Monthly Archives: April 2017

The true testof whether or not your job is vital to the sustenance of the national economy is if you come home in a bad mood after a day of work and your kids ask if interest rates are bothering you. Dr. Lael Brainard 83 finds time to help determine the countrys optimal monetary policy, ameliorate employment hierarchies that skew away from underrepresented groups, and most importantly, cheer on her three daughters.

c/o The Federal Reserve Board

The decorated alumna is currently serving as a member of the United States Federal Reserves Board of Governors. She last worked under President Barack Obama as Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury from 2010 to 2013 and Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury in 2009.

I am very mission-driven and I really care about economic opportunity, Americas role in the world, and this role as a force for good, said Dr. Brainard. The extent to which our country displays the true American Dream is being supported by policies, that people should not be held back by where they were born, or what schools are in their neighborhood, or how much wealth their parents had, or whether their parents were immigrants, or the color of their skin. I am cognizant that the field that I chose when I chose it was very male-dominated. As Ive progressed in my career I have tried to create more diverse opportunities for others at senior levels, from a gender, ethnic, and racial perspective. I want to give back and help younger people make their way in this arena.

Dr. Brainard discussed her career and what days are like as a member of the U.S. Federal Reserves Board of Governors.

There is really no average day, said Dr. Brainard. On a day that we have an FOMC meeting, or a scheduled Federal Open Market Committee meeting, where we determine monetary policy, generally we all start the day in the very large, historical boardroom, which has a big map of the Federal Reserve Districts on the wall. Each of us sits in a designated seat, the board members each have their names printed on the backs of the chairs, and it is extremely formal. Every word we say is transcribed and will be released five years after the date of the meeting. People are a bit cautious in terms of the observations that they make.

We start the meetings with people from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York telling us what the financial markets look like and then we hear about the economy, and then we go around and talk about our own views of the economy, she said. Generally, the Chair summarizes and the setting for the monetary policy discussion usually follows. During that portion of the meeting, we go around the table and talk about what we think is the right course for monetary policy and the right setting for interest rates. At the end of this period, we all vote very formally, and then the result is released to the public.

Joining the Fed has forced Dr. Brainard to be much more selective with her word choice, especially in the public sphere.

That definitely has a way of making us much more cautious about what we say in the public arena, she said. We recognize that financial markets are extremely sensitive to news of any sort on the policy front. It does make us need to calibrate our words very, very carefully. With regard to how they might be heard, and what kind of conclusions investors might be drawing about the future of the economy, it is incumbent on us to be as transparent as we possibly we can. This is so the public understands the factors that are influencing each of our individual thought processes as we think about the appropriate calibration of monetary policy.

Dr. Brainard explained that being stuck inside of a boardroom is not the only part of her job description. Another is traveling to help bona fide people in sticky situations.

Another kind of day is where I go out to a part of the country where our community development staff is working with local institutions and local community development organizations to try to improve economic development and access to financial services for capital for small businesses, underserved communities, and communities that dont traditionally receive the help they need, she said. I went to El Paso, to a border area, with our staff from the El Paso branch of the Dallas Fed.

We spent the day talking to families who were struggling to be able to secure mortgages on their land, and who generally have pretty challenging living conditions, based on their earned income, she said. It was a rewarding day that resulted in a new house being made available on an affordable basis to a single mother who was struggling with cancer and living in a trailer with rusted out floors and no air conditioning. There are days when I am out and about, trying to understand how Americans of all different types are experiencing the economy in a very granular way.

The way Dr. Brainard views the economy is shaped by her childhood experiences, which are not typical in the slightest.

I lived overseas for my entire childhood both in Communist Poland and Germany before reunification, she said. From that experience, I took away two things. One, the power of economic dynamism, markets in propelling forward economies, and using peoples great ideas to improve the quality of our lives and build better futures for us. In the Poland I saw as a young child, individual initiative was stymied at every turn. There were very high rates of suicide and alcoholism. The parts of the economy that flourished the most, the farm and small business sectors, had the least amount of red tape and the greatest role for individual initiative. The second thing is the capacity for our country, America, to be a beacon of hope for other countrys aspirations, but only when we as a nation embrace our own challenge to make sure that the American Dream is alive and well, and that all people who work hard can have opportunities to make a better life for themselves and their children.

c/o Japan Times

Operating monetary policy is no easy feat, as the meter for evaluating the ideal indicator is ever changing.

We are an organization that operates under the guidance in statute that Congress gives us, she said. Our job is to pursue maximum employment and stable prices. Stable prices in todays economy have been defined as two percent inflation. That makes it pretty clear-cut in terms of what are we are supposed to achieve. That is where the economy can grow in a sustainable way. It gets complicated because the nature of the economy changes over time, and the financial markets are extremely dynamic. You may find the same interest rate settings have very different effects on employment and inflation in different decades, which makes it complex, interesting, and quite challenging.

The instances when the Federal Reserve Governors are relied on the most are clearly in times of economic downturn.

At moments of extreme financial stress, monetary policy using interest rates alone, may not be able to get the economy back on its feet with credit flowing again and small businesses being able to restock their inventories and hire workers the things we need to make the economy vibrant, she said. Until recently interest rates have been near zero. At moments of extreme stress, it is important for polilcymakers to think outside the box, which is why we saw a much more complicated and innovative set of policies being implemented at the height of the financial crisis.

For some without a background in economics, Dr. Brainard discussed some of the basic causes of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

This is going to be like the Great Depression, where historians and economists write about it for decades to come, she said. It is probably too early to know what really mattered the most, but clearly the mortgage arena became unmoored. People were making mortgages based on no documentation, giving people with lower incomes mortgages they couldnt possibly afford. They were doing it because there was this massive machine whereby people who were making those credit decisions didnt actually have to live with their consequences. These bad mortgages would be sold, sliced up, packaged, and resold so that investors had no clue of any of the risk involved.

Layered on top of that there were increasingly international wholesale financial markets which are built on a set of trust relationships, she said. Once confidence and trust started to erode with one or two financial institutions essentially moving close to the edge of the abyss, everyone started withdrawing funds in a rush to get out first, and we saw a run on the wholesale financial markets. There are usually a whole host of factors that makes these large financial crises very tricky to foresee sufficiently in advance. There is not one single factor where if you tracked it, you would have been able to predict and prevent the crisis.

Commitment to her alma mater is something that cannot be disputed for Dr. Brainard, as she has twice served as a member of the Board of Trustees.

The hardest thing while I was an alumni-elected trustee, just five years after graduating, was still feeling tied to the perspective of being a student on campus and the concerns about the Wesleyan they were experiencing, but of course as a trustee, you have to think of Wesleyan across generations and as an abiding institution, she said. There is some tug there. For instance, I found it difficult when we were discussing the issue of divestment from companies that invested in South Africa during the Apartheid era. Wesleyan was trying to navigate this complicated, narrow ethical path; I saw the issue in more black and white terms.

Speaking of her time at Wesleyan, Dr. Brainard broke down, in simplistic terms, the nature of her senior-year thesis.

I got back to Wesleyan after the summer of my junior year with a quandary, no idea what to write my thesis on, she said. I had 50 ideas, but no conviction on any of them. I went into a professors office, Brian Fay, and I was in such despair at that juncture that I was thinking about not writing a thesis at all because I was having such a hard time choosing a topic. He told me that he didnt care what my topic was, just that I absolutely needed to write something, and that he would be happy to be my advisor. That was a great vote of confidence and spurred me to get my act together.

c/o Quartz

I chose a topic of utopianism and dystopianism but from a social engineering perspective, thinking about how the two genres in literature embodied the impulse that we all have as humans to be social engineers and social planners, and how some of that can go badly awry sometimes, she said. Of course growing up in a communist country for part of my childhood, I had some experience with that. It turned out to be some crazy long piece of work, but boy it was great for me to work out some of my own internal debates about policy. It was really made possible by the conviction of my professors, and this convinced me to have the conviction in myself.

The College of Social Studies most certainly took up a lot of Dr. Brainards time while attending the University.

I was at CSS and we were in this weekly rhythm where our class would have to read some huge number of pages of really dense stuff and then produce a long, beautifully written essay on Thursday overnight for seminar on Friday. We would all find ourselves, bleary-eyed, in the library late on Thursday night, trying to make some sense of the small percentage of the assigned pages that we actually managed to digest at that point. We would pull an all-nighter and always come in the next day with pretty adequate but not great efforts at writing essays. Once, I spent the entire night not being able to find one piece of evidence to answer the assigned question, and finally, I wrote something. I went to class the next morning and started to speak about the topic of nationalism in the enlightenment era. The professor asked me why I was speaking about nationalism in the enlightenment era, which was not a thing, and told me the actual topic was enlightenment rationalism. The assignment had a typo so rationalism was spelled with what an n. If nothing else, CSS gave us the ability to produce a paper on literally any topic.

At the end of the day though, even with all of her accolades, Dr. Brainards children are still what she cherishes most.

I spend all my free time with my three daughters, who are endlessly funny, she said. They always tease me about my work at the Fed. If Im ever in a bad mood, they ask me if I am unhappy about interest rates. Im not sure there are a lot of households in the country where the parent comes home from the office and the kids ask if you are unhappy about interest rates. I love cheering them on at their soccer games and track meets. I just traveled with the family to a really remote part of the Tibetan Plateau in rural China to visit my oldest daughter, who is studying there. I mostly enjoy spending time with my kids and their friends, and all the activities they are involved in.

Read the rest here:

Fed Board Governor Dr. Lael Brainard '83 Drives the Economy Forward - The Wesleyan Argus

Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam in James Grays new film.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY AIDAN MONAGHAN / BLEECKER STREET MEDIA / EVERETT

James Grays films are the public trace of a secret doctrine: dont follow the words, follow the music; dont believe your eyes, believe your heart. Hes a devoted, meticulous, fanatical realist whose clear, tough, physical dramas sublimate themselves into undertones and overtones, murmurs and intimations, reminiscences and dreams. His new film is The Lost City of Z, which is based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, aNew Yorkerstaff writer, chronicling an early-twentieth-century British explorers ill-fated expedition in the Amazon jungle. The film opens today, and with its bluff, romantic resuscitation of the cinemas classic adventure-tale genre and tone, its perhaps Grays most radical attempt at abstraction and displacement.

Its the story of a search thatits no spoiler to saydoesnt come to fruition, a series of missions that dont achieve their goals, and that nonetheless reverberate powerfully and enduringly with the force of its ideas and ideals. The action starts in 1905, when Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), serving to maintain British rule in Ireland, is summoned to London for a meeting. Though Percy (so Ill call him, to distinguish the character from the historical person) is brave and capable, hes the son of a dissolute father, and his lineage impedes his promotion both in the Army and in society. That may change, thoughhes dispatched by the Royal Geographical Society to lead an expedition into the Amazonian jungle bordering Bolivia and Brazil so that, by mapping the vague border, war between those countries can be avoided (and British economic interests can be served).

Percy and his second-in-command, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson), a more experienced explorer, discover the missions dangers and difficulties early on, as well as its mysterious wonderssuch as the discovery of an opera company maintained in a rustic encampment run by a local rubber baron. The potentate supports the mission with the full force of his harsh reignhe offers Percy a crew of enslaved indigenous people, as well as rafts and other supplies.

The heat proves overwhelming; Henry has a cut that wont heal; the Amazon teems with fish that the explorers never manage to catch; a crew member mutinies; natives on shore attack the river-borne company with arrows; and the mission threatens to deteriorate into a merely onerous duty when an Indian slave (on whose knowledge of the terrain Percy depends, and whom, its worth noting, Percy treats respectfully, like a crew member) confides to Percy that theres an ancient city in the jungle, somewhere past the source of the river. Sure enough, when they arrive at the sourcea land that no Caucasian has previously reachedPercy finds shards of pottery, as well as elaborate tree carvings, that indicate vestiges of the lost city. Though the British government has cancelled the original purpose of the mission and Percy and his crew return to London, Percy is now possessed of a new purposeto return to the jungle and find that city, which he dubs Z (pronouncing it zed, British-style).

Percys purpose isnt mainly archeologicalits anthropological. He wants to overcome Eurocentric bigotry and prove that the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle, derided by other Geographical Society members as savages, display an intellectual and cultural sophistication equal toand earlier thanthat of European society. He undertakes a second missionand it proves to be even more difficult than the first, but it also brings him into close contact with one native tribe thatwhile practicing cannibalism (albeit in a way thats explained so as to minimize its horrors)also displays an intricate civilization, as well as remarkable agricultural achievements. Yet this mission, too, is thwarted; Percy returns home unsatisfied. With the Great War now under way, hes sent to lead troops into battle and, suffering a chlorine-gas attack by German forces, is rescued from the battlefield, hospitalized, and warned by doctors that his exploring days are done. (As it so happens, theyre notand the final mission proves to be catastrophic.)

Theres a surprising lightness to the scenes of the rigorous, dangerous expeditions, and that lightness is a crucial aspect of Grays artistry. He doesnt minimize the hardships endured or the exertions requiredbut he approaches them with a modesty and a self-restraint thats as much a matter of ethics as of aesthetics. From a personal perspective, filming to emphasize the difficulties and displeasures of the mission could only come off (as it does, for instance, in Werner Herzogs films and in Apocalypse Now) as vanity, as a breast-beating boast of the difficulties that he himself endured (and to which he subjected his cast and crew) in order to make his filmas if that pride and that proclamation should win him any badge of honor over and above the specific merits of the film itself.

Proceeding by touches, symbols, and synecdoches, by suggestions and implications, Grays modesty conveys, above all, an absencethe incommensurable abyss between the experience and the image, the realm of the unfilmable, or, rather, the no-longer-filmable. Grays films vibrate with echoes of what his experiences, his ideas, his feelings could be, cinematicallyif the classical cinema that inspired them and nourished them were still in existence. It isnt only grand adventure that, in Grays artistic purview, cant be filmed with a classical fullnessits life itself. The Yards gathers the sounds and moods and tones of growing up in Queens, the experience of Gray watching classic movies and imagining his own experiences, his own emotions, embodied in those styles, knowing that they never could be. In Two Lovers, he conjures the sense of feeling simultaneously like an emotional titan trapped in a tiny apartment in a narrow life and like an emotionally stunted, damaged, unworldly-incapable monsterand does so within the constraint of a narrow, local cinematic style that reverberates nonetheless with the force of grand-scale classic melodramas. The Immigrant catches a family prehistory of grand passions that coincides with the operatic grandeur of the silent cinema; its a story of the furious struggles of an earlier generation that implanted Grays own immigrant family into America and implanted movies into Hollywood.

Theres a music to Grays films, a music to his images; hes essentially incapable of making a dull or untextured image, but, just like the term style, the word music is itself value-free. What kind of music do his images make? A poised, neoclassical music; Grays images have an untimely, exalted quietness, as if he were filming with violins and woodwinds and didnt admit of electric instruments, though his subtler textures compete in the same arena and catch some of the same emotional jolt. In Lost City, glancesas between Percy and his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller), his intellectual associate and companion in his mission (but who isnt allowed to accompany him physically into the jungle)fill instants with vast swaths of time. They reverberate with an extraordinarily inward intimacy, in which action doesnt seem to imply thought so much as it seems to accumulate around it.

Ive seen The Lost City of Z twice, and on first viewing I wished that the role of Major Percy Fawcett had been filled by its original claimant, Brad Pitt, whose element of ferocity and possession is his most distinguishing trait. On second viewing, though, I found Hunnams more moderate incarnation true to the movies sense of Fawcetts own obsession: Percy isnt an obsessive by nature, hes an obsessivemalgr lui. He didnt choose to explore the Amazonian jungle, he was sent there to fulfill a mission that was neither of his choosing nor of his preference (he wanted to see combat). He fulfilled his mission dutifully, found his sense of purpose inflamed by the ideaand the slender evidenceof the lost city, and his desire to find it is fuelled by an intense humanistic rationalism.

Percys devotion to discovering the Lost City of Z doesnt dance with exotic visions of golden towers but treads with an unusual yet pedestrian sense of decencyhe seeks not its glory but its workaday complexity, less El Dorado than an Amazonian Manchester. Hes looking to rediscover the traces of a vanished society in the hope of overturning facile hierarchies and replacing them with respect, honor, and wonder at the achievements of distant peoples in the distant pasta society that, for all its cruelty and ferocity, embodies secrets and experiences that are lost to modernity. (Like The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z features one of the greatest last shots in the recent cinemaand this one captures those contradictions with a majestically imaginative gesture.) The mission involves chaos, turmoil, troublebut Percys vision, his efforts, and his reports are models of poise, purpose, and precision. Grays subject is the pursuit of a truer, better self, one thats imbued with and inspired by the colossal achievements of the past, a self-accomplishment thats distinguished from the petty rounds of daily negotiations and drawing-room squabbles. As alluring as the fleeting fragments of inspiration may be, theyre subordinate to the purpose of the great, big, perfected, enduringand impossiblework. In Grays filmsas in the drama of The Lost City of Z itselfthe true creation is neither the effort nor the result: its the purity of the emotion and the clarity of the idea.

More:

The Lost City of Z Resuscitates Cinema's Classic Adventure Tale - The New Yorker