World Interest Rates, Flying Mad Men and A Photo from The Crash of 1929.
May 8, 2023 Volume 4 # 2
World Interest Rates
Interest rate hikes are over for now, according to many economic thinkers. But that leaves rates a lot higher than they were a year ago.
Real rates — adjusting for local inflation— means that in more than half the countries on this list, it is still relatively cheap to borrow.
Toronto Housing Prices Ignore Rates, Jump Again.
Maybe Canadian home buyers have figured it out as prices rise again in Toronto.
The Bloomberg headline:
“Toronto Housing Market Roars Back With Sales, Prices Surging.”
Housing prices in April were up 4% for detached houses; but some condo prices— for two bedrooms— rose 11% in the month, though prices are off compared to a year ago. One cause for April’s price rise could be a lack of supply. Listings were down 38% from a year ago. People could be hanging on for a turnaround.
Another reason is the pressure of immigration. Canada has ambitious immigration targets but there isn’t enough housing so the price goes up. Economics 101.
All Male Flight In the Mad Men Era
This one is hard to believe. A flight from New York to Chicago in the mid 1950s that only allowed male passengers. The only women on board were the stewardesses.
The plane was a four engine Douglas DC-6. But by the time the marvellous TV series Mad Men came Don Draper and Roger Sterling were flying in jets.
The DC-8
Roger and Don could have been in a Douglas DC-8, one of the first passenger jets.
At the time Douglas and Boeing with its 707 airliner were neck and neck in the jetiner business. The two battled back and forth, introducing more seats and longer or stretched versions. The DC8-60 was the world’s largest airliner when it was rolled out in January of 1966. A long story, but Boeing eventually was the winner in the jetliner business.
The DC-8 was the first airliner I ever flew on. On November 19, 1967, using the money I had saved working at Expo 67, I set out for London. We took off from Montreal in a snowstorm. We arrived over the green fields of England seven or eight hours later. As well as my introduction to transatlantic travel, it was also my introduction to foreign exchange. I had changed my Canadian dollars into British pounds before I left. Dumb. The day I landed Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson devalued the currency by 14%. Talk about Tax Man Mr. Wilson
Is This Famous Photo a Phoney?
The photo is this man selling his car for just $100 on October 30, 1929, after the sign says he lost all his money in the stock market. It is a spectacular image that at once says everything about the stock market crash of 29. Perfect. But too Perfect?
The man in the picture is well dressed, sending the message that until a day or two ago he was a prosperous investor. The car is a Chrysler Imperial 75 Roadster. It is as pricey as it looks and $100, worth about $1,700 today, is a steal.
But here is another photo taken when a crowd was attracted to the scene.
The gloves are a nice touch. The seller is a handsome man. Too handsome.
The man’s name is Walter Clarence Thornton, a 26 year old male model. If he was really broke, he made a hell of a comeback. In 1930 he started the Walter Thornton Model Agency and could afford to be one of the first to rent space in the spectacular art deco Chrysler Building. His agency was a huge success: some of the models he represented including Grace Kelly and Lauren Bacall. He sold his agency in 1958 and retired to Mexico and died in Long Beach, California at the age of 88 in 1990.
The verdict: the car sale photo was brilliant, but a setup. Too perfect to be true.
Essay of the Week
Few Canadians know there were camps for German and Austrian Jews in Canada at the start of the Second World War. I wrote obituaries of three of those men and this is one of them, a grandson of the the socialist Chancellor of Austria, pre-Anschluss.
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Karl Renner never meant to come to Canada. He was sent here at the start of war as an internee, an "enemy alien" kept behind barbed wire in one of several camps for Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, who were living in England when the Second World War broke out in 1939.
Although not a vengeful man, Mr. Renner did get back at the Nazis. He later helped to create Canadian war propaganda, German-language radio broadcasts aimed at sowing doubts in the German population, and stayed on for most of 65 years.
The Nazi race laws were one of the reasons Karl Renner and part of his family fled to England. The other was that they couldn't abide living under Nazi rule. Although his father had been a practising Protestant, the Nazis classified him as Jewish. "As far as the Nazis were concerned, he was Jewish," said Frances Ashley, Mr. Renner's sister. The classification applied to his son, too.
In May, 1940, the British didn't have time to decide who was a threat and who wasn't. They put them all in internment camps, such as on the Isle of Man, and then shipped them to Canada. "The British panicked," said broadcaster and writer Eric Koch who went to England from Germany in the mid-1930s. "We were interned by the British and sent to Canada."
Both men spent about two years in "enemy alien" camps. Later, Mr. Renner would joke that although they were given the same rations as men in the Canadian Army, they ate better. The chef from the Ritz in London was among the detainees at his camp at Farnham in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
The internees arrived in May, 1940, and settled down to life behind the wire. Soon, however, Ottawa questioned whether they should be treated as prisoners of war and in mid-1941 reclassified them as refugees. The government also realized they could be useful. Some, like Mr. Renner, were given a chance to work.
He spent a short time at the spy school at Camp X outside Toronto where he polished his propaganda skills. From 1943 on, Mr. Renner and others wrote and broadcast propaganda aimed at the German population in a unit with the ominous name of the Psychological Warfare Committee. The Canadian Censorship Board also asked Mr. Renner and many others to translate letters to and from some of the 32,000 German prisoners of war held in camps in Canada. What they gleaned was often used to advantage in their radio broadcasts. The service began transmission during Christmas, 1944.
"What distinguished the German-language material was that it was prepared by very bright persons who understood German, could empathize with the German population as well as the prisoners," wrote Arthur Siegel in his History of Radio Canada International. "Karl Renner, the Censorship's Board's contributor to psychological warfare, had himself been an internee when he first arrived in this country, although he was a refugee from the Nazis."
Even 10 years after the war, Canadian officials glossed over the treatment given to Germans and Austrians who had fled the Nazis. "A native of Vienna, Karl came to Canada in 1940 and worked for a time with the National War Services in Ottawa," read the announcement when Mr. Renner was named a correspondent for the CBC International Service, implying he arrived as a happy immigrant
Karl Renner was a man of polished manners and a sharp wit, a product of a privileged childhood in Vienna and a direct connection to the culture of central Europe. In Canada, where he lived for most of the past 65 years, he was always the life of the party.
He loved his connection to European socialist aristocracy. "We don't have to work, we're socialists," was a favourite throwaway line. And he had a string of them.
"He had beautiful manners, spoke several languages and was a beautiful dancer," recalled Joan Irwin, a retired journalist who knew him in Ottawa and Montreal. "He was very aware of his family background. He lived two-thirds in the present and one-third in the past."
Karl Renner's socialist connection came through his maternal grandfather, Karl Renner, the first Chancellor of the Republic of Austria. He was born Karl Renner-Deutsch (his father, Hans Deutsch, had hyphenated the two names) in Vienna in 1917. The year of his birth shaped his life. The Austro Hungarian Empire was at war with Britain, Canada and the rest of the Empire, France and Italy and soon the United States. When it ended, so did the Empire that stretched from parts of Poland in the north to Trieste and the Adriatic in the south, covering 11 ethnic groups. Vienna went from being the centre of a polyglot empire of 50 million people to being the capital of a poor man's Switzerland with just three million people.
Karl Renner, grandfather of the man who has just died in Ottawa, was the son of a Moravian peasant and a prominent socialist politician, first elected to Parliament in 1907. In her book, Paris 1919, University of Toronto historian Margaret Macmillan details how Karl Renner, who was leader of a peace delegation at Versailles, used his charm to save chunks of land for the new Austria. "Karl Renner, a cheerful, portly man, fond of good food and drink, card games and dancing," was how Ms. Macmillan described the Austrian chancellor.
By all accounts, it also described his grandson, Karl Renner, who had long since dropped both the hyphen and his father's name. Big-picture politics continued to shape young Karl Renner's life. When that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler, took over his native country in 1938, young Karl Renner fled to England. His grandfather remained in Vienna under a kind of house arrest throughout the war and re-surfaced in 1945 to help Austria maintain its delicate balance between the Soviet Union and the West.
In England, the grandson of the old Austrian Chancellor was a social hit. His dancing skills made him a favourite at balls; his Austrian airs added a cosmopolitan sparkle, helped out by anti-Nazi views.
After his internment and then freedom in Canada, Mr. Renner returned to London and worked for an oil company, travelling across Europe. In 1948-1950 he worked for the International Refuge Organization in Italy. During his time in Europe he maintained his Canadian connection, making freelance radio reports to the International Service.
In the mid 1960s, he returned to Montreal to serve as public-relations officer for the service. By then, the Cold War was at its height and much of the service was broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
Mr. Renner's ambition was to become head of the department but worried his connection to a famous socialist family might have done in him. "Socialism and communism were seen as closely related during the Cold War," said his wife, Juliet Harrison. Some of his friends thought he was thwarted, in part by his own louche image.
"He loved to give the appearance of never working very hard," said Mr. Koch. His old friend Joan Irwin remembered that Al Johnson, the Saskatchewan-born president of the CBC, was not fond of the smooth Karl Renner.
"Al Johnson thought Karl was frivolous," said Ms. Irwin. And, in many ways, he was. Years of diplomatic parties gave him a weakness for drink. One of his affectations was to carry a silver flask filled with vodka. Eventually, one by one, he gave up his vices.
Some time in the mid-1970s, Karl Renner moved to Ottawa. He loved it there. The Austrian embassy treated him as a near deity and he was invited to many receptions. Recently, the current ambassador paid him a visit.
He visited Austria often, staying with his mother at the family home near Vienna. When his mother died, the house was dedicated to his grandfather and made into the Renner Museum.