scholarly journals Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation

2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (4) ◽  
pp. 1408-1438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philippon
Keyword(s):  
Financial Intermediation ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quantitative Investigation ◽  
Secular Changes ◽  
Finance Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Constant Returns To Scale

A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the United States over the past 130 years yields the following results: (i) the finance industry's share of gross domestic product (GDP) is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980; (ii) most of these variations can be explained by corresponding changes in the quantity of intermediated assets (equity, household and corporate debt, liquidity); (iii) intermediation has constant returns to scale and an annual cost of 1.5–2 percent of intermediated assets; (iv) secular changes in the characteristics of firms and households are quantitatively important. (JEL D24, E44, G21, G32, N22)

The Riddle of a Common History

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constant Part ◽  
Intrinsic Component

By identifying two general issues in recent history textbook controversies worldwide (oblivion and inclusion), this article examines understandings of the United States in Mexico's history textbooks (especially those of 1992) as a means to test the limits of historical imagining between U. S. and Mexican historiographies. Drawing lessons from recent European and Indian historiographical debates, the article argues that many of the historical clashes between the nationalist historiographies of Mexico and the United States could be taught as series of unsolved enigmas, ironies, and contradictions in the midst of a central enigma: the persistence of two nationalist historiographies incapable of contemplating their common ground. The article maintains that lo mexicano has been a constant part of the past and present of the US, and lo gringo an intrinsic component of Mexico's history. The di erences in their historical tracks have been made into monumental ontological oppositions, which are in fact two tracks—often overlapping—of the same and shared con ictual and complex experience.

scholarly journals Dirty tricks on the underground press

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Rips
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
Underground Press ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Us ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

What was known in the United States as the ‘underground press’ – self-published newspapers of the youth counterculture sold at street corners and around campuses in American cities during the 1960s and early 70 s – was once a significant network estimated at over 400 publications. Their hallmark was opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, criticism of the authorities, of uncontrolled technology and big business, advocacy of sexual freedom and artistic experimentation and, frequently, the advocacy of marijuana, LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Few of these publications have survived the past ten years, and their disappearance has been variously attributed to the cooling of radical interest after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as well as to the vague and shifting nature of the ‘hippie’ scene. Complaints by their publishers during the early and mid-seventies that printers refused their business, that office rents suddenly doubled, that advertising was cancelled, that papers were lost – these were seen as local accidents and were rarely reported by the established media. Claims of official or officially-sanctioned harassment were dismissed – even by fellow radicals – as paranoid. Recent research by Geoffrey Rips of the PEN American Center has revealed the extent and variety of official pressure exerted against alternative publications during the Vietnam War period. Using evidence from government hearings like the Church Committee, which reported in 1976, actual FBI documents released to American PEN under the Freedom of Information Act, and other sources, Mr Rips argues that such harassment contributed materially to the closure of certain publications and in general terms constituted a gross infringement on the protection afforded to dissenting opinion and to a free press under the US constitution. We publish edited extracts here from Geoffrey Rips' report which will be published in full by the PEN American Center and the City Lights Press.

Abstract P183: 20-year Secular Trend of Cardiovascular Disease Comorbidities in the United States, 1997-2016

Circulation ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 137 (suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dianjianyi Sun ◽  
Tao Zhou ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Yoriko Heianza ◽  
Xiaoyun Shang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cardiovascular Disease ◽  
Secular Trend ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Metabolic Conditions ◽  
Respiratory Conditions ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Chronic Comorbidities

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been the number one cause of death and disability in the US and globally for decades, and its comorbidity complicates the management of CVD. However, little is known about the secular trend of CVD comorbidities in national representative populations in the last 20 years. Methods: Prevalence of CVD and nine major chronic comorbidities was estimated using data from 1,324,214 adults aged 18 years and older in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) from 1997 through 2016, with age-standardized to the U.S. population in the year 2000. Results: CVD prevalence in the US adult population significantly declined in the past twenty years (from 6.6% in 1997 to 5.9% in 2016, P trend <0.01in Figure a). And such trend was shown in women and whites (P trend <0.01), but not in men and blacks (P trend >0.05). We ranked the nine major chronic comorbidities (high to low) in the CVD patients (Figure b.), including (1) hypertension, (2) respiratory conditions, (3) nervous system conditions, (4) digestive conditions, (5) diabetes, (6) cancer, (7) genitourinary conditions, (8) circulatory conditions, and (9) endocrine/nutritional/metabolic conditions. From 1997 to 2016, the prevalence of CVD comorbidities including hypertension (38.8% to 50.2%), digestive conditions (17.0% to 27.1%), diabetes (10.0% to 19.2%), cancer (9.4% to 12.8%), and genitourinary conditions (4.1% to 5.2%) continuingly increased (all P trend <0.01), while respiratory conditions declined (35.9% to 27.6%, P trend <0.01). Similar trends of CVD comorbidities were observed among subgroups stratified by gender or by race. Conclusions: CVD prevalence in the U.S. adults have declined significantly in the past two decades, but rates of CVD comorbidities including hypertension, digestive conditions, diabetes, cancer, and genitourinary conditions increased substantially.

Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christen Mucher
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American History ◽  
New Spain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ruling Elites

Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.

scholarly journals Fungicide Sensitivity of U.S. Genotypes of Phytophthora infestans to Six Oomycete-Targeted Compounds

Plant Disease ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 99 (5) ◽  
pp. 659-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Saville ◽  
Kim Graham ◽  
Niklaus J. Grünwald ◽  
Kevin Myers ◽  
William E. Fry ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Phytophthora Infestans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Effective Concentration ◽  
Response Curves ◽  
Baseline Sensitivity ◽  
Fungicide Sensitivity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us

Phytophthora infestans causes potato late blight, an important and costly disease of potato and tomato crops. Seven clonal lineages of P. infestans identified recently in the United States were tested for baseline sensitivity to six oomycete-targeted fungicides. A subset of the dominant lineages (n = 45) collected between 2004 and 2012 was tested in vitro on media amended with a range of concentrations of either azoxystrobin, cyazofamid, cymoxanil, fluopicolide, mandipropamid, or mefenoxam. Dose-response curves and values for the effective concentration at which 50% of growth was suppressed were calculated for each isolate. The US-8 and US-11 clonal lineages were insensitive to mefenoxam while the US-20, US-21, US-22, US-23, and US-24 clonal lineages were sensitive to mefenoxam. Insensitivity to azoxystrobin, cyazofamid, cymoxanil, fluopicolide, or mandipropamid was not detected within any lineage. Thus, current U.S. populations of P. infestans remained sensitive to mefenoxam during the displacement of the US-22 lineage by US-23 over the past 5 years.

Rethinking of Turkey’s Geopolitics together with Eastern Mediterranean. Turkish Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 705 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Arıboğan Deniz Ülke ◽  
Ibrahim Arslan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transportation Accessibility ◽  
The Eu

In the studies carried out within the scope of geopolitical discipline, the expression "geography is destiny" is frequently used and it is claimed that geography has unchangeable, irreversible qualities and the policies implemented are shaped through this assumption. This assumption ignores the humanitarian interventions over the geography and makes it difficult to understand the results produced by these interventions at both regional and global level. Similarly, the dynamic nature of international relations reveals new actors in the international system in times of bounce and collapse, and the borders that expand or narrow with each transformation can differentiate the geopolitical view with new sovereign countries. In the historical process, transportation accessibility, trade, search for raw materials, security and alliance relations have caused the same geography to be interpreted differently in different periods. This situation also applies to the geography of Turkey had been the homeland of empires. The developments in the Middle East over the past two decades has created a sensitivity in the relations between Turkey and the West, especially the United States. Competing interests with the EU and the US in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, has necessitated a reassessment of Turkey's geography.

Kuntanshi yamikalile (The Future): speculative nonconformity in the works of Zambian visual artists

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew Mukuka Mulenga
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
African Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Contemporary African Art ◽  
Freeze Time

In recent years, select African visual artists practising on the continent as well as in its diaspora have increasingly been attracted to themes that explore, portray or grapple with Africa’s future. Along with this increasing popularity of the ‘future’ or indeed ‘African futuristic’ themes by visual artists, such themes have also attracted academic consideration among various scholars, resulting primarily in topics described as ‘African Futurism’ or Afrofuturism. These are topics that may be used to disrupt what some scholars – across disciplines and in various contexts – have highlighted as the persistent presumptive notions that portray Africa as a hinterland (Hassan 1999; Sefa Dei, Hall and Goldin Rosenberg 2000; Simbao 2007; Soyinka-Airewele and Edozie 2010; Moyo 2013; Keita, L. 2014; Green 2014; Serpell 2016). This study makes an effort to critique certain aspects of ‘African Art History’ with regard to the representation of Africa, and raises the following question: How can an analysis of artistic portrayals of ‘the future’ portrayed in the works of select contemporary Zambian artists be used to critique the positioning of Africa as ‘backward’, an occurrence at the intersection of a dualistic framing of tradition versus modern. Furthermore, how can this be used to break down this dichotomy in order to challenge lingering perceptions of African belatedness? The study analyses ways in which this belatedness is challenged by the juxtaposition of traditional, contemporary and futuristic elements by discussing a series of topics and debates associated to African cultures and technology that may be deemed disconnected from the contemporary lived experiences of Africans based on the continent. The study acknowledges that there is no singular ‘African Art History’ that one can talk of and there have been various shifts in how it has been perceived. I argue that while currently the African art history that is written in the West does not simplistically position Africa as backward as it may have done in the past, there appear to be moments of a hangover of this perception (Lamp 1999:4). What started out as a largely Western scholarly discourse of African art history occurred in about the 1950s and the journal African Arts started in the 1960s. Even before contemporary African art became a big thing in the 1990s for the largely US- and Europe-based discourses there were many discussions in the US about how the ‘old’ art history tended to freeze time and that this was not appropriate (Drewal 1991 et al). In order to advance the discourse on contemporary African visual arts I present critical analyses of the select works of Zambian artists to develop interpretations of the broader uses of the aforementioned themes. The evidence that supports the core argument of this research is embedded in the images discussed throughout this dissertation. The artists featured in the study span several decades including artists who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as Henry Tayali and Akwila Simpasa, as well as artists who have been practising since the 1980s, such as Chishimba Chansa and William Miko and those that are more current and have been producing work from the early 1990s and 2000s, such as Zenzele Chulu, Milumbe Haimbe, Stary Mwaba, Isaac Kalambata and Roy Jethro Phiri.

Population Issues and Reproductive Politics

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rickie Solinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The Us

What is the state of population growth in the United States today, and how is it affected by immigration? According to the 2010 census, the US population has grown 9.7 percent (adding about 27 million people, including about 13 million immigrants) during the past...

Western Europe and the collapse of Bretton Woods

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-300
Author(s):  
Michael De Groot
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rate System ◽  
Bretton Woods ◽  
The Us ◽  
Exchange Rate System ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This article contends that Western Europe played a crucial and overlooked role in the collapse of Bretton Woods. Most scholars highlight the role of the United States, focusing on the impact of US balance of payments deficits, Washington’s inability to manage inflation, the weakness of the US dollar, and American domestic politics. Drawing on archival research in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, this article argues that Western European decisions to float their currencies at various points from 1969 to 1973 undermined the fixed exchange rate system. The British, Dutch, and West Germans opted to float their currencies as a means of protecting against imported inflation or protecting their reserve assets, but each float reinforced speculators’ expectations that governments would break from their fixed parities. The acceleration of financial globalization and the expansion of the Euromarkets in the 1960s made Bretton Woods increasingly difficult to defend.

scholarly journals Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-)History of the “Polarized” Present

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-408
Author(s):  
Thomas Zimmer
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Severe Problem ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Polarization is everywhere. It is, according to the Pew Research Center, “a defining feature of American politics today.” Elected officials, journalists, and political pundits seem to agree that it is a severe problem in urgent need of fixing, maybe even the root of all evil that plagues the United States, from dysfunction in Congress to the decay of social and cultural norms. Many historians, too, have embraced the concept of polarization for its explanatory power: It has emerged as the closest thing to a master narrative for recent American history. In this interpretation, the “liberal consensus” that had dominated mid-twentieth-century American politics and intellectual life—the widely shared acceptance of New Deal philosophy and broad agreement on the desirable contours of society and the pursuit of certain kinds of public good—gave way after the 1960s to an age of heightened tension, dividing Americans into two camps that since then have regarded each other with deepening distrust. Yet too few historians have reflected on the limits and potential pitfalls of using polarization as a governing historical paradigm. It is high time, therefore, to pause to consider the larger implications of approaching the past through the prism of polarization.

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