A. For several years I’ve looked at political economy books on central banks. The goal is to adapt the strategic subcultures framework that Columbia University’s Jack Snyder first formulated in 1977 at the RAND Corporation to integrate it with neo-institutional frameworks about financial market and geopolitical risk management. This is essentially ‘porting’ or copying an institutional schema from one domain (late Cold War era strategic studies) to another (the critical role of synchronised monetary policy in our rapidly evolving postliberal, multipolar world). Bloomberg’s Odd Lots has a new episode on the Federal Reserve and how the Fed Funds Market actually works.
B. The Nuclear Wal-Mart (Panorama, Season 54, Episode 30, 2006). The inside story of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear smuggling network which exported missile designs and plans from Pakistan to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Khan proved to be one of the most significant (grievance-motivated) malign actors (strategic threats) in facilitating nuclear proliferation to authoritarian regimes that were outside the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governance and jurisdictional control.
C. The Who perform their last ever song on their last ever United States tour:
D. A playlist on the late Bruno Latour and actor network theory - which I still don’t really understand but read a little about during this past week.