Living its Strange Life A literary biography of Margery Latimer from the archives in 18 scenes

Portage, Wisconsin is a place defined by passing through it. It was once a major hub of passage, via river and canal, from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. Today, the town, home to just over 10,000 people, is little more than a distant suburb of the state capital, Madison, 35 miles to the south. On the drive up 91-North, billboards advertise Ho-Chunk casinos, water parks in the Wisconsin Dells, and the world’s largest Culver’s, a fast-food chain famous for its frozen custard. There are numerous roadside attractions: outside a gas station, a life-sized statue of a pink elephant wearing horn-rimmed glasses; on the roof of a cheese shop, a giant mouse, nibbling a hole-riddled block of cheese. These advertisements are pleas for drivers, on their way to somewhere else, to pull off the highway and stay for a while. Yet in this seemingly placid place there unfolded a revelatory literary and social struggle of the early 20th century. The key players were Margery Latimer, a modernist writer, her mentor, Zona Gale, a progressive writer, and Latimer’s husband, Jean Toomer, a spiritual teacher of the Gurdjieff movement and modernist writer, best remembered for his masterpiece of African American Literary Modernism, Cane (1923). Gale and Latimer were both born and buried in Portage. Toomer’s presence triggered the town\u27s most infamous scandal. All three profoundly shaped the town through their short stories, novels, and essays, which sought to contain and comprehend its essence

The Career Does Not Love You Back : Impacts of Contingent Employment on Workers, Cultural Heritage Institutions, and the Archival Profession

This article reports the findings of the 2021 New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study, which comprised a survey with eighty-three valid responses, fifteen interviews, and analysis of 250 job postings. The study found that although contingent employment often provides useful professional experience and mentorship, it can negatively impact archival workers due to low pay, inadequate benefits, and short term lengths. Additionally, many experience low morale and isolation due to their contingent status, and the inherent instability of contingent employment causes some to feel that they have little control over their careers and personal lives. Cross-tabulation analysis revealed that new professionals have more contingent positions than their mid-career and late-career counterparts, suggesting that contingent jobs and the challenges of protracted contingent employment have become more prominent over time. Participants were concerned that relying on contingent employment negatively affected their employers, particularly in terms of morale, high rates of staff turnover, institutional memory, and unstable funding. The study also documented perceived effects on the broader archival field, including causing burnout and attrition of archival workers; hampering efforts to recruit and retain a diverse profession; devaluing archival education and labor; perpetuating the reliance on unsustainable funding models; and preventing the development of robust, innovative, and inclusive professional communities. Using the study data and other research in the professional literature, the authors argue that there is an urgent need to address the issues raised in the study by improving working conditions for contingent workers and broadly reassessing the profession’s relationship with contingent labor

Lessons Learned: Bo Lundgren

Bo Lundgren was Sweden’s cabinet minister for fiscal and financial affairs from 1991 to 1994, making him a key leader in managing the nation’s severe financial crisis during those years. Lundgren had a decades-long political career as a member of the Swedish Parliament from 1975 to 2004, was leader of the Moderate Party (1999–2003), and vice president of the European People’s Party in the European Union. He also served from 2004 to 2013 as director general of the Swedish National Debt Office, the country’s central financial agency. Drawing on his experiences in the Swedish crisis, Lundgren has shared his views with US and Irish government panels examining the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis and the European debt crisis that followed. He has also written a book about the Swedish crisis. This summary is based on a Lessons Learned interview held in May 2022

Austria: Heta Asset Resolution Restructuring, 2015

Hypo Alpe Adria (HAA) was Austria’s sixth-largest bank by assets at the time of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009. HAA pursued a growth strategy in southeastern Europe in the years preceding the GFC—emboldened liability guarantee from the Austrian state of Carinthia—which proved troublesome for HAA’s loan portfolio and led to large write-downs in autumn 2008. From December 2008 to April 2014, Austria provided EUR 5.8 billion in total capital injections—during which time the government nationalized HAA. Per European Commission (EC) authorization of State Aid, Austria had to submit a restructuring plan, which the EC approved in September 2013. The restructuring plan called for three parts: (1) the sale of HAA’s Austrian subsidiary, (2) the sale of HAA’s southeastern European network, and (3) the creation of an asset management vehicle, Heta Asset Resolution AG (Heta), to liquidate what remained. Heta faced ongoing challenges. In March 2015, the Financial Market Authority (FMA) issued a resolution decree for Heta after an asset quality review revealed a capital shortfall. The FMA imposed a temporary moratorium on Heta’s liabilities until May 2016 to provide an opportunity to value assets and deploy the bail-in tool under the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive. Heta’s creditors challenged the use of bail-in, given Carinthia’s guarantee. In September 2016, Carinthia offered creditors zero-coupon bonds, resulting in a 10% haircut for senior creditors and a 55% haircut for junior creditors in 2016; however, over the following year, most creditors accepted a government offer to buy back their zero-coupon bonds with an additional 5% haircut. Because asset sales went better than expected, the FMA declared that the resolution of Heta was complete on December 21, 2021, two years ahead of schedule. Legacy senior creditors received additional compensation. The Austrian federal government had EUR 6.5 billion in net losses with regard to the recapitalization of HAA and later resolution of Heta; the Carinthian state also lost EUR 1.2 billion from its guarantee. The bail-in cost legacy creditors about EUR 2.1 billion

YPFS Lessons Learned Oral History Project: An Interview with Ádám Banai

The Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS) interviewed Ádám Banai regarding his time as an analyst and director of the National Bank of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Bank, or MNB) during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and in the subsequent era to date

Technology and the Global Economy

Interpreting individual heterogeneity in terms of probability theory has proved powerful in connecting behaviour at the individual and aggregate levels. Returning to Ricardo\u27s focus on comparative efficiency as a basis for international trade, much recent quantitative equilibrium modeling of the global economy builds on particular probabilistic assumptions about technology. We review these assumptions and how they deliver a unified framework underlying a wide range of static and dynamic equilibrium models