T E Narasimhan has this interesting piece on the Amma brand based on TN Chief Minister Jayalalitha.
It is all ironical really. One would imagine private sector to dominate private sector in Indian economy and a new private player to challenge the incumbents. But the challenges are coming from babas and politicians. It perhaps goes back to our historical roots where we always believed gods and kings more than anything else:
Interesting bit of advice from Hans Gersbach. Something India’s election commission should look at:
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai) has this piece in Project Syndicate. UAE recently formed such a Ministry and he explains reasons for the same.
This is easily one of the best articles and one of the most interesting developments in recent times. It is also such a surprise to see the rule of Dubai write such a piece. When the world leadership barely struggles to speak properly, it is amazing to see King of Dubai of all leaders writing a piece on governance:
Sarah Skwire has this interesting discussion on the topic.
After all whom to lend and not to lend and on what terms is critical to evolution of banking.
Marina Primorac of IMF has this nice piece on local currencies:
Michael Boskin of Stanford Univ sums up the different economic strategies:
This is a superb profile of Prof Anatoly Liberman (of Univ of Minnesota) who is trying to figure out the origins of common words
Anatoly Liberman is a tall man with a slight stoop and an accent that is hard to place. The stoop comes from decades spent searching for the hidden history of words in one of the fifteen languages he can read. It may also be from the weight bearing down on his shoulders as he races the clock. At the age of seventy-nine he is trying to finish one of the greatest achievements in the annals of lexicography: a history, as complete as possible, of some the last words in the English language whose origins remain unknown.
They are simple words, common words, but words whose origins are a mystery: he, she,girl, pimp, ever, gawk, yet. We use these words every day, but Liberman has been working for thirty years to unearth their roots. His sharp mind, breadth of language, and sense of mission have kept him moving steadily toward that goal for the last half of his life. He is driven by the knowledge that if he were gone, no one would have the depth of linguistic knowledge, let alone the drive, to complete his work.
One is short of words to see the effort and joy of discovery Prof gets while discovering the origins:
It is one thing to reform the Fed, completely another to see Trump first getting elected as President and then reforming the Fed.
Things have become so negative for Federal Reserve (and ECB and BoE and BoJ and SNB and..??) that it has become a punching bag of sorts. Ryan McMaken of Mises has this bit on whether Trump will reform the Fed or not. Even more interesting is that all President candidates have spoken about reforming the Fed. From an institution which was beyond reproach some years ago, Fed has become such a reproachable organisation:
R Jagannathan of Swarajya has a piece raising several controversial (if not millions) ideas.
A superb paper by Prof. Peter Spufford on the topic:
When Ortelius, Abraham Ortel, the humanist son of a successful merchant, was born in Antwerp in 1527, it was already the commercial metropolis of Europe and had also become its dominant financial centre. As a young man in the 1540s and 1550s he lived through the years of Antwerp’s greatest prosperity. He did not die until 1598, by which time Antwerp had been reduced from the great metropolis of the west to a place of only regional commercial importance for the Spanishoccupied Netherlands. Nevertheless it was still the financial centre of Europe. This time lag between industrial and commercial decline on the one hand and decline as a financial centre on the other is one that has been repeated time and again.
As an historian whose metier compels him to study change over time, I am aware that our present arrangements, like those of Ortelius’ lifetime, are not anything more than temporary. Antwerp was by no means the first financial centre in the west. London will by no means be the last. And in this lecture, named after Ortelius, I will try to explore some aspects of the continuous rise and fall of financial centres like Antwerp and London over the last seven centuries, and even to glance back a little earlier to Arras and Genoa.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century there were two dominant financial centres in Europe, Florence for southern Europe, and Bruges for northern Europe. Communication between the two was by couriers, who, by the mid-century, were setting out in each direction once a week and took about three weeks to cover the distance. What then gave Florence and Bruges their financial pre-eminence? Both developed as focal points for industry, and as commercial centres, before becoming financial centres. This turns out to have been the normal pattern for seven centuries.
The blogger got into a very interesting discussion with friends who are financial market professionals and very savvy ones at that.
One question that cropped up was how is it that losses in banking are limited mostly to the public sector banks and not the private sector ones? If we have the same set of corporates, why is it that corporates choose to default with public banks and not private ones? Before viewers think this was some left oriented socialistic leaning group, it was just the opposite. The views of the discussants had emerged after seeing the way banking has been working in India and globally.
This question is going to be dismissed by most as a worthless discussion. Public sector banks make losses as they are owned by govt, have governance issues etc. Obviously, this answer chooses to ignore the kinds of malfeasance we are seeing in global private banks. But this issue of public vs private banks cannot be easily dismissed now with huge losses showing in a foreign bank which actually believes itself as an Indian player.
So what exactly is going on?
In the discussion, one was enlightened on how banking actually works between public and private banks:
Robert Skidelsky, Keynes biographer writes on the 80th anniversary of Keynes’ magnum opus – The General Theory.
In this era of overt praise for India’s financial markets and its policies, here is some straight talking from Percy Mistry.
He starts with GIFT city troubles and then speaks on other issues as well……
Suman Layak of ET does a profile of how gen next of Godrej family is trying to make changes in 118 year old company.
Nice bit..
Chris Patten who claims to be the Vice Chancellor of most universities writes on a disturbing trend across the world – govts trying to intervene and influence univ teaching:
A team of Bloomberg analysts have this interesting piece on the topic. In sum it is all via a complicated network so that it is difficult to find the trail:
Biagio Bossone and Stefano Sylos Labini look how ECB could have better managed the crisis.
They pick a note from Franco Modgiliani and other scholars which argued for a broad based ECB:
TCA Srinivasa Raghavan hits out at the usual economic commentary in India which obsesses with fiscal deficit target.
He starts with economic illiteracy and lemming effect:
Suraj Gupta has an article on Madhya Pradesh’s agri economy. He highlights progress in MP’s most of agri indicators.
If the story is somewhat true, it shows how things can be done in India without making much noise over ministers and reforms.
Pramit Bhattacharya of Mint has this nice piece on state of modern economics. This word modern is problematic as it usually connotes anything modern is better than its past avatar. However, this may not be the case with most such modern things and surely not with modern economics.
Mostly Economics 