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Stagflation is the best danger to Europe’s restoration

Stagflation is the greatest risk to Europe’s recovery

Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti told CNBC on Saturday that he believed the greatest threat to Europe’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic was “stagflation”.

Monti, now president of Bocconi University in Italy, said the “huge bulk” of central banks’ expansionary monetary policies and government fiscal incentives put in place to support economies amid the coronavirus pandemic “could well trigger more inflation.”

At the same time, Monti said there were “a number of restrictions on the flexibility of production” that needed to be increased.

Generally speaking, stagflation is when the rate of inflation is high, but economic growth is slowing and unemployment continues to rise.

The IHS Markit Flash Composite purchasing managers’ index for the euro zone, which tracks activity in manufacturing and services, hit a two-month low of 59.5 in August, compared with 60.2 in July. A value above 50 still means that economic activity is expanding, but many economists have suggested that dynamism in the region may slow down.

Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti will perform on “Porta a Porta” on October 11, 2018 in Rome, Italy.

Massimo Di Vita | Massimo Di Vita Archive | Mondadori portfolio | Getty Images

There are also concerns about the impact of supply chain problems from Asia affecting manufacturing in Europe, as well as the fact that higher wages could lead to inflationary pressures.

Speaking to CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the European House Ambrosetti Forum on Saturday, Monti said that economies, not just in the EU, may begin to experience elements of “stagflation”, similar to what happened in many countries in the 1970s.

As a result, Monti said it was “very important to manage this transition from a needed abundance of financial and financial support to a simpler situation with caution and in a coordinated manner.”

Preliminary data released on Tuesday showed that inflation in the eurozone hit a 10-year high in August, with consumer prices up 3% year over year.

The European Central Bank will hold its next policy meeting on September 9th to discuss the way forward for its asset purchase program. However, analysts told CNBC earlier this week that they expect the ECB to suspend its announcement of tapering its Covid stimulus measures until December.

– CNBC’s Silvia Amaro contributed to this report.

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Health

Fauci declares delta variant ‘best risk’ to the nation’s efforts to get rid of Covid

Fauci declares delta variant 'greatest threat' to the nation's efforts to eliminate Covid

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC on Tuesday, April 13, 2021.

Leigh Vogel | Bloomberg | Getty Images

White House senior medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday the highly contagious Delta variant is the “greatest threat” to the nation’s attempt to eradicate Covid-19.

Delta, which was first identified in India, now accounts for about 20% of all new cases in the United States, up from 10% about two weeks ago, Fauci said during a White House press conference on the pandemic.

He said Delta appears to be “following the same pattern” as Alpha, the variant first found in the UK, with infections doubling in the US about every two weeks.

“Similar to the UK, the Delta variant is currently the biggest threat in the US to our attempt to eliminate Covid-19,” he said.

Fauci’s comments come after CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday urged Americans to get vaccinated against Covid and said she expected Delta to become the dominant coronavirus variant in the United States

Studies suggest that it is about 60% more transmissible than alpha, which was more contagious than the original strain that emerged from Wuhan, China, in late 2019

“As worrying as this Delta strain is about its hypertransmittance, our vaccines are working,” Walensky told ABC’s Good Morning America. If you get vaccinated, “you will be protected against this Delta variant,” she added.

In the UK, the Delta variety recently became the dominant variety there, surpassing Alpha, which was first discovered in the country last fall. The Delta variant now accounts for more than 60% of new cases in the UK

Health officials say there are reports that the Delta variant also causes more severe symptoms, but that more research is needed to confirm these conclusions. However, there is evidence that the Delta strain may cause different symptoms than other variants.

Fauci said Tuesday the US had “the tools” to defeat the variant and urged more Americans to get fully vaccinated against Covid and “destroy the outbreak.”

The Biden administration said Tuesday that it is unlikely to meet President Joe Biden’s goal of getting 70% of American adults to receive one or more vaccinations by July 4th.

“In this case, two weeks after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, the effectiveness of the vaccines was 88% effective against Delta and 93% effective against Alpha when it comes to symptomatic diseases,” said Fauci, citing a study.

The World Health Organization said Friday that Delta is becoming the predominant variant of the disease worldwide.

On Monday, WHO officials warned that the variant was the fastest and strongest coronavirus strain to date and that it would “pick up” the most vulnerable people, especially in places with low Covid-19 vaccination rates.

It has the potential to be “more deadly because it is more efficient in the way it is transmitted between people, and it will eventually find those at risk who will become seriously ill, hospitalized and possibly die”, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Emergency Health Program, said during a news conference.

Delta has now spread to 92 countries, said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical director for Covid, on Monday. She said, “Unfortunately, we still don’t have the vaccines in the right places to protect people’s lives.”

WHO has urged wealthy nations, including the US, to donate cans. The Biden government detailed early Monday where it will be sending 55 million doses of vaccine, most of which will be distributed through COVAX, the WHO-supported immunization program.

“These vaccines are highly effective against serious illness and death. That is what they are intended for and that is what they must be used for,” said Van Kerkhove. “This is what COVAX and WHO and all of our partners have worked to ensure that these vaccines reach the most vulnerable people.”

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Entertainment

What Makes a French Comedy One of many Best Movies of All Time?

What Makes a French Comedy One of the Greatest Films of All Time?

Gateway Movies provides ways to explore directors, genres, and topics in the movie by examining some streaming movies.

Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” was first shown in 1939 and contains lists of the best films of all time so often that its ranking can also be difficult to explain. This French film doesn’t mess up the conventions of cinematic storytelling as radically as “Citizen Kane” did in 1941, nor does it have the obsessive bait that makes “Vertigo” so endlessly accessible. While part of the Renoir film’s reputation rests on its use of depth of field and long takes, it didn’t invent either technique – and camerawork alone isn’t why it endures.

But “The Rules of the Game” is one of the best balanced films: a film about discretion that is a model for it in every way. The opening credits call it a “dramatic fantasy,” but it’s not just drama, farce, or tragedy. It’s a manners comedy (although the introductory text specifically disapproves of this description) in which manners act as a scrim. Etiquette and pomp excuse the characters for being honest with matters of the heart, and may even blind them to the darkness of WWII.

“The Rules of the Game” was made in France when Hitler threatened Europe. In this context, Renoir’s comic criticism of a “society in decline” gets a touch of fear. The chaos and death of the final act seem more than convenient ways to end the trial.

“The rules of the game”: Stream it on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy. rent or buy it from Amazon, GooglePlay or Vudu.

In describing the diagram, only the surface is scratched. Aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) made the mistake of embarking on a grand romantic gesture: he is presented in France after a solo transatlantic flight with rival Charles Lindbergh. But after landing, he finds that Christine (Nora Gregor), the married woman he completed the flight for – and whose affection he likely overestimated – is not there to greet him. He vented his displeasure to a radio reporter, and Renoir showed Christine listening to the live broadcast. She and her husband Robert (Marcel Dalio), a marquis, discuss this soon after.

Why couldn’t André calmly accept his role as a national hero, asks his friend Octave (Renoir) shortly after André drove his car into a ditch? Obviously Christine couldn’t have appeared to greet him. “She’s a society woman,” says Octave, “and society has strict rules.” How the characters obey these rules – or rather, bend them without breaking them – becomes the film’s line of passage.

Robert understands how distraught André must feel. “He had risked his life,” says Robert Christine with a kind of dashing complacency. “How could you deny him that little token of affection?” Infidelity is not exactly frowned upon in the circles of the Marquis; He has continued with Geneviève (Mila Parély) in an affair that is widely whispered about. Still, he is moved to end the alliance because Christine unexpectedly showed him loyalty.

Robert and Christine’s concern about keeping up appearances has a caption: Everyone is perceived as an outsider – Robert for his Jewish heritage, which the servants make fun of when he is out of sight, and Christine for being the daughter of one prominent Austrian conductors and remove them from French society.

Octave, who grew up next to Christine in Salzburg and says he sees her as a sister, can move seamlessly between the worlds of the film. He persuades Robert to take André on a short break in the country. Robert admits that his wife and her admirer “may as well see and talk about each other”. Clearly, the only way to break the love triangle is to bring everyone among other members of high society close and show everyone how to do the right thing.

“The terrible thing about life is that everyone has their own reasons,” Octave told Robert after asking Robert to extend the invitation. It’s the most famous line in the film, and represents an idea that The Rules of the Game is committed to as both a dramatic principle – the film delights in highlighting its characters’ flaws and small moments of hypocrisy – and aesthetic Strategy.

In previous films, Renoir had experimented with depth of field, which made the foreground and background clearly visible at the same time. The device is used in all of the “rules” to subtly emphasize how characters react to their reasons as they watch or chase one another in the ornate rooms and hallways of a sprawling estate.

The film theorist André Bazin wrote that at the time of “Rules” the director “had uncovered the secret of a form of film that made it possible to say anything without breaking the world into small fragments that would reveal the hidden meanings of people and things without disturbing their natural unity. “Sudden camera movements – like the dolly that was recorded when Christine greets a rain-soaked André when he arrives at the castle – cut into slices like the most tender shivs.

The much-imitated centerpiece of the film is a lengthy hunting sequence in which the characters are superficially embroiled in posh physical violence (hunting rabbits and poultry) as they band together to commit equally cautious acts of emotional violence among themselves. André tells Jackie, Christine’s niece, who is interested in him, that he is not interested in her. Robert breaks off the affair with Geneviève, although Christine discovers her through binoculars and confirms the Dalliance.

The upper crust characters are not the only ones involved in delusions. Christine asks her married maid Lisette (the charming Paulette Dubost) about her lovers at an early age. Lisette soon starts flirting with a literal poacher (Julien Carette) who has pissed off Lisette’s rude husband, a gamekeeper (Gaston Modot). Class satire is nothing new to Renoir – in Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), a great next step if you want to explore his work further, a bookseller saves a tramp from suicide and quickly learns that no good deed goes unpunished.

But the tensions in “The Rules of the Game” – between rich and poor, between decency and libertinism, between order and pandemonium – are so refined that they are almost sui generis. The characters seem a little different each time they look at it, and there are few finals more devastating than the Marquis’ parting words as he invites his guests to hide from the cold.

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Entertainment

What Are the Best 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is Deciding

What Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is Deciding

But Warren is no fool. All of this genesis bears witness to some of the station’s older listeners “who grew up with WMMR”. He says the last 200 songs will represent a consensus between these ballots and that “No. 1 is by far number 1. “I wouldn’t let it spoil, what a consensus, but I wonder. Would that be what my friends, who are tired too, predict? “Ladder to Heaven”? “Born to Run”? Would Aretha Franklin perform her usual canonical role of bringing both Black America and women to the top of the pile? Didn’t anyone put the words “Sinead” and “O’Connor” on their ballot?

One compelling aspect of this countdown business is philosophical. With more than 2,000 songs, a certain percentage would likely always match the taste of XPN. Local acts like the Hooters, Amos Lee and Low Cut Connie are very present here. And believe it or not, “local” extends to Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, who had nearly 30 entries between them by Monday noon. But how would a countdown of the 2,020 greatest songs run, for example at WDAS, where the format is now old-school R&B and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” anchors the Am-Block? Power 99 used to have a nightly countdown show in which one song – Shirley Murdock’s “As We Lay” or Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” or Prince’s “Adore” – dominated for weeks. What would a more epoch-making company look like? Would WMMR find a way to move forward there too?

And what would the same countdown at a similar station in Anchorage or Montgomery or Chicago or the Bay Area reveal? Does it matter that some company sizes flattened the pop palette? Can a diagram still quantify local tastes? Would an accurate answer prove as annoying as accurate polling data, since we now partially live on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube? Is this whole process just too random and subjective to continue?

I agree no; it is not. I appreciate the folly, the surprises, the mind-boggling idea that a ranking process could put the number 1,995 next to something as heavenly as Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” and play another song after Ella Fitzgerald made “Mack the Knife” In Exciting Mass murder. I think “Brilliant Disguise” is a better Springsteen song than certain finalist “Born to Run” but no chart will ever reflect that because it’s a blasphemous position. But I like the drama of blasphemy and the certainty of what a diagram tells you: modernization is hard work. XPN is still a kaleidoscope.

It is true that you can create your own massive, perfectly tailored playlist. But you will miss the astonishment that Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” starts the 767-to-764 block and A Tribe Called Quest’s “scenario” tears it to pieces. It wouldn’t be a shock to hear Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne Regrette Rien” (1.093) follow Notorious BIG’s “Juicy” (1.094), which Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” had followed ”(1.095 ). There’s nothing wrong with Dan Fogelberg’s 40-year-old Same Auld Lang Syne, and he swears it’s the lonely ghost lurking on Taylor Swift’s two quarantine albums. Same thing – if you get up late enough – to hear XPN’s newbie Rahman Wortman go a little crazy and exclaim that Outkast’s “BO B (Bombs Over Baghdad)” actually made the cut.

And Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” and the Richard Harris travesty known as “MacArthur Park” certainly couldn’t be frightened. I suspect the people who voted for these two knew they were trolls. But it doesn’t matter. Even songs that are as confusing (well, so terrible) as they culminated in days and days from something we have become increasingly estranged from: word of mouth.