A State of Crisis: Macrobiotic Theory and the Production of Fukushima

In the face of the disaster and devastation wrought by both the tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown of March 11, 2011, everything from organizing to theorizing appears unable to go on as usual, encapsulated by the recurrence of the descriptor ‘shinsai-go.’ But for those living according to the macrobiotic health lifestyle philosophy, the crisis is fomented by this concept. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork with macrobiotic practitioners, I present that a macrobiotic narration of March 11, 2011, contrasts with a dominant one. Macrobiotic adherents cast the normality with which Fukushima would break as conditioning Fukushima-as-crisis – and the unwellness that results as endemic. The normality that is presumed by an idea of Fukushima as sudden crisis thus obfuscates, from a macrobiotic viewpoint, a larger, longer crisis. In this thesis, I demonstrate that wellness determines the timing and spacing of crisis in both dominant and macrobiotic narrations – but that the timing and spacing of a crisis changes with different definitions of wellness. Specifically, those living macrobiotically practice a pointed critique of dominant society’s wellness as about the capacity to be productive. I argue herein that the timing and spacing for a macrobiotically imagined crisis is the nation-state, precisely because the means by which the nation-state is continually produced through bodies are figured as causal of unwellness. I contend that a macrobiotic narration of the state as produced through ideas and practices of productivity – ones which are making people unwell from a macrobiotic perspective – informs a set of practices that seek (macrobiotically imagined) wellness as a refusal to be productive under a dominant rubric

Estimating Bank Trading Risk: A Factor Model Approach

Risk in bank trading portfolios and its management are potentially important to the banks%u2019 soundness and to the functioning of securities and derivatives markets. In this paper, proprietary daily trading revenues of 6 large dealer banks are used to study the bank dealers%u2019 market risks using a market factor model approach. Dealers%u2019 exposures to exchange rate, interest rate, equity, and credit market factors are estimated. A factor model framework for variable exposures is presented and two modeling approaches are used: a random coefficient model and rolling factor regressions. The results indicate small average market exposures with significant but relatively moderate variation in exposures over time. Except for interest rates, there is heterogeneity in market exposures across the dealers. For interest rates, the dealers have small average long exposures and exposures vary inversely with the level of rates. Implications for aggregate bank dealer risk and market stability issues are discussed.

In the shadow of the ICC: Colombia and international criminal justice

The report of the expert conference examining the nature and dynamics of the role of the International Criminal Court in the ongoing investigation and prosecution of atrocious crimes committed in Colombia. Convened by the Human Rights Consortium, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the School of Advanced Study, University of London University of London, 26–27 May 2011

Deposit insurance, bank incentives, and the design of regulatory policy

This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 6, "The role of capital regulation in bank supervision." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new century.Deposit insurance ; Bank investments ; Bank supervision ; Bank capital

Universal Properties of Galactic Rotation Curves and a First Principles Derivation of the Tully-Fisher Relation

In a recent paper McGaugh, Lelli, and Schombert showed that in an empirical plot of the observed centripetal accelerations in spiral galaxies against those predicted by the Newtonian gravity of the luminous matter in those galaxies the data points occupied a remarkably narrow band. While one could summarize the mean properties of the band by drawing a single mean curve through it, by fitting the band with the illustrative conformal gravity theory with fits that fill out the width of the band we show here that the width of the band is just as physically significant. We show that at very low luminous Newtonian accelerations the plot can become independent of the luminous Newtonian contribution altogether, but still be non-trivial due to the contribution of matter outside of the galaxies (viz. the rest of the visible universe). We present a new empirical plot of the difference between the observed centripetal accelerations and the luminous Newtonian expectations as a function of distance from the centers of galaxies, and show that at distances greater than 10 kpc the plot also occupies a remarkably narrow band, one even close to constant. Using the conformal gravity theory we provide a first principles derivation of the empirical Tully-Fisher relation.Comment: 6 pages, 15 figures. The paper is a comment on S. S. McGaugh, F. Lelli, and J. M. Schombert, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 201101 (2016). Updated to include a first principles derivation of the Tully-Fisher relation using the conformal gravity theory. Submitted to Physics Letters