| Former President Jimmy Carter's death has brought condolences and remembrances from across the political spectrum and around the world. Today we highlight a few. Plus: A story you might have missed about the downfall of Diddy from the business side. Contact the editor of this newsletter here. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. The headline on Bloomberg Opinion's editorial today, Jimmy Carter: Good Man, Middling President, encapsulates many of the stories published upon the death of the 39th president on Sunday at age 100.  Carter at a ribbon cutting ceremony in 2017 for a solar panel project on farmland he owned in Plains, Georgia. Photographer: David Goldman/AP Photo On the "good man" point, here's one example from Bloomberg News' obituary by Laurence Arnold: Carter made some of his biggest imprints on the world in the years after he left the White House. He "reinvented the post-presidency," observed Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and a Carter biographer. In four-plus decades as an ex-president—the longest such tenure in American history—Carter waged a worldwide campaign against war, disease and the suppression of human rights through the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he founded with his wife. The center made particular strides against Guinea worm disease, a parasite spread through contaminated water that can render victims non-functional for months. Worldwide cases dropped to just 14 in 2023 from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986, according to the center.
As for his "middling" presidency: The signature achievement of the Carter presidency, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, led to peaceful co-existence between the Middle East neighbors even as it fell short of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That and other foreign policy breakthroughs, including the establishment of formal ties with China and a treaty granting Panama ownership of the US-built Panama Canal, were overshadowed by the plight of American hostages held in Iran during the last 444 days of his presidency. They were finally released the day Carter turned over the Oval Office to Republican Ronald Reagan. On the domestic front, the Carter presidency was dogged by economic woes. Inflation reached 13.3% at the end of 1979 compared with 5.2% when he took office in January 1977. The Federal Reserve's actions to stem price increases pushed home-mortgage rates to almost 15%, and Carter had to take emergency action to stem a slide in the dollar. There were energy shortages, and oil prices more than doubled.
You can read the full obituary here: Jimmy Carter, the Longest-Living US President, Has Died at 100.  Flags in Washington were lowered to half-staff on Sunday. Photographer: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
President Joe Biden said Carter will receive a state funeral on Jan. 9 and declared that a national day of mourning. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq said on Monday that they will close, as the markets traditionally do for presidential funerals. You can find a gallery of photos from Carter's extraordinary 100 years here. "When you look at the full scope of his intellect, interests, commitments, talents and deeds, Carter seems more a man from the dexterously imaginative generation of America's Founders than from the late 20th century reign of specialization," writes Francis Wilkinson, a political columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. On a more human level, he writes, "Carter's late-inning triumph as a 'model ex-president' is perhaps better appreciated as a template for a model old age. He shared quiet meals with his lifelong partner, Rosalynn Carter, until she died last year. He kept intellectually nimble by thinking, reading, speaking and writing. And he remained passionate about his commitments, which included humans, their dignity and rights, and the planet on which they reside." | 
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