when using it could prove beneficial to all.

Eucken’s paradigm – antipodal to Keynes’ – grew out of (and found support in) the dramatic experience of Germany with Nazism in the years 1933 to 1945. In displacing that experience from the collective psyche of the country after the war, and in the process of re-establishing the country’s political and intellectual foundations, it was natural for a re-born Germany to accept Eucken’s negative message on a supposedly direct line, running from the ‘full employment policy’ of the 1930s to price controls, rationing, a corporative structure of the labour market, and central planning.

Unfortunately, removing the Nazi experience and all that was associated with it also caused the complete disregard of another major German lesson, that of Hjalmar Schacht, the maker of the formidable German economic rebound from the depression of the 1930s. While initially a supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and serving in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, Schacht eventually developed serious concerns about German re-armament policy and its effect on the economy. He clashed with Hitler and was thus dismissed from his duties just before the beginning of the war. After the war, Schacht was tried at Nuremberg and was acquitted and cleared of all blame for rearmament and inflation. However, he was later tried and sentenced by a German denazification court to eight years in a work camp. Since then, nobody wanted to remember him, let alone rehabilitate his name, and his great lesson was all but forgotten.

Time should help us tell the good from the bad, out of even those very bad times. In any case, it is not our intention here to come to a judgement of Schacht’s political conduct, but simply to consider his policy programme for an economy trapped in deep depression with no fiscal space.

The economics of Hjalmar Schacht: A needed re-evaluation

In 1921, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, war reparation obligations upon Germany amounted to $33 billion. Keynes (1920) strongly criticised the Treaty. It did not include any plan to revamp the economy, and the punitive attitude and economic sanctions of the major powers against Germany, as he predicted, would lead to new conflicts and instabilities, instead of seeking to secure long-lasting peace. The reparations were in fact at the origin of the cataclysmic events that followed – from Weimar hyperinflation (1921-1923) to the dramatic austerity of the Bruning government (1930-1932). The resentment that all this created in the German people manifested itself in the huge support that Hitler’s National Socialism received in the whole country (Ruffolo and Sylos Labini 2012).

As Hitler rose to power, in January 1933 the economic situation in Germany was dire. Stocks of raw materials had been depleted, factories and warehouses lay empty, and about 6.5 million people (about 25% of the domestic workforce) were unemployed and on the verge of malnutrition, while the country was crushed by debt and its foreign exchange reserves approached zero.

Yet, from 1933-1938, thanks to Schacht, the economy recovered spectacularly (Figure 1).2 Schacht’s objective to jumpstart the moribund economy required money. But money was not available, since savings were inexistent and production was so restricted that savings would not accumulate (Schacht 1967). Neither could money be printed, since lending to the government would have put the Reichsbank at risk of losing control of monetary policy.

Schacht then contrived a brilliant unconventional monetary solution. For payments, state contractors and suppliers received bills of exchange issued by a company called ‘MEFO’.3 The MEFO-bills were state guaranteed, they could circulate in the economy and could be discounted by their holders at the Reichsbank in exchange for cash.

Figure 1 GDP growth and inflation in Germany and the Netherlands, 1922-1939

Schacht believed that the duty of the central bank was to make available to the economy as much money as necessary to facilitate output production. The issuance of bills of exchange was instrumental to this end – as each bill stood against the sale of newly produced goods, and each issue of money was based on the exchange of the new goods, central bank money issuance against bills could not be inflationary. Indeed, the employees of MEFO checked that every MEFO-bill issued was tied to a quantity of newly produced goods, and only bills issued against the sales of these goods were granted. This way, the circulation of money and the circulation of goods remained in equilibrium.4

The Reichsbank undertook to accept on demand all MEFO bills, irrespective of their size, number and due date, and to exchange them for money. The bills were discounted at a 4% interest rate. As such, they were given the character of interest-bearing money, and banks, savings banks, and firms could hold and use them exactly as if they were money. If all MEFO-bills had been presented for discount at once, inflation would have resulted. But this did not happen – making the bills both re-discountable and interest-bearing allowed for much of them to be absorbed by the market without going through the Reichsbank.5 Also, output responded remarkably well. State purchases fed into a growing demand for labour, and firms restarted investments using MEFO-bills as collateral for borrowing. Investments put additional manpower to work, and incomes and savings increased as a result, raising fiscal revenues (Guillebaud 1940).

In 1938, Schacht strongly urged terminating the MEFO programme, as full employment had been reached and the closing output gap was raising price tensions (Toniolo 1988).6 He clashed with Hitler on this, and on 19 January 1939 the Führer removed him from the Reichsbank.

Modernity of Schacht’s lesson

Such was the economic policy that allowed Germany to regain monetary sovereignty and finance its reconstruction in the interwar period – an ante litteram case of unconventional money-financed fiscal expansion. It enabled a national economy to exit a long and deep depression, and to attain non-inflationary full employment in a short span and with no use of price controls or rationing (Stucken 1953).7 In only five years, Schacht’s programme transformed a bankrupt state into Europe’s strongest economy (Emry 1982).

It is quite unfortunate that Schacht’s lesson was lost while Eucken’s paradigm carried the day. Schacht’s programme resembles a variation of the ‘helicopter money’ policy and its free-lunch effects (Bossone 2016), which several economists today consider an effective demand management tool for fiscally constrained economies trapped in deep depression.

The ‘fiscal money’ proposal launched in Italy by Cattaneo and others,8 whereby special Tax Credit Certificates would be issued by Eurozone crisis countries (in line with the EU fiscal rules) as quasi-money, claims that it would add to the economy’s purchasing power, stimulate output and employment growth, and raise fiscal revenues. It draws inspiration from Schacht’s MEFO-bills (although it also features important differences).

Bofinger’s (2016) contribution offers an excellent opportunity to contrast two important economic lessons from Germany. One – from Walter Eucken, still celebrated – has served Germany well but has proven dramatically unfit for Europe. The other – from Hjalmar Schacht, removed from memory – was a success, and should inspire Europe as it deals ineptly with its worst crisis since the 1930s.

References

Blanchard, O (2016), “How to Teach Intermediate Macroeconomics after the Crisis?”, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2 June

Bofinger, P (2016) “German macroeconomics: The long shadow of Walter Eucken,” VoxEU.org, 7 June

Bossone, B (2016), “Why Helicopter Money is a “Free Lunch”, EconoMonitor, June 6

Bossone, B, and M Cattaneo (2016), “New ways of crisis settlement: fiscal levers as tool to fight stagnation,” forthcoming

Bossone, B, M Cattaneo, E Grazzini and S Sylos Labini (2015), “Fiscal Debit Cards and Tax Credit Certificates: The best way to boost economic recovery in Italy (and other Euro Crisis Countries)”, EconoMonitor, 8 September

Bossone, B, M Cattaneo, L Gallino, E Grazzini and S Sylos Labini (2014), “Free fiscal money: exiting austerity without breaking up the euro”, Associazione Paolo Sylos Labini, 26 November

Emry, S (1982), “Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People,” Lord’s Convenent Church, America’s Promise Broadcast

Read also:Signs of a French Spring

Guillebaud, C W (1939), The Economic Recovery of Germany from 1933 to the Incorporation of Austria in March 1938, Macmillan and Co.

Keynes, J M (1920), The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York, Harcourt Brace

Mahe, E (2012), “Macro-economic policy and votes in the thirties: Germany (and The Netherlands) during the Great Depression”, Real-World Economics Review Blog, 12 June

Ruffolo, G, and S Sylos Labini (2012), Il film della crisi. La mutazione del capitalismo, Einaudi, Torino

Schacht, H H G (1967), The Magic of Money, Oldbourne, London

Stucken, R (1953), Deutsche Geld- und Kreditpolitik 1914 – 1953, Tübingen, Ed. Mohr

Toniolo, G (1988), Central banks’ independence in historical perspective, Berlin, De Gruyter

Endnotes

[1] “I was struck by how many times during the crisis I had to explain the ‘paradox of saving” – recalls Blanchard (2016) – “and fight the Hoover-German line, ‘reduce your budget deficit, keep your house in order, and don’t worry, the economy will be in good shape’”.

[2] In the initial phase, the recovery was not driven by the military industry and the output response was particularly strong. The leading industries were in the construction, automobile, and steel sectors. Thanks to the launch of large public works and the building of the country highway network, constructions recorded the fastest absorption rate of employment (209%), followed by the automobile industry (117%) and steel (83%).

[3] MEFO stood for Metallforschungsgesellschaft (Metal Research Company), a private empty-shell company with paid-up capital of 1 million marks. It was co-owned by Siemens, Gutehoffnungshutte, Rheisenstahl and Krupp, in whose names the bills were issued, so as not to weigh on the fiscal budget.

[4] Under Reichsbank regulation, the bills had 3-month maturity and could be renewed 19 times for a 5-year period. This was necessary since economic reconstruction would require a number of years.

[5] The bills became a sort of fiduciary money flowing between firms. They were used for 4 years and reached a volume of 12 billion marks by 1938.

[6] Schacht’s decision was also due to the fact that the conversion of MEFO-bills at the Reichsbank was putting pressure on the money supply, since banks were facing higher demand for loans while savings were drying up.

[7] The money created against the MEFO-bills issued did not produce the inflation that classical theory – then as much as now – would have predicted. Supply and demand grew in parallel, leaving prices unaltered.

[8] See Bossone et al. (2014). For a concise description of the proposal, see Bossone et al (2015). Fiscal money can be defined as “any claims, private or public, which the state accepts from holders to discharge their fiscal obligations either in the form of rebates on their full value (tax discounts) or as effective value transfers to the state (payments). Fiscal money claims would not be legal tender, and could not be convertible by the state in legal tender. However, they could be negotiable, transferable to third parties, and exchangeable in the market at par or below par with respect to their nominal value”. (Bossone and Catteneo 2016).

Published at https://voxeu.org/article/macroeconomics-germany-forgotten-lesson-hjalmar-schacht