May You Live in Interesting Times: Does the CityHome Represent the Architecture of Cheap Money?

One of the largely-unheralded casualties of the most recent property bubble in both the United Kingdom and the United States is a group whose relative lack of access to the corridors of power often sees it ignored by policymakers: young adults. With prices for housing – whether rented or purchased – long in parodic territory in metropolises such as London and New York, the lack of posited solutions for such an obvious problem is one of the genuine intellectual disappointments of the twenty-first century. Well-intended proposals such as microflats – tiny apartments that seem designed for large rodents rather than anything approaching a humanoid – have only served to highlight the lack of imagination evident in addressing this crisis; many young professionals have turned to internal or external migration as the only viable exit.

It was with this in mind that our CSO was struck by a novel form of housing being formulated at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (‘MIT Media Lab’). The CityHome is an 840ft² property the main room of which – via the use of robotic walls, appliances and furniture – can transform into any number of large rooms at the flick of a switch. One minute it can be a large dining room with space for up to fourteen people; the next, a home gym; the next, a large kitchen. While the project is still very much under development and its limitations for anything other than one-person occupancy are clear, the massive corporate underwriting of the MIT Media Lab means that should the construction industry find this idea a winner, CityHomes could soon be making their way into a newly-constructed apartment block near you.

As brilliant an idea as it is, however, the CityHome does not address the ultimate question of its own perceived necessity. Would there be any need for such electronic ingenuity in the event of a simple rise in interest rates which would end subsidised money and rebalance the housing market? As red ink soaks the balance sheets of financial institutions in both the great financial centres of the last century, it seems almost churlish to ask.

From Friends to Two Broke Girls: Is American Popular Culture Adjusting to Tougher Times?

Throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s, Mediolana’s CSO had to blag his way through a whole series of pop culture conversations, but none so often as the one about Friends; he still hasn’t got round to seeing a single complete episode of the 236 that were made over the ten years of the iconic NBC sitcom’s original run. However, such was the total penetration of that programme’s cultural impact that our CSO could more or less survive a Friends-themed interaction, winging it via references to the popular ladies’ haircut the series inspired, observations on the similarity between names of Lisa Kudrow and Barcelona striker Meho Kodro, and ironic musings about whether life in New York City was really that glamorous for most people, most of the time.

Fast forward to the 2010s and an epoch when Asad Yawar has finally carved out forty-four minutes in his weekly schedule to watch an American sitcom, and the scene could not be more different: indeed, the café-based situation comedy of the zeitgeist is not Friends or even the seemingly ageless Seinfeld, but Two Broke Girls, a bleak take on life in post-developed Brooklyn. The promising premise sees underclass waitress Max Black (Kat Dennings) joined in an Asian-owned establishment by Caroline Wesbox Channing (Beth Behrs), a dethroned socialite and alumnus of Pennsylvania business school Wharton whose fortune (along with those of much of the city’s wealthier denizens) has disappeared in her father’s ponzi-scheme.

But Two Broke Girls is about much more than two obviously-contrasting personalities and the rich opportunities for comedic material that this presents. Indeed, in its scripts there is more than a hint or two of a mirror to American society and the direction in which is has travelled:

1. From the Waited-on to the Waiting-on. Of course, Central Perk was a Starbucksesque environment where customers are at least encouraged to – using the technical term – bus their own trash, but there was no mistaking the awe with which the collective global audience was meant to behold the shiny-haired mob that constituted the ‘gang’ of Friends. Conversely, in the Williamsburg Diner, restaurant patrons have an at best ambivalent status, with the ‘stars’ of the show being the overworked, behind-schedule and regularly victimised entry-level staff.

2. Cynicism. Friends was not a series to which the ‘postmodern’ tag applied, at least until the main protagonists became so ludicrously famous that every episode ended up breaking the fourth wall whether it wanted to or not. The NYC of 2 Broke Girls, however, is a conurbation that has been chewed up and spat out by a decade more of dizzying and still-increasing inequality and societal breakdown – Max’s comment that sleeping with a knife in her hand is the best home security system she can afford is barely ironic.

3. Post-Dream. The intrepid pair of waitresses create meaning in their lives by dreaming of, and eventually working towards, opening their own cupcake shop, but well into season 2 it is apparent that if this is going to happen at all it will happen on credit. In the interim, the title characters are left to inhabit a world of predatory men, linguistic vulgarity and emotional distance – with the American Dream having exited stage left while no one, seemingly, was looking.

Mind the Gap: GCT Celebrates Centennial; US ‘Falling Out of Love’ With Railroads

Iconic New York City transportation hub handles 0.75m passengers daily; symbolic of early 20th century, railroad-defined United States #USA—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) February 02, 2013

America has only one short high-speed line, connecting #Boston and #WashingtonDC; #China network c.18,000 kms by 2016 tinyurl.com/bg2mkzz—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) February 02, 2013

Which Central Bank Wants to Be a Trillionaire? Twelve-Zero Coin Signals US Economy’s Stretch into Infinity

For many years, the subject of the national debt of the United States had more percipient commentators wonder – sometimes even aloud – whether they actually know anything about anything. How can what is nominally the world’s most powerful country run an exponentially-increasing deficit that is public knowledge – indeed, prominently displayed on a dedicated clock (which, ironically, has run out of digits) in New York City’s Times Square – and yet not experience a proportionate decrease in domains such as international prestige or perceived credit-worthiness?

Recent years, however, have seen the formerly invincible one-time ‘hyperpower’ begin to resemble an all-too-human entity: the summer of 2011 saw the United States flirt with outright default, with China’s Xinhua news agency giving the US government a very public dressing-down; towards the end of 2012, the term ‘fiscal cliff’ entered the global public’s consciousness in an unforgettable manner. Now, with the American administration once again engaged in the governmental equivalent of rummaging round the back of the sofa for a bit of spare change – a fiscal ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre’ looks to be on the cards – a proposal has been floated for the US Treasury to create a trillion dollar (US$1,000,000,000,000.00) platinum coin and deposit it with the Federal Reserve in exchange for the same value of loans.

Technically, the coin would be issued as a commemorative one, a process permitted by a hitherto obscure 1997 law – and therefore an ingenious stratagem to circumvent the need for the United States Congress to agree to an additional trillion dollars of debt. But while a wonderfully convenient method for the executive to get their paws on a pile of ‘free’ cash, we at Mediolana have some doubts as to whether this is a viable path:

1. Democracy? The idea that the US Treasury could bypass the elected Congress in such a brazen fashion does nothing to augment already-tarnished American claims to be a democratic exemplar.

2. A Bad Impression. Creating a trillion dollars out of thin air by coin seignorage is, to put it mildly, on the desperate side; that it is being seriously contemplated gives the watching world the perception of a country which is running out of viable ideas faster than most would wish to accept.

3. A Concerning Pattern. The United States seems to be lurching from one financing crisis to another with increasing frequency, with not even close to one quarter having passed since the sighting of the ‘fiscal cliff’. How its creditors react to this trend may well define the present epoch.

Lights, Camera, Structural Adjustment: Art Imitates #DSK

Gerard #Depardieu and Isabelle #Adjani to star as Mr and Mrs Dominique Strauss-Kahn in #IMF-inspired thriller tinyurl.com/73ma9m3 #IMFgate—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) February 06, 2012

Debt @ 1000% of GDP = The United Kingdom’s Lost Generation

The 1990s in Japan is now known worldwide as a ‘lost decade‘ (‘Ushinawareta Jūnen‘) for what was at the time the world’s second largest economy – and the biggest creditor of the global hyperpower, the United States. A collapsing asset bubble  led to a crash in the stock market; the ensuing debts that had been run up during the era of gold leaf sushi turned bad, and the Japanese have been struggling to rid themselves of the shadow of indebtedness which has throttled economic growth in the Land of the Rising Sun ever since.

So what exactly is one to make of this recent graph - produced by Haver Analytics for Morgan Stanley, the global financial services firm headquartered at 1585 Broadway in New York City - comparing debt levels across a range of advanced economies?

As can be seen from the graphical representation, Japan’s debt – a huge percentage of its GDP – is nevertheless dwarfed by that of the United Kingdom: weighing in at just shy of 1,000% of the nation’s gross domestic product, it is literally peerless in the context of the great global debt game; intriguingly, a huge chunk of the UK’s liabilities are not government debts, but obligations owed by the financial sector. At the other end of the spectrum, nations such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy relatively less alarming positions, with Australia’s low level of government debt particularly enviable.

After some contemplation, we at Mediolana have reached the following conclusions from this sobering data:

1. A Lost Generation? The idea that the United Kingdom could be facing anything other than – at the very least – a lost decade must now be consigned to the designer recycle bin of history. The absolute level of debt that exists within the economy means that nothing other than economic collapse is possible, though whether it is gradual or sudden is yet to be determined. The fact that the United Kingdom of today does not possess anything like Japan’s scientific clout of the 1990s – nor its world class brands - means that there is no equivalent cushion to keep the economy ticking over, either; a lost generation, rather than a lost decade, may be the country’s fate.

2. Who Pays? The green part of the UK debt bar – constituting around two-thirds of the obligations – are those owed by the City of London and its relevant associates. Ordinarily, this would be a bad scenario – the collapse of banks and financial institutions more generally is hardly pleasant – but within the specific context of the United Kingdom, this state of affairs could prove catastrophic. The reason is that even since the onset of the present financial crisis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer – regardless of political hue – has not hesitated to write out cheque after cheque in an attempt to restore the banking sector to health; if this policy is continued, the United Kingdom could end up following the Japanese example of bailing out zombie institutions to the point of general economic implosion.

3. The Recapitalisation of Capitalism. It is clear that even allowing for the nerve-wracking examples of the UK and Japan, the developed world in general is still far, far too dependent on debt – as opposed to savings – for its day-to-day economic functioning. From Scandinavia to North America, easy borrowing, rather than fiscal discipline, is the norm. Capitalism cannot work sustainably under such conditions: the only result will be debt cycles of ever-increasing velocity. There is much soul-searching to do both in the corridors of power and amongst ordinary citizens.

Clarissa Now and Internships: It Really Does Explain Them All

It seems almost impossible to imagine now, but there was a time when Melissa Joan Hart was – at least in the minds of we at Mediolana – not associated with the Reaganite ideology that she today espouses, but instead as the central character in one of the best series never to be made: CBS’s Clarissa Now (‘CLAN’). A sequel to Nickelodeon’s hit Clarissa Explains It All - in which Hart starred as Clarissa Darling, an Ohio adolescent with a questionable taste in fashion – the 1995 pilot episode for CLAN featured the future teenage witch as an intern at the New York Star Chronicle, a fictional newspaper that bears more than a resemblance or two to the inside of some of the less salubrious media rooms we’ve had the dubious pleasure of inhabiting.

In her first day at the office, Darling experiences some of the delights of internship in the Anglosphere: getting squeezed out of her seat on the decrepit, delay-generating New York Subway (substitute London Underground) by selfish fellow commuters; finding that she has not been allocated a desk or computer; and discovering that the senior journalist to whom she officially reports is a cynical hack who can only be coerced into something approaching normal human functionality through being threatened with the cancellation of his column.

The world of the intern as depicted (at least for the most part) in CLAN chimes with the experiences of all too many interns in the workplaces of today. Two 2011 pieces from the Financial Times – Hard work doesn’t always pay and Internships: ordeal or opportunity? – paint a particularly bleak picture of the life of the company apprentice. Chronically overworked and/or underpaid, a vast number of interns are exploited on a seismic scale: Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little, notes that there are 500,000 unpaid interns in the United States which effectively constitute a US$2bn annual subsidy to corporate America. Indeed, the business model of some companies is so impoverished that without armies of interns manning their desks in lieu of secure full-time employees, they would go bust virtually overnight.

So how should the present generation of students view internships? In our view: with caution. Without doubt, internships are still remarkably valuable if one is gunning for a position in a low-trust industry which only rarely adds any compelling social value, such as banking, corporate law or finance; in these frequently paranoid sectors, familiarity is one of the greatest assets that any potential employee can bring to the table. But if one has no particular desire to be a cog in a collapsing machine which will not hesitate to dispose of any ‘excess’ parts at a moment’s notice, then the real value of internships is in picking up skills, life experience and contacts to utilise in one’s own endeavours: a less glamorous path, but perhaps ultimately the only viable one.

Alessio Rastani on 2012: ‘The System as we Know it is Going to Collapse’

It’s difficult for most people to recollect an era when the future seemed to be so uncertain, but whatever happens in as yet unelapsed time, we at Mediolana cannot be accused of ignoring the phenomenon that is Alessio Rastani, director of the London-based company Santoro Projects Limited who was catapulted to global stardom this autumn via an instant classic of a BBC News interview. Rastani – who has since featured more times on national and international television than even we can chronicle – is looking increasingly visionary; his observation that ‘governments don’t rule the world: Goldman Sachs rules the world’ has taken on the status of life imitating art as ‘Super Mario’ Monti and Lucas Papademos – both heavily connected with the investment banking and securities behemoth of 200 West Street in New York City – are now respectively in charge of troubled eurozone economies Italy and Greece.

This past Saturday, Rastani outlined a new dimension to his thought at the Bank of Ideas (‘BAI’), an impromptu educational facility that was only inaugurated on 19th November 2011; the BAI is located in an abandoned UBS AG building on the fringes of the City of London. Rastani’s main talk was, as usual, perceptive and honest. He pulled no punches in telling his audience that Wall Street would always defeat them as long as it could manipulate the general public’s ignorance of all matters financial and play on human irrationality; meanwhile, Rastani’s exhortation that people should stop wasting their lives obsessing over reality television shows and soap operas was a call that is as salient as it is unlikely to be heeded, at least in the short-term.

Yet the truly striking – and troubling – development in Rastani’s burgeoning theoretical corpus was articulated not so much during his talk, but whilst waiting to enter the building at Sun Street, Hackney: chatting to some fans, Caffè Nero cup in hand, the amiable Italo-Iranian noted that the state of play in the financial markets ‘is a lot worse than people can actually imagine’, and that soon – perhaps as soon as January, 2012 – ‘people are going to have to realise that the entire system as we know it is going to collapse‘.

This particular strand of Rastani’s thought is disturbing, but not because we think that one of the world’s most famous independent traders is incorrect on this count; quite the reverse is in fact the case, and it is this that perplexes us. During his main talk, Rastani cited the example of MF Global (‘MFG’), a financial services provider that is now in the death spiral of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and liquidation. Facing the inevitable fallout from gigantic bad bets made on European sovereign debt, it appears that MFG heisted hundreds of millions – perhaps billions – of dollars from customer accounts. But, incredibly, these same customers are facing serious obstacles to legal redress, with the judge in their case at the Manhattan Bankruptcy Court refusing their request to form a committee to represent them while, at the same time, ex-MFG CEO Jon Corzine – the man who oversaw this fiscal and ethical meltdown – walks free. As Rastani warns us, this is a sobering precedent – and one the general population would do well to contemplate.

NYC ♥s #OWS!

67% of New York voters agree with #OWS – and 87% support the movement's right to camp out in Lower Manhattan tinyurl.com/66og3tr #USA #USSR—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) October 17, 2011

Are Three Dimensions Enough? 4D Cinema Debuts in South Korea

CJ 4DPlex cinema in Seoul vaunts special effects such as wind, fog and relevant odours; 4D Multiplex in New York to come tinyurl.com/6lc8jsb—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) July 13, 2011