‘Humour is Serious’ as a Geopolitical Speech Act: IMDb Film Reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator

Humour is a manifold cultural institution through which society and space become politicised. In this paper, the political nature of humour is discussed by dissecting the IMDb film reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy, The Dictator (2012), a parody of democracy in which the topics of racism, political incorrectness and sexism, as well as their relationship to the discourses of Neo-Orientalism and the Global War on Terrorism, are present. The reviews are perceived as speech acts, which establish broader interpretative patterns through which audience may approach the questions related to the serious and political aspects of humour. The analysis focuses on how the ‘humour is serious’ claim and similar arguments are expressed in order to condemn or support the use of ‘immature’ and sophomoric humour within the context of politically sensitive issues. Similarly, the paper scrutinises how IMDb functions as a stage on which opportunity for political participation becomes accessible.     

重大公共卫生事件背景下企业传统创新与社会创新融合及创新转型研究

新型冠状病毒引发的肺炎疫情成为2020年的“黑天鹅”,给国家带来严峻挑战并造成重大社会危机。为此,以新冠疫情引发重大公共卫生危机事件为背景,探讨本土企业如何化危为机,提出将传统创新与社会创新融合起来等观点。在此基础上,进一步分析传统创新与社会创新融合特点、机制和路径,包括对3M公司和阿里巴巴社会创新进行案例研究等。以新冠肺炎疫情应对为契机,本土企业完全可以改变过去以顾客为导向的单一创新,转向与社会创新融合,实现本土企业创新转型与高质量发展。     

银行危机过程中的道德风险及其对银行危机成本的影响

本文从理论和实证的角度分析了处于危机状态的银行，为什么会产生严重的道德风险问题，以及道德风险是如何影响危机处理成本的，并提出我国中小金融体系重建必须重视先从根本上克服存在的问题。     

The failure of foresight in crisis management: A secondary analysis of the Mari disaster

Foresight the ability to plan and think systematically about future scenarios in order to inform decision-making in the present has been applied extensively by corporations and governments alike in crisis management. Foresight can be complicated because dispersed groups have diverse, non-overlapping pieces of information that affects an organization's ability to detect, mitigate, and recover from failures. This paper explores the failure of foresight in crisis management by drawing on data on events that preceded and followed the Mari disaster in a naval base in Cyprus in July 2011, where a large explosion killed 13 people and injured 62 others, while completely destroying the major power plant of the island. The paper examines how foresight into crisis management decisions was compromised because of a conscious effort by high ranking decision-makers to minimize emergent danger and avoid responsibility for the crisis, in joint with red tape, bureaucracy, and poor coordination and information flows. The paper explores the notion of operational and political responsibility of individual decision-makers and discusses an alternative approach to foresight in crisis management, one that is built on multiple layers of decision-making.     

Seize the Moment: Financial Crisis and the Making of the Finnish Competition State

In this paper we examine how Finnish Governments dismantled the Nordic welfare state paradigm from the 1990s onwards and adopted Schumpeterian ideas of a competitive workfare state. In the early 1990s, Finland went through a financial crisis that was the most severe in OECD countries since the Second World War and came to play a major role in the paradigm change. In the crisis, the Ministry of Finance gained a central role as a consensus-building power broker, and formulated a political strategy of national competitiveness, which was adopted as a rationale of power for consensual governments and has been maintained since. We suggest that financial crises can become formative moments in which new ideas are adopted and policies are reformulated. They can also become moments which provide opportunity to overcome citizen opinion. In Finland, the wide popular and party support for the Nordic welfare model was not reflected in the new paradigm.     

An unlikely Phoenix: The recovery of Argentina’s monetary and financial system from its ashes in the 2000s and its lessons

The study discusses the recovery of the Argentine financial system after the crisis of the so called convertibility regime of the 1990s. The Argentine macroeconomic regime established in 1991 and based on the hard peg of the peso to the dollar at a 1 to 1 parity ended in a multiple crisis in 2001–2. Beyond the default on the public debt, the crisis also involved the breakdown of the domestic financial system, and an almost complete isolation of the country from the international financial markets as a consequence of the default. Under such a deep crisis and the consequent uncertainty, the recovery of the solvency of the financial institutions was an almost insurmountable enterprise. However, with a gradualist approach (contrary to the advice of the International Monetary Fund) and a degree of “regulatory forbearance,” the financial and monetary authorities were able to recover the health of the financial system, which became much more resilient to shocks, even if its development has been very slow and, as a consequence, the contribution of domestic credit to the economic expansion of the 2000s can be considered almost negligible.     

Crisis and self-fulfilling expectations: The Turkish experience in 1994 and 2000–2001

In this paper we analyze the role of fundamentals and self-fulfilling expectations in the crisis episodes of Turkey in 1994 and 2001. The question is how much of the occurrence of a crisis can be attributed to market expectations and how much to fundamentals. The model is estimated using a Markov switching framework in which the devaluation expectations affect crisis probability via three different specifications. Such a framework which allows for sunspots performs better than a purely fundamental-based model. The study shows that besides the fundamentals in the economy, shifts in agents' devaluation expectations have played a crucial role and that a Markov switching model with constant transition probabilities provides better estimates for the Turkish currency crises.     

Currency crisis transmission through international trade

The Eurozone recent crisis has shown how balance of payments problems in less developed European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries can affect EMU trading partners, spreading the crisis to a larger group of countries. This paper introduces a three-country dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze whether and how terms of trade effects can generate a spillover effect or a currency crisis transmission between countries. Specifically, using a two period model, it incorporates world market clearing conditions for tradables into a new theoretic model, analyzes net capital flow movements between countries, and establishes cross-border macroeconomic linkages. This paper shows how a currency crisis can transmit through the real (trade) sector channel of the economy.     

对中小企业地位的再认识

东南亚金融危机爆发后, 以大企业、大集团为基础的韩国经济受到重创, 而以中小企业为主的台湾却安度危机。本文分析了东南亚金融危机给予我们的两点启示： 一是宏观调控不能片面集中在大型企业的发展上; 二是以中小企业为主的经济更具适应性、更具活力。同时指出, 应对中小企业在我国国民经济中的地位和作用进行重新认识。     

Financial crisis in the Russian Federation: Are the Russians learning to tango?

The paper presents some evidence about the rise and fall of financial markets in Russia in the course of 1998, and discusses the causes and likely consequences of the crisis for the Russian economy. It also discusses some important policy issues regarding the effects of global financial integration. The central message is that the Russian financial disaster is a typical example of crisis contagion, although the underlying vulnerability of the economy was a problem which no investor could ignore. In particular, financial stabilization remained extremely fragile owing to the deterioration of the fiscal situation and the vulnerability of the banking system.     

国际金融危机背景下西方学者的资本主义危机理论及启示

资本主义危机理论一直是国外马克思主义学者关注的焦点。在资本主义发展的不同时期,他们对于资本主义危机的理解也有所不同。2008年金融危机的爆发,迫使一些西方学者摒弃以往传统的经济视角,转而寻求新的研究范式来解读资本主义的危机,这一时期备受关注的危机理论有:体制危机论,福利国家危机论和资本主义总体性危机论。总体来看,随着资本主义社会的发展,西方学者不再从单一视角出发研究资本主义危机,不再将资本主义危机单纯理解为经济危机,而是趋向多元化的理解。     

On the Exchange Rate as a Nominal Anchor: The Rise and Fall of the Credibility Hypothesis

The credibility hypothesis, which was used to support the use of a pegged exchange rate arrangement as a nominal anchor mechanism, is based on restrictive analytical foundations that circumscribe its real world applicability. While all pegged exchange rate arrangements are subject to circumstances that can undermine the sustainability of the peg, exchange rate nominal anchor pegs are especially fragile because such arrangements introduce problems that are endogenous to that particular type of regime. The East Asian crisis is used to demonstrate the fragility of exchange rate nominal anchor pegs, while the case of Australia demonstrates how a floating currency escaped the contagion of the East Asian crisis.     

The eurozone financial crisis: debt,credit ratings and monetary and fiscal policy

This paper discusses the eurozone financial crisis. It argues that it was largely the result of a common monetary policy not being suitable for individual countries which led to excessive private and public borrowing and a debt crisis. Neither borrowing rates nor credit ratings anticipated the crisis. Fundamental changes to eurozone governance are being proposed. The paper examines whether instead there might be a market solution if financial markets priced risk better. Accordingly, a more timely way of obtaining credit ratings is shown.     

Financial crises and regime-dependent dynamics

Generalized with the regime-dependent beliefs and regime-switching dynamics, the simple market-maker framework established by Day and Huang (1990) is capable to model all types of crises, that is, sudden crisis, disturbing crisis and smooth crisis, and to offer economic and dynamic justifications on how and why these crises appear. Moreover, the model simulations verify the salient qualitative and statistical properties commonly observed in the real financial data such as fat tails, volatility clustering, long range dependence, leverage effect and other stylized facts. Additionally, the model replicates the various chart patterns widely applied in the technical analysis.     

小议现代故事漫画的特性

故事漫画擅长以叙事情节传递信息,而创作故事漫画则是作者在整合所要传递的信息与现代漫画的叙事方式的有机结合。在这个过程中.必须了解故事漫画的艺术特性.本文在这里就是浅显的阐述一下现代故事漫画的特性。     

Humour at the Model United Nations: The Role of Laughter in Constituting Geopolitical Assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on ‘real’ issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor.     

“两次金融危机”产生的原因与影响及对中国经济发展的启迪

分析1997年"亚洲金融危机"和2007年"世界金融危机"产生的原因及其异同点与"两次金融危机"对世界及其中国经济发展的影响.在此基础上,探讨"两次金融危机"对中国经济发展的启迪,为中国在今后经济发展中防范和应对金融危机提供科学依据.     

Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity,Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque in South Park

Humour and laughter have become the subject of recent geopolitical scrutiny. Scholars have explored the affirmative and liberatory possibilities of humour, and the affective bodily dimensions of laughter as tools for transformative action in critical geopolitics. Humour that is vulgar and politically ambiguous is yet to be explored as a potent geopolitical avenue of enquiry. Studies of satire have suggested that rather than contesting entrenched geopolitical beliefs, satirical shows can serve to further divide audiences both amenable and antagonistic to the satire in question. I argue that this should not involve a wholesale rejection of satirical shows, as humour that uses irony, subversion, and other discursive techniques is just one way satirical media becomes an effective commentator on political issues. I examine the show South Park and argue its satire combines bodily and scatological humour with more traditional satirical techniques to produce a comedy that ridicules contemporary issues by reducing complex politics to the most basic and crass condition possible. This is defined in a Bakhtinian sense of the body grotesque, a social inversion through reference to the common bodily functions of all human beings.     

A DSGE model of banks and financial intermediation with default risk

This paper takes the view that a major contributing factor to the financial crisis of 2008 was a failure to correctly assess and price the risk of default. In order to analyse default risk in the macroeconomy, a simple general equilibrium model with banks and financial intermediation is constructed in which default-risk can be priced. It is shown how the credit spread can be attributed largely to the risk of default and how excess loan creation may emerge due to different attitudes to risk by borrowers and lenders. The model can also be used to analyse systemic risk due to macroeconomic shocks which may be reduced by holding collateral.     

基于通胀压力分析政府救市政策的退出

在国际金融危机中,我国政府出台了大规模的救市计划以应对冲击.而在后金融危机时期,由于一些宏观经济因素发生变化,例如通货膨胀压力增大等,政府救市政策自然应逐步退出.笔者选择基于防范通货膨胀的视角来分析政府应如何选择最佳的救市政策退出方式,通过建立脉冲响应函数,分析金融危机中三类主要的政府救市政策即财政政策、货币政策和流动性政策对通货膨胀率的影响,并根据三类救市政策不同的影响力度和滞后期,判断其合理的退出方式.