Word: 1920s
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...Various 1920s and '30s New York high-rises are represented in photos, ironwork and hunks of decoration - especially Rockefeller Center, the 22-acre (nine hectare) living museum of Art Deco that lies 52 blocks due south of the exhibit. The French government, not coincidentally, was one of the center's first tenants. Indeed, France fell in love with the skyscraper, and the show includes plans for (mercifully unbuilt) Parisian versions that somehow lacked the energy of their New York counterparts...
...architecture is frozen music, as Goethe aphorized, then jazz is Art Deco on ice. France adored that American musical invention and especially Josephine Baker, the black American singer and dancer who electrified the Paris jazz scene in the 1920s. Her sleek, exotic beauty is on display in Art Deco - influenced posters, paintings, advertisements and fabrics, plus a film loop of her doing an athletic shimmy...
First it was Wall Street that was in trouble. Then Main Street. Now, the nightmare is approaching Elm Street. Even in my relatively placid little corner of the world - a leafy, middle-class, middle-American neighborhood with two- and three-bedroom brick and stone homes built in the 1920s and '30s - it is hard not to feel jittery as 2009 begins...
Chances are you can't name a single central banker from the 1920s, but in their day, they were quite the celebrities, even giving false names when traveling by ocean liner in order to dodge the press. These were the men who - in the wake of WW I and the economic destruction it wrought - returned the world to the gold standard, used interest rates to bolster the value of currencies and let stock speculation run rampant. In short, they helped lay the groundwork for the Great Depression. In Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, investment manager Liaquat...
...worry is that in the 1920s, the banking system in the U.S. was about $50 billion, which was about 50% of GDP. The banking system and the shadow banking system now are about 150% of GDP. In Britain it's 350% of GDP. The worry is that the financial system has become so large relative to the size of central banks that we've created something of a Frankenstein. No one really knows whether we can handle a financial system that...