The trouble with austerity nostalgia + MORE Jan 24th

(Alexander Kachkaev)

THE MINISTRY OF NOSTALGIA
Owen Hatherley
“Nothing is too good for ordinary people.” Architect Berthold Lubetkin’s motto still carries an electric charge, which may be why it is so hard to buy this quote on a tea towel. “Keep calm and carry on,” on the other hand, sounds like the soporific for our time, and it can be found on everything from wallets to underwear, doormats to pillows. Created by the British government for use in the event of a German invasion during the Second World War, it had a renaissance during the financial collapse of 2008. It’s now, as Owen Hatherley writes, as recognizable an image as Rosie the Riveter, as iconic as Coca-Cola or Apple.
Hatherley’s book analyzes the contemporary appeal of this message, which he relates to a more general “austerity nostalgia,” a hazy yearning for postwar ethics and aesthetics now in vogue in Britain. He asks how it is possible to invoke an aesthetic developed in the 1940s, when the British welfare state was built, in the 2010s, when it is being destroyed…

WARSAW, Poland – U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman received a welcome reception Sunday from Polish entrepreneurs as he worked to finalize a free trade pact between the United States and the European Union.
Froman said he hopes the deal, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, will finally be completed in 2016 after nearly three years of negotiations.
Still, there is strong resistance among some Europeans to the planned agreement, which aims to eliminate tariffs and create common regulatory standards between the world’s two biggest economies. Opponents fear a lowering in food safety standards and the undermining of local regulations by giving international arbitration panels the power to rule over disputes.
In Warsaw, Froman told a group of young Poles with startups, among them software developers, that the deal would be especially helpful to small and medium-sized businesses like theirs. He said they would benefit from a harmonizing of regulatory standards and intellectual property protection…

Learn, save, invest and prosper with My Own Advisor.
Not sure you can retire?  Well, maybe this short list that I was thinking about the other day might help you out. Here are my signs you can probably retire, now, or you need to wait.

Your investment income from your portfolio exceeds your expenses, and then some.
You have no debt entering retirement or you could easily pay off debt before retirement if you really wanted to.
You don’t worry about a 30% stock market decline that could negatively impact your portfolio.
You don’t worry about interest rates or bond yields anymore.
You couldn’t care less about prolonged bear markets and what it does to your portfolio.
You don’t tinker with your portfolio.
You have a juicy workplace defined benefit pension plan with at least 30 years in the bank.
You don’t care about house prices; there is no need to finance your retirement by selling your home.
You’ve done the math and you already know you can (retire) based on a 3% safe withdrawal rate from your portfolio…