When Richard Reynolds first started gardening around London’s streets, he was so worried he might be arrested that he worked under the cover of darkness. Reynolds was one of the UK’s first modern guerrilla gardeners, a movement that encourages people to nurture and revive land they do not have the legal rights to cultivate.

Gardening, in general, offers physical and mental health benefits. But as many as one in eight British households have no access to a garden or outdoor space of their own.

This issue is particularly pronounced among city dwellers, ethnic minorities and young people. A 2021 survey conducted in England revealed that those aged 16-24 were more than twice as likely to lack access to a garden or allotment compared to those aged over 65.

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.

You may be interested in:

How community gardening could ease your climate concerns

Three ways to get your nature fix without a garden

How often do you think about the Roman empire? TikTok trend exposed the way we gender history

Guerrilla gardening is a particularly good option for these groups of people. It can involve planting herbs or vegetables for a whole community to enjoy, spreading seeds or plants, tidying weeds, or even something as simple as picking up litter.

But if you’re considering becoming a guerilla gardener, it’s important to understand your rights. Could you be arrested for it? And should you wait until after dark?

Can you be prosecuted?

It’s important to remember that much of the unused or abandoned land that is potentially suitable for guerilla gardening in towns and cities throughout the UK is owned by local councils. Common examples of such locations include broken pavements with missing slabs, wasteland and the central areas of roundabouts.

Although much of this land is already open for the public to walk over, actively gardening on it would become an act of trespass.

The law of trespass sounds scary. However, gardening on this land would be a breach of civil law rather than a crime. This means that most guerrilla gardeners are unlikely to receive a fine or a criminal record.

Landowners do have the legal right to use “reasonable force” to remove trespassers from their land. But, fortunately, it seems most councils have ignored guerrilla gardeners, having neither the time, money or inclination to bring legal action against them.

Colchester Council, for example, were unable to track down the identity of the “human shrub”, a mysterious eco-activist who restored the flowers in the city’s abandoned plant containers in 2009. The shrub returned again in 2015 and sent a gift of seeds to a local councillor.

In other areas of the UK, the work of guerilla gardeners has been cautiously welcomed by local councils. In Salford, a city in Greater Manchester, there is a formal requirement to submit an application and obtain permission to grow on vacant spots in the city. But the local authority tends not to interfere with illegal grow sites.

There seems to be an unwritten acceptance that people can garden wherever they want, given the abundance of available space and the lack of active maintenance. This also offers the additional advantage of saving both time and money for the local council.

You should still be careful about where you trespass though. In some areas, guerrilla gardening can lead to unwelcome attention. During the May Day riots of 2000, for example, guerrilla gardeners were accused of planting cannabis seeds in central London’s Parliament Square.

Gardening at night may draw the wrong attention too, particularly if you are carrying gardening tools that might be misunderstood by the police as threatening weapons.

How can you start?

There are many different types of guerrilla gardening that you could get involved in, from planting native plant species that benefit pollinators and other wildlife to tidying derelict land to create safer places for the local community.

One of the simplest forms of guerilla gardening is planting seeds. Some environmental projects circulate “seed bombs” and others use biodegradable “seed balloons” that are filled with helium and deflate after a day, distributing seeds by air.

Whatever you try, as a guerrilla gardener you shouldn’t harm the environment or spoil other people’s enjoyment of the space around you. Remember that weeds and wilderness have an environmental value too. And think carefully about the species you are going to plant so that you can protect local plants and wildlife.

The most attractive species to humans might not provide the best home or food for wildlife. Some can even outcompete native plants and drive them towards extinction. Planting certain harmful, invasive or poisonous species like ragwort, knotweed or Himalayan balsam is even prohibited by law.

That said, some guerrilla gardeners have used social media to organise “balsam bashing” events, where people come together to pull up this harmful invasive plant.

Guerrilla gardening takes many forms and can bring great benefits for people and the environment. You’re unlikely to be arrested for planting and growing trees and other greenery in public spaces. But remember that these spaces should be shared with everyone, including your local wildlife.

Ben Mayfield does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More

Netflix couldn’t have chosen a more resonant title than Everything Now for their new comedy drama series. When I came out of a residential clinic in 2009 for treatment of anorexia, I did a parachute jump, started volunteering and decided to have a baby on my own. Some of these were impulsive – yet heartfelt – attempts to “catch up” on a life that had been passing me by.

This sense of things moving on while you have been trapped in the depths of an eating disorder is probably even more potent in the intensified temporal rhythms of teenage years.

As Mia Polanco (Sophie Wilde), the 16-year-old protagonist of Everything Now, asks as the school bus conversation jostles around her: “Fuck. How can I have missed so much in seven months?”

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.

You may be interested in:

Friends with benefits – what a sex and relationship therapist wants you to know

‘Girl math’ may not be smart financial advice, but it could help women feel more empowered with money

Why are ‘photo dumps’ so popular? A digital communications expert explains

Everything Now is a thoughtful, sensitive and entertaining journey through Mia’s experience of teenage life following her discharge from the eating disorder inpatient unit she has been confined to for seven months.

The image of eating disorders

White, middle-class girls with anorexia have long since dominated the representation in film and TV. But eating disorders cut across ethnic boundaries.

Although there can never be any simple correlation between popular media representations of eating disorders and reality, they play a role in shaping wider understandings of eating problems. This includes who might be affected by them. As a result, this under-representation contributes to a culture in which people from minority ethnic backgrounds are under-diagnosed and less likely to access treatment.

Everything Now should be praised for recognising that it’s not just white, middle-class girls who experience eating disorders.

Also, a significant part of the early plot focuses on Mia’s crush on a female student. Historically, clumsy assumptions have supposed that LGBTQ+ girls and women are somehow more “protected” from eating issues than their heterosexual counterparts. This has long since been challenged. Research has shown that sexual minorities may be more at risk due to the complex relationships between oppression, gender identity and sexuality.

Read more: A male character on Heartstopper has an eating disorder. That's more common than you might think

Nuanced representation

Everything Now is one of the first TV shows about eating disorders that did not make me cringe. It is sensitive, carefully researched and it resonated.

The show does a good job of exploring the complexities of recovery – a long and uncertain process that is rarely depicted, perhaps because it is seen as less arresting than the descent into the illness.

Switching between flashbacks of her time in the clinic and her present life at school and home, Mia’s voiceover communicates her struggles and anxieties. It also shows how difficult it is to navigate other people’s perceptions of recovery. Her grandmother, for example, bakes her a coconut sponge to welcome her home, to which Mia internally exclaims: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Her grandma then pinches her cheek and says: “You look so wonderful, so healthy.” The implied link between flesh and healthiness can make such comments a minefield for people in recovery.

Mia aims to throw herself back into adolescence, but the series poignantly explores her new status as an insider and outsider – how she is irrevocably changed by her eating disorder.

As the camera pans over the nibbles and drinks at a party she asks: “How can they just eat and drink? How am I 16 and I can’t just do that?” This captures the way spontaneity with food and drink becomes utterly unimaginable, not only during the throes of an eating disorder but during the pressures, regimens and routines of a recovery meal plan.

Representing recovery

The voiceover is particularly good at showcasing the disjuncture between Mia’s eagerness and how her eating disorder pulls the brake: “Shots, OK. At least I can track what’s in that. Maybe I can skip something tomorrow. I need to show them I’m better. That I can be normal.” She is both present and not present – one of her peers yet so separate.

Everything Now depicts positive moments of recovery too, in ways that are touching and insightful. As Mia walks to school for the first time, she reflects on “All the everyday beauty I forgot how to see – and all the things I get to rediscover now.”

While the eating disorder has made the everyday strange (the snacks and drinks at the party seem impossible) it has also made the everyday more beautiful. The scene reminded me of a quote from a student in sociologist Paula Saukko’s 2008 book The Anorexic Self: “I used to be able to see the sky, but now I only think about food.”

Everything Now is an original, heartwarming and insightful story of learning to see the sky again.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Su Holmes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More

Based on some comments, it appears we scared a few people with A Crisis Is Coming. Our article warns, “A financial crisis will likely follow the Fed’s “higher for longer” interest rate campaign.” We follow the article with more on financial crises to help calm any worries you may have. This article summarizes two interest rate-related crises, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) and the lesser-known Financial Crisis of 1966.

We aim to convey two important lessons. First, both events exemplify how excessive leverage and financial system interdependences are dangerous when interest rates are rising. Second, they stress the importance of the Fed’s reaction function. A Fed that reacts quickly to a budding crisis can quickly mitigate it. The regional bank crisis in March serves as recent evidence. However, a crisis can blossom if the Fed is slow to react, as we saw in 2008.  

Before moving on, it’s worth providing context for the recent series of rate hikes. Unless this time is different, another crisis is coming.

LTCM’s Failure

John Meriweather founded LTCM in 1994 after a successful bond trading career at Salomon Brothers. In addition to being led by one of the world’s most infamous bond traders, LTCM also had Myron Scholes and Robert Merton on their staff. Both won a Nobel Prize for options pricing. David Mullins Jr., previously the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve to Alan Greenspan, was also an employee. To say the firm was loaded with the finance world’s best and brightest may be an understatement.

LTCM specialized in bond arbitrage. Such trading entails taking advantage of anomalies in the price spread between two securities, which should have predictable price differences. They would bet divergences from the norm would eventually converge, as was all but guaranteed in time.

LTCM was using 25x or more leverage when it failed in 1998. With that kind of leverage, a 4% loss on the trade would deplete the firm’s equity and force it to either raise equity or fail.

The world-renowned hedge fund fell victim to the surprising 1998 Russian default. As a result of the unexpected default, there was a tremendous flight to quality into U.S. Treasury bonds, of which LTCM was effectively short. Bond divergences expanded as markets were illiquid, growing the losses on their convergence bets.

They also wrongly bet that the dually listed shares of Royal Dutch and Shell would converge in price. Given they were the same company, that made sense. However, the need to stem their losses forced them to bail on the position at a sizeable loss instead of waiting for the pair to converge.

The Predictable Bailout

Per Wikipedia:

Long-Term Capital Management did business with nearly every important person on Wall Street. Indeed, much of LTCM’s capital was composed of funds from the same financial professionals with whom it traded. As LTCM teetered, Wall Street feared that Long-Term’s failure could cause a chain reaction in numerous markets, causing catastrophic losses throughout the financial system.

Given the potential chain reaction to its counterparties, banks, and brokers, the Fed came to the rescue and organized a bailout of $3.63 billion. A much more significant financial crisis was avoided.

The takeaway is that the financial system has highly leveraged players, including some like LTCM, which supposedly have “foolproof” investments on their books. Making matters fragile, the banks, brokers, and other institutions lending them money are also leveraged. A counterparty failure thus affects the firm in trouble and potentially its lenders. The lenders to the original lenders are then also at risk. The entire financial system is a series of lined-up dominos, at risk if only one decent-sized firm fails.

Roger Lowenstein wrote an informative book on LTCM aptly titled When Genius Failed. The graph below from the book shows the rise and fall of an initial $1 investment in LTCM.

The Financial Crisis of 1966

Most people, especially Wall Street gray beards, know of LTCM and the details of its demise. We venture to guess very few are up to speed on the crisis of 1966. We included. As such, we relied heavily upon The 1966 Financial Crisis by L. Randall Wray to educate us. The quotes we share are attributable to his white paper.

As the post-WW2 economic expansion progressed, companies and municipalities increasingly relied on debt and leverage to fuel growth. For fear of rising inflation due to the robust economic growth rate, the Fed presided over a series of rate hikes. In mid-1961, Fed Funds were as low as 0.50%. Five years later, they hit 5.75%. The Fed also restricted banks’ reserve growth to reduce loan creation and further hamper inflation. Higher rates, lending restrictions, and a yield curve inversion resulted in a credit crunch. Further impeding the prominent New York money center banks from lending, they were losing deposits to higher-yielding instruments.

Sound familiar? 

The lack of credit availability exposed several financial weaknesses. Per the article:

As Minsky argued, “By the end of August, the disorganization in the municipals market, rumors about the solvency and liquidity of savings institutions, and the frantic position-making efforts by money-market banks generated what can be characterized as a controlled panic. The situation clearly called for Federal Reserve action.” The Fed was forced to enter as a lender of last resort to save the Muni bond market, which, in effect, validated practices that were stretching liquidity.

The Fed came to the rescue before the crisis could expand meaningfully or the economy would collapse. The problem was fixed, and the economy barely skipped a beat.

However, and this is a big however, “markets came to expect that big government and the Fed would come to the rescue as needed.”

Expectations of Fed rescues have significantly swelled since then and encourage ever more reckless financial behaviors.

The Fed’s Reaction Function- Minksky Fragility

Wray’s article on the 1966 crisis ends as follows:

That 1966 crisis was only a minor speedbump on the road to Minskian fragility.

Minskian fragility refers to economist Hyman Minsky’s work on financial cycles and the Fed’s reaction function. Broadly speaking, he attributes financial crises to fragile banking systems.

Said differently, systematic risks increase as system-wide leverage and financial firm interconnectedness rise. As shown below, debt has grown much faster than GDP (the ability to pay for the debt). Inevitably, higher interest rates, slowing economic activity, and liquidity issues are bound to result in a crisis, aka a Minsky Moment. Making the system ever more susceptible to a financial crisis are the predictable Fed-led bailouts. In a perverse way, the Fed incentivizes such irresponsible behaviors.

Nearing The Minsky Moment

As we shared in A Crisis Is Coming: Who Is Swimming Naked?:

The tide is starting to ebb. With it, economic activity will slow, and asset prices may likely follow. Leverage and high-interest rates will bring about a crisis.

Debt and leverage are excessive and even more extreme due to the pandemic.

The question is not whether higher interest rates will cause a crisis but when. The potential for one-off problems, like LTCM, could easily set off a systematic situation like in 1966 due to the pronounced system-wide leverage and interdependencies.

As we have seen throughout the Fed’s history, they will backstop the financial system. The only question is when and how. If they remain steadfast in fighting inflation while a crisis grows, they risk a 2008-like event. If they properly address problems as they did in March, the threat of a severe crisis will considerably lessen.

Summary

The Fed halted the crises of 1966 and LTCM. They ultimately did the same for every other crisis highlighted in the opening graph. Given the amount of leverage in the financial system and the sharp increase in interest rates, we have little doubt a crisis will result. The Fed will again be called upon to bail out the financial system and economy.

For investors, your performance will be a function of the Fed’s reaction. Are they quick enough to spot problems, like the banking crisis in March or our two examples, and minimize the economic and financial effect of said crisis? Or, like in 2008, will it be too late to arrest a blooming crisis, resulting in significant investor losses and widespread bankruptcies?

The post From LTCM To 1966. The Perils Of Rising Interest Rates appeared first on RIA.

Read More