Economist, May 5, 2018 (I)

choi

(1) Banks in Japan | Silver Service; A painful but essential streamlining has barely began.

Quote:

"Uniformed concierges welcome every customer with a bow. A dozen tellers are watched over by a manager * * * Transactions are concluded with * * * another round of bows.  Japan's high-street banks are not just overstuffed. They are also overbranched. According to World Bank, high-income countries have on average 17.3 commercial-bank branches per 100,000 adults. Japan has 34.1. if you include branches of the post office, a popular place for people to save, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) [Japan's central bank] reckons the country is the world's most overbanked.

"Retail banks across most rich countries struggled to make money after the financial crisis. But Japan has been close to or in deflation for most of the past two decades.  The result, according to a report last year by BOJ, is 'strikingly' low profitability. Return on assets for the 12 months ending in March 2017 was 9.3%, compared with 1% for those in America. 'The entire banking system has to drastically shrink [in branches and employment],' says Naoyuki YOSHINO of Asian Development Bank Institute, a think-tank.

"But the Financial Services Agency (FSA) 金融庁 [directly under 内閣府, as opposed to under a ministry], their [banks'] regulator, is reluctant to put them under too much pressure. Many [bank branches] provide a lifeline to ageing communities and help prop up struggling companies.

"Japan's banks, like those elsewhere, must also cope with new, low-cost competition. China's largest fintech [financial technology] company, Ant Financial, has recently set up an office in Tokyo. * * * SBI Sumishin [Net Bank, Ltd] 住信SBIネット銀行株式会社, an online bank set up by SoftBank Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank 三井住友信託銀行 [to oversimplify: Mitsui trust and Sumitomo trust merged in 2009] a decade ago [2007], has quickly become Japan's most popular mortgage lender * * * It [Sumishin] has shaved interest rates on home loans to 1.17% a year, compared with an average for major banks of 1.28%

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Paul Adrian Raicu, A Brief History of Silver-Service Dining. LinkedIn, Dec 17, 2016
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/b ... e-dining-paul-raicu
("The waiter or server uses the utensils to create a pincer-type action for transferring food to the guests' plates, usually from a large silver dish or tray [carried by the serverl hence the etymology].  Silver service is also known as English service or butler service, and originates in the country manors and high-class estates of England during the 17th and 18th centuries. . Silver service is thought to have evolved out of the practise of giving waiting staff Sunday evening off, meaning the butler [head of the house and staff] was required to serve the food instead")
(i) If not placed at the beginning of a sentence, it is written silver service.
(ii) If you search images.google.com with (silver service "one hand"), you will see examples, especially a close-up with the title "Silver Service Techniques - Hospitality Elearning Academy" which, if clicked, is no longer existent (but you can view the photo kept by Google). A server carries the same food in his dish to distribute to many guests at the same time, rather than serving one and returning to a kitchen before serving another guest with the same.
(c) SBI Group started in 1999 as SoftBank Investment Corp.

choi

(2) Reconsidering Marx | Second Time, Farce; Two hundred after his birth Karl Marx remains surprisingly relevant.

Quote:

Paragraph 1: (a) "A good subtitle for a biography of Karl Marx would be 'a study in failure.' Marx claimed that the point of philosophy was not just to understand the world but to improve it. Yet his philosophy changed it largely for the worse: the 40% of humanity who lived under Marx regimes for much of the 20th century endured famines, gulags and party dictatorships. Marx thought his new dialectical science would allow him to predict the future as well as understand the resent. Yet he failed to anticipate two of the biggest developments of the 20th century  -- the rise of fascism and the welfare states -- and wrongly believed communism would take root in the most advanced economies. Today's only successful self-styled Marxist regime is an enthusiastic practitioner of capitalism (or 'socialism with Chinese characteristics').  Yet for all his oversights, Marx remains a momumental figure.

(b) "None of these bicentennial books [about Marx] is outstanding. The best short instruction is still Isaiah Berlin's 'Karl Marx,' which was published in 1939.

(c) "Why does the world remain fixated on the ideas of a man who helped produce so much suffering?  The obvious reason is the sheer power of those ideas. * * * He was a brilliant writer. Who can forget his observation that history repeats itself, 'the first time as tragedy, the second as farce'?

(d) "A second reason is the power of his personality. Marx was in many way an awful human being. He spent his life sponging off Friedrich Engels, He was such an inveterate racist, including about his own group, the Jews, that even in 1910s, when tolerances for such prejudices was highest, the editors of his letters felt obliged to censor them. He got his maid [Helene Demuth 1851 in 1951 in London] pregnant and dispatched the child to foster parents. Mikhail Bakunin described him as 'ambitious and vain, quarrelsome, intolerant and absolute * * * vengeful to the point of madness.'

"But combine egomania with genius and you have a formidable force. He believed absolutely that he was right; that he discovered a key to history that had eluded earlier philosophers. He on promoting his beliefs whatever obstacles fate (or the authorities) put in his way. His notion of happiness was 'to fight;' his concept of misery was 'to submit,' a trait he shared with Friedrich Nietzsche.

(e) "Toward the end of his life he questioned many of his central convictions. He worried that he might have been wrong about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He puzzled over the fact that, far from immiserating [not found in www.meriam-webster.com, immiserate (to make miserable) is back-formation from immiseration] the poor, Victorian England was providing then with growing prosperity.

(f) "His insistence that capitalism drives workers' living standards to subsistence level is absurd. The genius of capitalism is that it relentlessly reduces the price of regular consumer items: today's workers have easy access to goods once considered the luxuries of monarchs.

(g) "Marx's greatest failure, however, was that he underestimated the power of reform -- the ability of people to solve the evident problems of capitalism through rational discussion and compromise. He [1818 – 1883] believed history was a chariot thundering to a predetermined end and that the best that the charioteers can do is hang on. Liberal reformers, including his near contemporary William Gladstone [1809 – 1898; party: first as a Conservative but after 1859, a Liberal; UK prime minister 1868 – 1874, 1880-1885, 1886-1886, 1892-1894)], have repeatedly proved him wrong. They have not only saved capitalism from itself by introducing far-reaching reforms but have done so through the power of persuasion.

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997; Isaiah Berlin was his birth name; father Jewish, mother Russian; born in Riga, Russian Empire (present-day Latvia); In 1921 his family moved to the UK; he spent most of his life in Oxford, first as an undergraduate and then as a professor; died in Oxford)

It appears that he had a bachelor's degree only.