The Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialised world, was a time of great pain in the US.
At one point, in 1932, national unemployment rose to 25 per cent. Poverty-stricken people sold apples on the streets of Manhattan and San Francisco to make a few pennies. Mobs looted supermarkets; migrant workers moved from farms to cities, desperately seeking food and shelter. In the midst of such misery, the Klu Klux Klan had an evil resurgence and grown men fought like animals for scraps of leftover food in garbage pails. In Oklahoma, where drought ravaged the Southern Plains, ranchers threatened a revolution. The stock market lost almost 90 per cent of its value between 1929 and 1933. It was a time that threatened to bring America to its knees.
2020, dominated by Covid-19, did not reach those epic levels of misery, but it has taken a chunk out of America’s soul.
To compound this tragedy, climate change-related icy storms over the past weeks have made the lives of many miserable. There are power outages and rolling blackouts of electricity. Recent winter snow has left many in Texas – which rarely gets such weather – without power. People were having to crowd into churches, now known as “warming centres”. Where I live on the Bowery, a street in New York City, there are more homeless than I have ever seen, despite the bitter cold and grey mushy snow. People sleep in the subways.
His message is that freedom belongs to us all. It's about climbing through darkness to hope.
Midtown Manhattan is ghostly and empty. Many businesses are shuttered and dark; the once-glorious skyscraper offices empty. It’s hard not to compare the past year to the Great Depression.
We are now in mid-winter, with many weeks to go until our metaphorical spring and resurgence.
This is why Bruce Springsteen’s poignant advert for Jeep, “The Middle”, shown during the Super Bowl, matters so much. In it, Springsteen – who wrote, directed and executed the video – drives through the most central point of “the lower 48 of America” in Lebanon, Kansas. The images are stark and haunting: flat, snowy fields, abandoned factory towers and a small chapel “that never closes. All are welcome”.
Adverts shown at the Super Bowl are among the most-watched commercials every year in the US. AP
Springsteen is now 71 and an icon in America, a troubadour who speaks for the abandoned veterans and working class. He always shunned appearing in ads, but as the unofficial chronicler of the blue collar worker, he must have felt the time was right to talk about re-unifying America.
In order to recover from all we have witnessed, he says we must abandon our red and blue politics, our anger and our trauma. In a deeply divided country, we must move forward, taking our cue from the symbolic Middle America.
It’s interesting he chose the most central point of the Midwest of America, usually associated with conservative politics and family values. As a graduate student in Iowa, I remember arriving to that great expanse of land, pickup trucks and unshakable faith in Republican politics with a kind of stunned horror. It is vastly different to the East Coast where I was raised.
The Middle comprises the deep red states. Kansas, for instance, has given its electoral college votes to the Democrats only once – in 1964 – since 1940.
“The Middle has been a hard place to get to lately," Springsteen says quietly, lighting a candle in the chapel and eventually driving off.
His message is that freedom belongs to us all. It’s about climbing through darkness to hope.
While it sounds corny, with his masterful storytelling, the two-minute video is poetic, even if it is an advertisement for Jeep. “Fear has never been the best of who we are,” he says quietly. “And as for freedom, it is not the property of the fortunate few…it belongs to us all”.
I think it’s a message we need to hear. My mother grew up during the Great Depression. Her father lost his business and her entire family moved in with my great-grandmother. She says they were never hungry, but she remembers, even as a tiny girl, the fear that gripped the household.
She also remembers it ending. Her father went to work for the WPA (Works Progress Administration), a part of the New Deal. This was former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s programme that began to heal America through a series of projects and reforms that gradually brought the country out of its misery. Although it did not end the Great Depression, it restored public confidence and brought relief to millions of Americans. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” was FDR’s inaugural message.
Bruce Springsteen is one of America's most famous musicians. AFP
We are on hold right now, waiting for vaccines, waiting for President Biden’s first 100 days in office to erase the pain of the Trump years, waiting for schools to open and waiting to go back to work. Springsteen’s video, seen by 37 million viewers, means just that.
Not everyone liked it. One tweet sent to Steve Van Zant (a member of Springsteen’s E Street Band) said: "You think we can just move on now if we’re just nice to one another? I don’t. It’s whistling past the graveyard. And it was cynical on Jeep’s part and naive on Springsteen’s part."
All of this came as news broke that Springsteen was arrested last November for driving under the influence of alcohol in Sandy Hook, a national recreation area in New Jersey near his home.
According to police, Springsteen acted with his usual decorum, but Jeep took the advert off their YouTube page. It was later revealed that Springsteen reportedly blew a .02 on the breathalyser test, which is one-quarter of his home state's .08 legal limit for drink-driving. As I expected, the minor offence didn’t tarnish Springsteen’s reputation.
To me, the video was about getting to our core. Springsteen and Jeep aren’t telling us all to agree on everything, and yes, it is an advert that wants you to buy cars and albums. But it’s also telling us to put the greater good ahead of our pain and move forward. The US is a broken country and it is hurting. But it needs to find its way to the Middle.
Janine di Giovanni is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute. Her next book, The Vanishing, about Christians in the Middle East, is out in the autumn of 2021.
Founders: Michele Ferrario, Nino Ulsamer and Freddy Lim Started: established in 2016 and launched in July 2017 Based: Singapore, with offices in the UAE, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand Sector: FinTech, wealth management Initial investment: $500,000 in seed round 1 in 2016; $2.2m in seed round 2 in 2017; $5m in series A round in 2018; $12m in series B round in 2019; $16m in series C round in 2020 and $25m in series D round in 2021 Current staff: more than 160 employees Stage: series D Investors: EightRoads Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Sequoia Capital India
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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What: India v Afghanistan, first Test When: Starts Thursday Where: M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengalaru
The more you save, the sooner you can retire. Tuan Phan, a board member of SimplyFI.com, says if you save just 5 per cent of your salary, you can expect to work for another 66 years before you are able to retire without too large a drop in income.
In other words, you will not save enough to retire comfortably. If you save 15 per cent, you can forward to another 43 working years. Up that to 40 per cent of your income, and your remaining working life drops to just 22 years. (see table)
Obviously, this is only a rough guide. How much you save will depend on variables, not least your salary and how much you already have in your pension pot. But it shows what you need to do to achieve financial independence.
DMZ facts
The DMZ was created as a buffer after the 1950-53 Korean War.
It runs 248 kilometers across the Korean Peninsula and is 4km wide.
The zone is jointly overseen by the US-led United Nations Command and North Korea.
It is littered with an estimated 2 million mines, tank traps, razor wire fences and guard posts.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un met at a building in Panmunjom, where an armistice was signed to stop the Korean War.
Panmunjom is 52km north of the Korean capital Seoul and 147km south of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.
Former US president Bill Clinton visited Panmunjom in 1993, while Ronald Reagan visited the DMZ in 1983, George W. Bush in 2002 and Barack Obama visited a nearby military camp in 2012.
Mr Trump planned to visit in November 2017, but heavy fog that prevented his helicopter from landing.
