Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There is a kerfuffle underway about a statue called "fearless girl" recently installed in the financial district of Manhattan. It isn't the biggest of controversies, but it does have some symbolic significance, and there is a pragmatic lesson here about how markets work. http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2017/04/wheres-the-bear-.html#comments   Since 1989, the financial district has featured the "Charging Bull," a statue by Arturo Di Modica. He originally located it directly in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but it was subsequently moved to a small park in the neighborhood. In March of this year, a four foot tall bronze statue of a grade school aged girl (pigtails and billowing dress) standing in the path of the bull in the usual stance of defiance (legs spread, hands on hips, face forward toward the danger) made its appearance. Fearless Girl is sufficiently close to Charging Bull that they appear to be a single work , which has Di Modica ...

The Cyprus/bank/bailout story is big. Really big . Too much for me to handle in my own voice just now. So I'll just provide a few links, following chronological order, in this post and the next. The above photo is Cyprus' finance minister, Michael Sarris. By February 28, Cyprus was clearly 'next up,' the new center of the ever-shifting limelight in Europe's traveling crisis over banks and sovereign debts. The new president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, said that day that though Cyprus would have to negotiate terms of a bail-out, "no reference to a haircut on public debt or deposits will be tolerated." A big EU meeting in Brussels began on March 3d, and involved a good deal of discussion of the matters that Anastasiades had tried to wish off the table. Skipping ahead a bit ... by March 14th, EU officials, as well as those from the IMF, were in round-the-clock talks on a bail-out of Cyprus that would include a depositor sacrifice, known politel...