The Ben Bernank is kind of a jerk. Most of the Fed stuff in this is pretty basic but I know most people don't really understand it so I won't complain. The bulk of this is sort of a biography of two somewhat random dudes and it switches from one to the other halfway through and there's no "endpoint" to the story for either so that's a questionable narrative choice. I do wonder if it started as a biography of the one guy, a Fed board dissenter, and then he took another job and dropped out of the story because he wasn't part of the Fed story anymore. Most of what I liked is that the guy read the released Fed meetings so I don't have to, they're released many years after the fact. That's where you learn how much of a jerk Bernanke and a few others were. Saw he wrote a new book trying to explain some economy thing at the library and laughed like lol what a jerk. This book covers the time from like 2006 mostly forward through COVID but all the "action" in is in the first half because after the first guy and Bernanke leave everyone mostly agrees all the time about doing stupid stuff. Also the minutes aren't available yet so we wouldn't really know if anyone disagreed anyway.
Mildly deceptive title, this is really about the film industry in China not Hollywood specifically. Hollywood does play a role obviously and it covers some similar ground on that to another book or two I've shared in the thread but the vast bulk of it is really about Chinese film itself. I thought it was somewhat interesting how although the author seems somewhat more favorable of China and the CCP (although she may have just been being even-handed) she portrayed the state guided and promoted propaganda type films much more cynically than that other book on Hollywood/China I read which seemed to view things like Wolf Warrior 2 as legitimate threats to American cultural hegemony. She notes by contrast that basically nobody outside of China gives a shit about Chinese blockbusters and how the CCP is somewhat like "I don't get it, we put the explosions, we put the quips, we put the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, we showed the success of the Belt and Road Initiative for encouraging independence from capitalism, why does the rest of the world not eat this stuff up?" She also notes that the CCP is not unique in being paranoid about the power of film, the Qing and KMT had similarly extensive and harsh censorship although in the former case it was more of the "wait, they're showing this in theaters?" type of reaction versus controlling the means of production. She doesn't note it explicitly but I thought it was somewhat amusing that one aspect the CCP deliberately copied from the Hollywood studio system and found to their continuing advantage was all kinds of layers of bureaucracy that can take your scripts and budgets and movies away from you and change everything no matter what they promised you before and then stick your name on it.
Jeff Immelt sucks. Wait a minute... This is, as the title might imply, the whole story from after some guy nobody's ever heard of invented a light bulb or something. Anyway, GE gets really big, Jack Welch becomes God, etc. then Jeff Immelt fucks it all up. Pretty much everyone alive was willing to be interviewed for this, Welch did multiple interviews so he gets a slightly more favorable treatment than everyone else although he probably was better anyway. Best part is that this is after Immelt's own book and also he gave interviews for it which leads to most of the second half being the same format: guy tells you about some GE thing, goes to Jeff Immelt's version, then asks everyone else who says "that's bullshit, he's lying." Jeff Immelt has a pretty simple theory for what went wrong at GE: people didn't listen to Jeff Immelt's brilliance enough. Everyone else seems to think it was that Jeff Immelt wouldn't listen to anyone else. Welch was a tyrant but he could be won over and not only could he be but he enjoyed the entire give-and-take process. Immelt wouldn't even read the reports people brought him, make a decision from the "gut" despite not knowing anything about any of the businesses and then demand absolute loyalty. For some strange reason, this didn't work. Immelt doesn't outright suspect he was sabotaged by wreckers and Kulaks but he does think too many other people were focused on their careers rather than what was best for GE (following Jeff's ideas with total loyalty) which is apparently delivering a $2 a share dividend and just buying shit semi-randomly.
Are you sitting down? China's been erasing events from its official history. I know, it was surprising. In this case the CCP has pretty much erased that Zhao Ziyang did anything. Now, you might be asking, who is that? Oh, just a minor guy, let me quote Wikipedia here: "was the third premier of the People's Republic of China from 1980 to 1987, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1981 to 1982, and CCP general secretary from 1987 to 1989." Anyway, after Tiananmen they blamed him for literally every problem in China, put him under house arrest, accused him of being part of a capitalist plot and erased him from official documents. Now you might wonder, how can you erase the head of the country
and The Party? Easy peasy, see all his good ideas, those were actually Deng Xiaoping's. Sure, you thought they were just vague random sayings but actually they were really specific policy orders. The bad ones, well like Jeff Immelt's 99 Problems that was just Zhao, evil capitalist who rose to the premier spot in the CCP, not following Deng's perfect wisdom. While the book mostly covers only the above noted dates, the coda is an amusing look at how Xi Jinping has now effectively erased Deng as well, not completely like Zhao (who still goes unmentioned) but now Deng is just some guy from the before time back before Xi's perfectness came to power and gets mentioned only in passing rather than as the "chief architect" history they used to cover over Zhao. If I had a complaint, there's one section where the various Chinese officials are discussing some problems including "inflation" and the guy discusses it like they are, say, American officials which makes the entire discussion not really make sense, I was baffled somewhat about the chapter and assumed it was something I might just have to look up or whatever but then I read another official on another subject talking about Marxist philosophy and it hit me, the officials may have been using all the kinds of economic language we're used to but they were actually talking about things involving
state rationing so stuff like the "inflation" wasn't actually ever happening. It's a minor point in the book but it was the main flaw I found in it. The other may have been that he didn't really "wrap" up the story and let Zhao be erased from his own book, the guy wrote a memoir that got out through Hong Kong, the author read it (and reads Chinese) as it's used as a source and you're left wondering if the guy is like "yeah, they fucked me, but that's the game." Chinese officials have been pretty candid in their memoirs so he might have had a whole section on how Jeff Immelt sucks!
