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People of a new generation cannot imagine that India that they know today could not exist without the integration of 560 smaller kingdoms within overall British India that were allowed self rule under British conditions and law. They made up no less than one third of the British Empire in India. During India's 75th anniversary of independence and looking to India's 100th year a young generation born after 1947 growing up in post-British India cannot easily imagine the critical years after 1910, with Gandhi writing Hind Swaraj that year during a period when he negotiated for the rights of Indians in South Africa just to move freely. The years of the struggle for Swaraj between 1910 and 1931, the Satyagraha March to the Sea at Porbandar to protest the British Salt Tax, the elected assemblies that brought the first experience with self-rule in the thirties, and the "karenge o marenge" pledge to do or die with Quit India Movement in 1942 by Gandhi.  The dominant role of Jawaharlal Nehru after 1947, and that of daughter Indira Gandhi after him, wittingly or unwittingly had the intended or unintended effect of obscuring from view the role of many of the leaders around Gandhi of whom Jawaharlal Nehru was just one. No doubt about Jawaharlal who wore a prisoners badge number token around his neck and spent years in British jails. No doubt about his contribution. Lyrarc throws a spotlight on other leaders who made equally large contributions so that India's young people can get a better sense of what this struggle involved and how it was won by the  people of that time  under the most difficult conditions and trials. This includes Vallabhbhai Patel, Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, and the young Lal Bahadur Shastri. Others Naoroji, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda, from an even earlier period, Gokhale and Tilak, are people on whose shoulders Mohandas Gandhi stood on and fully accepted as his mentors, as do today's Indian leaders. This BBC report looks at the role of Vallabhbhai Patel of Kheda district in Gujarat state and of his assistant VP Menon. Gandhi was born in 1869, Patel in 1875 and Nehru in 1889. In 1947 Gandhi made the decision to go with Jawaharlal Nehru who was 14 years younger than Vallabhbhai Patel as the younger leader and prime minister who could take India through this critical first decade after independence with Patel as deputy prime minister. Patel died of heart conditions in 1950. Patel's assistant during the crucial period of negotiations for independence after the war ended in 1945 with Viceroy Mountbatten was V.P. Menon.  Mohandas Gandhi always believed that with hundreds of millions of Indians gaining consciousness of their rights even under British concepts of free men and free people, and a sense of their own dignity under God, the British would simply have to leave. His faith in the Bhagavad Gita that affirmed this right under God was firm and indomitable. This was true by 1947. He needed other leaders around him to structure the form this independence would take in terms of administration of the country and the constitution of the new nation. He also needed to bring those parts of British India that were not absorbed into direct British rule during successive wars between 1756 and 1857. These small kingdoms were retained under princely rule after the British decided to halt the policy of integrating them into direct rule following a war in 1857 that almost led to the downfall of the British in India. How large was this area is hard to comprehend when one sees that this was one third of British India in land mass from the Himalayan mountains to the Indian Ocean. Harder still it is to grasp that it would involve bringing in about 560 different princely states or kingdoms into the new India of 1947. It was the task of Vallabhbhai Patel and of his assistant V P Menon to do this. Southik Biswas of the BBC tells the story of how this was done with pictures from that period- click on Original Article to see the BBC report. It also shows how much modern India owes to Vallabhbhai Patel, as it does to Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Atal Bihari Vajapayee, to Tilak and all the people in the jails of Andaman, to Naoroji and Gokhale. And how much it owes to today's leaders who have made it their task to bring Har Ghar Jal, cooking gas, and electricity to every family in every village in India, never losing sight of that last poorest of men and women in the land that Vivekananda and then Mohandas Gandhi never lost sight of.   ...

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Turner Adair, head of Britain's Financial Regulatory Authority thinks that banks have assumed an outsize role in the British and world economy, and are coopting their regulators. He sees the need to check many of the excesses. Why not use profits to build up reserves rather than give out huge bonuses and paychecks, he asks. He sees the need to challenge the accepted thinking on Wall Street and in the City of London, where the ideology of efficient markets became embedded, as it did also in the regulatory community. He came in the week Lehman Brothers collapsed as chairman of the FSA. And he wants to shake up the existing thinking. In March, the Turner Review. a 126 page report was published. A lot of attention was paid to his suggesting atax on financial transactions, called the Tobin tax, but its designed more to get people thinking and questionning the existing way of running banking as Turner said in an interview, "we have begun to accept this idea of liquidity as the new God." Can British or American society and the financial industry in both countries work to the benefit of both? Nobel prize winning economists and other experts have advised ashift to productive investments that grow the economy using technology, science and brainpower and new ideas, as opposed to the investment in mortgages and other speculative investments. As the regulators -including former and current heads of the SEC, and other regulatory bodies in the US, Cox, Schapiro and others- once held on to the same theory of uninhibited operation of free markets as best for generating increased wealth for society as the banking community, they tended to get co-opted in letting bad practices flourish. Went to sleep on the job as it were. See the links in Intelilinks. Adair Turner's admonitions are designed to get people thinking. He says, "banks need to be willing, like the regulator, to recognize that there are some profitable activities so unlikely to have a social benefit, direct or indirect, that they should voluntarily walk away from them." Investments in science, technology and new products, as in the 60's that generated a revolution in living standards, than the mortgages and consumer lending of the last decade, is what he may be saying, as do these Nobel prize winning economists....

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Hitachi's conversion to a leaner, more profit conscious company, learning from rivals, GE, Siemens, IBM and large Korean companies. CEO, Nakanishi, graduated from Stanford with a computer science degree in 1979, during a break from Hitachi. He takes a hands on approach to management and brings this approach to tough assignments to learn what is going wrong. He moved to San Jose, to figure out why the hard disk drive business Hitachi bought from IBM for $2.05 billion was losing money. There he found quality problems were causing 60% of the hard drives coming off the production line with defects. After fixing the problems and achieving 10% profit margins Nakanishi put the company up for sale. Western Digital bought the company for $4.8 billion. His hands on approach includes meeting directly with public officials and ministers in governments around the world that buy its nuclear plants, high speed trains and large machinery. To maintain its preferred bidder status Nakanishi met with Britain's transport minister during the switch in government to the Conservative party in 2010. In his approach he is part of a new breed of Japanese executives, some with education in the U.S., such as Toyota's new CEO, Akio Toyoda, and others such as Toshiba's CEO, Norio Sasaki, who are eager to break away from the mold. Like Toshiba, Hitachi has shifted away from its consumer product lines. Hitachi consumer products are expected to make up only 10% of sales in the coming fiscal year. Emphasis is on the industrial products from nuclear plants to power plant equipment and high speed trains that powered Hitachi from its early beginnings as a maker of mining equipment in the 1920's. These executives are vigilant about a "Not Invented Here Syndrome" typical of large Japanese companies. Nakanishi says there is a lot Japanese companies can learn from rivals about cost and strategies. The experience came with hard knocks. In March 2009, Hitachi announced the biggest loss for a Japanese company upto that time of $9.9 billion. As head of the power and industrial business Nakanishi lost a contract to build a power plant in the Unted Arab Emirates to Korean companies. Compared to Hitachi, Toshiba's strategy is to emphasize industrial products such as nuclear reactors but also keep a presence in consumer products because Sasaki's view is that consumer products require smaller investments and generate cash flow. Jurio Osawa, WSJ, April 9, 2012, Toshiba's Chief Takes Stock....

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The SEC requirement that companies disclose the ratio between median worker pay and the pay of senior executives. The SEC says it is putting out the rule as part of implementing Dodd-Frank legislation to control excessive executive pay. Companies will be allowed to survey a fraction of their workforce as appropriate for companies with global operations. Executive pay will include pension benefits and stock options under the new rule. A WSJ chart using information from the University of Southern California and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows the ratio between what CEO's on average make and rank and file workers make remained at about 30 times in the post war period till about 1970, a period of rapid growth in the U.S. economy. By 1980 this climbed to about 60 times and exceeded 100 times by 1990. The period of stratospheric growth for CEO pay and extreme widening of the gap then occurs between 1990 and 2000. By 2000 the dot com boom- telecom boom and the internet- creates a surge in executive pay reaching over 500 times. This drops to about 280 times in 2008 and picks up again to reach about 320 times in 2011. Many of the poor business practices, the excessive leveraging and risktaking in the financial industry, take place against this background of excessive pay for senior executives. Some of that risk was passed on to others through such methods as securitization in the period leading to the 2008 financial crisis, so that executives were compensated with higher pay for taking excessive risk that they personally or their companies did not assume. Dodd-Frank legislation following the 2008 financial crisis sought to correct this imbalance by having pay information disclosed. The excessive pay has also coincided with an increase in the frequency of boom-bust cycles in the economy. The busts prompted the needs for intervention by the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, to drop interest rates more than would otherwise have happened during this decade, culminating in the huge bond purchases and monetary easing by the Bernanke Fed. The SEC under Mary Jo White is mindful of these distortions in the economy as a result of misallocation of resources based on excessive executive pay, and the need to take action before the next crisis. ...

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Protectionist sentiment in the USA is keeping tariffs high on ethanol to keep out Brazilian ethanol. Some of the arguments used for keeping it out are concern for the Brazilian rainforests, for food prices, for labor. Are these concerns real or just a way of keeping out imported ethanol by farm lobbies in the USA. Brazilian ethanol packs 8.2 times as much energy as the energy used to make it compared to just 1.5 times for corn ethanol, according to the Woodrow Wilson Center. It is grown in Sao Paulo state or the northeast miles away from the Amazon so it is not deforesting the Amazon. About 65% of it is grown on land that was previously pasture, the rest was used for other crops according to Conab, a government agency. Also sugar cane occupies only 7 million hectares or 17 million acres of Brazilian farmland compared to 200 million hectares for cattle ranching so it is not pushing cattle ranchers into the Amazon. So it does not have a noticeable impact on food or beef prices. And sugar cane production may benefit from higher yield varieties with more research. In 2005 of the 440,000 workers, 453 died, 17 were killed in accidents according to a study by a researcher at the the University of sao Paulo. In the same year of the 2.16 million workers in other branches of Brazilian farming, 2900 died and 135 were killed in accidents, so the situation in the sugarcane industry is not much worse than the rest of Brazilian agriculture. Moreover cane cutting is getting mechanized. At Santelisa Vale 60% of cane cutting is mechanized. So the arguments of protectionists in the USA about environmental impact, labor situation, and others do not carry much weight. The tariff on Brazilian ethanol makes it less attractive to import ethanol from Brazil and it creates uncertainty about future imports if the prices of corn based ethanol drop in the USA. Removal of the tariff is supported by John McCain. The tariff is 54cents on each gallon of imported ethanol. Importing ethanol from Brazil would have less impact on corn supply in the USA and on on corn prices so it would put less pressure on the world food supply and world food prices. ...

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The Detroit News Daniel Howes draws UAW leader Gettelfinger's attention to how serious Obama is about this auto loan not being a bridge to nowhere, and how Obama expects union, management and others to kick old habits and start building areally viable competitive future. Howes thinks Gettelfinger and the UAW may be doing what they did before in kicking the proverbial can down the road, as they said they would ask Obama and Democratic leaders to help the unions take out clauses for unions to do their part in the road to recovery that are stated in the term sheet for the loans. Howes reflects Detroit opinion in favor of the loans and helping GM, UAW and management get the bridge loan, but here he makes a marked shift in view. Howes accepts that the situation now is where with a bailout weary public and Democrats in the new Congress (more keen on getting energy efficiency and a competitive car industry than helping out the UAW and current management), and Obama, are not likely to support the old habits and ways of the car industry, its unions,its old managements and boards, and its old way of doing things. Howes is even skeptical of Wagoner's claim that he is going to reinvent the company. There are only 3 months between now and March 31st and the term sheet for the auto loans says the time between now and then should also be used to prepare for an orderly bankruptcy with government support and financing in place. No less than in a place like Detroit this columnist is calling for serious attention to be paid to what this term sheet implies and the public mood is saying by all concerned. In a sombre message to union bosses and management and politicians, Howes says its Big Three communities that would be paying their own prices as CEO's, union bosses, politicians and bankers, played chicken with other people's livelihoods and lost anyway. So the bridge loans given that there are only 3 months to come up with plans and action for viable futures for GM and Chrysler, are in fact a serious step for the last act before an orderly bankruptcy takes place, unless every stakeholder gets his act together. ...

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The director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Cai Fang predicts that by 2009 there would be a widespread shortage of workers, pushing up industrial wages. Figures from the UN Population Division show that China's working age population will decline in the years ahead. There are two things here that matter. The millions of people in a socalled surplus labor force that can be tapped so that industry can hire more people expand and grow without wage inflation, and second the working age population 20-29, younger people being preferred by employers for the long hours, single people who can stay in dorms and can be mobile to move near factories and do not have the restrictions of married people with children. The one child policy has limited the growth of the working age population. After rising by 1.3% a year according to the UN Population Division during the decade to 2005, the population of working age is expected to increase at an annual rate of 0.7% until 2015, and then shrink by 0.1% ayear until 2025. The surplus labor pool figures estimates vary from 150 million people to 200 million people, but the Economist estimates the true figure to be much smaller because government figures for the rural labor force include millios of migrants already in the cities and others working in rural industry not farming. The population of workers in ages 20-29 fell from 233 million in 1990 to 165 million in 2005. Because of this shrinking of supply of eligible labor especially considering the preference of textile and electronics firms to hire young women because they complain less and put up with long hours and for single men preferred by construction firms, Cai Fang believes that this preferred or eligible labor pool is shrinking to the point where it will be a problem in the years ahead. This will have the impact of shrinking the growth rate to around 7% sometime after 2009. Problems that remained under cover because of the Olympics will also become evident as 2008 winds down. Some experts argue that there are other factors that will contine to sustain the pool of available workers, but its this pool of preferred available workers that will be in short supply according to Cai Fang. ...

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Allan Meltzer, a former economic adviser to President Reagan, and an expert on monetary policy at Carnegie Mellon School of Business says that "this is scare tactics to try to do something that is in the private but not the public interest, its terrible." Vincent Reinhart a former Fed economist says Paulson has lost credibility, people don't believe him anymore. And Elmendorf of the Brookings institution says that taxpayers should get more out of this deal with ownership stakes in the companies that use government money. Others like Bruce Bartlett, a former White House economist under president Reagan say the problem is nobody knows what the hell is going on and there are some naive assumptions about how this would function. Martin Bailly, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton says for financial institutions to take the funds Treasury has to pay a premium because otherwise they would have sold already. While Bernanke told the Banking Committe that the government would pay more than the distressed prices to get broad participation which is a goal of Treasury and the Fed, neither he nor Paulson could reassure the committee about how taxpayers would be protected. Most of the economists surveyed here by the NYT are skeptical about a Wall Streeter from Goldman Sachs credibility on this as they see him paying financial institutions a premium price. The sore point in all this for the taxpayers and the public would be that the Bush administration has done nothing to help homeowners with foreclosures that are also at the root of the problem when you look beyond the immediate clogging up of the financial system and present a threat via declining home prices. And Paulson now offers a plan that also is very hazy about protecting taxpayers with equity ownership or some other protections, and has nothing to assuage the public's outrage about ceo compensation in the midst of distress. Not just the Banking Committee but experts from all sides of the political spectrum are raising concerns stressing one or other of these points, and find the lack of details in the Paulson Bernanke plan a sign of a hastily put together plan with little research even considering the lack of time, and the lack of any details a strain on people's intelligence for a proposal of such magnitude....

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House Speaker Pelosi and Majority leader Reid prempt the Bond-Levin proposal to use the $25 billion of funds from the energy efficiency retooling for operating expenses. They said there were just not enough votes to pass the change. And the general feeling was that the automakers had hurt their case more than they had helped it after 2 days of hearings in the Senate and the House on November 18-19, 2008. Pelosi put it this way, "until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money." The automakers were asked to come up with a plan that shows accountability and viability. Pelosi is from California, a state that has seen its mandate for controlling auto emissions held up by the automakers lobbying and the Bush administration EPA, and which favors higher fuel efficiency, higher than the numbers passed in recent legislation, also held up by the automakers lobbying efforts. So there is a three way battle going on with the states in the midwest and the Bush administration pitted against Pelosi-Reid-Waxman and the younger Obama supporters in Congress for the $25 billion in energy efficiency retooling to be used for salaries and so on. And the other battle pitting the midwestern states against all those who call for strict conditions including firing management, and serious restructuring within or outside prepackaged bankruptcy. Reid and Pelosi called for Congress to reconvene on December 2. Reid said that what happened this week has not been good for the auto industry,, which is ominous, because the hearings showed an unrepentant automaker management which did not accept any of the errors made by management long before the credit crisis in October, which riled Congressmen. Another thing was the reference to corporate jets which came up in the hearings, and Reid emphasized as did others that these guys flying in in their corporate jets did not send a good message to people in Searchlight or Reno, Nevada. The reason this is important is that executive compensation and golden parachutes are moving right to the top as they do in such times, as evidenced by the story in the Wall Street Journal frontpage on November 20 about 120 executives making $21 billion in compensation in the last 5 years including failed companies, see the link. . ...

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People in California did not feel the early blows of the coronavirus like New York. This is now turning into a disadvantage as people in California have now failed to follow the guidelines for social distancing and masks as carefully as they should be. The state reopening  took place as the case numbers were increasing as the economy and unemployment became an issue.  State hospitalizations are up 40% on July 1 from 2 weeks ago. Percentage of tests coming positive are close to 6% but in some counties much higher- in Riverside county has rate positive in tests at 11.7% and bars are only recommended to close. In Los Angeles county it is 8.2%. On June 20 the day after the bars were allowed to open 500,000 people visited bars in Los Angeles County. A big problem is that for lockdown the whole state was asked to lockdown by the governor. For reopening it is done by county and each county is doing this differently. Pressure to reopen has led to counties with increasing and poor metrics for cases still reopening. Some counties felt pressured to open when other counties had reopened. Even when a county such as Riverside or Los Angeles county is doing poorly the governor waits 14 days for it to be on a watch list before acting. This is too long for the extremely contagious virus giving it time to spread quickly. Governor Newson is now facing serious problems tackling the coronavirus. ...

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Sheila Bair leaves behind a much stronger FDIC. William Isaac, a former FDIC chairman says she has had a positive effect on the agency by raising its profile and energy level. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation FDIC now has the powers to take over large complex financial institutions that are in serious trouble. Mr Gruenberg, who succeeds Ms Bair, has worked closely with her at FDIC. Jim Wigand, heads the new Office of Complex Financial institutions at the FDIC. One of the powers given by the legislation is for FDIC to have its examiners at financial firms to go over operations, providing backup supervision to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. According to FDIC officials analysts should be in place at financial firms the FDIC oversees during the next 12 months. The FDIC is also working on a rule requiring banks with assets larger than $50 billion and other large nonbank financial firms to provide a "living will," a plan that would help regulators speedily and cleanly wind down a firm in a future financial crisis. In March 2011 the FDIC approved a draft rule requiring firms to submit these plans, along with regular updates and reports on the firms' current credit exposure. Ms. Bair says the proposal will be completed in August. Bair has also put in place FDIC managers with considerable experience who can continue the work of strengthening the regulatory system she started in 2006. In her work at FDIC Bair has performed a remarkable public service at a difficult time in the nation's history....

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Rajneesh Goel, Bangalore's chief civil servant, says the city never followed scientific landfill practices. Instead as Bangalore expanded with new business campuses for Infosys and other companies, the garbage was trucked out to sites with little planning and no interest on the part of companies on where this was ending up. Most of the landfill sites outside the city are now filled and the city is running out of places to dump the garbage. About 4000 tons of garbage needs disposal every day, over a millon tons a year now that the city is no longer the smaller garden city it used to be, a place where people looked to go for retirement years in the early post 1947 period. A new effort is being made in crisis conditions by NGO's and business to come up with better disposal practices that are good for the environmental air quality and water quality.

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India's robust debate as a democracy is of an astonishing size and diversity of opinion. The debate did not diminish when there was one federal party in many states under Indira Gandhi (1970's). It actually increased many times during this period compared to the period under Jawaharlal Nehru (1950's) taking the example of one state Gujarat as an example of what was going on in 18 states of that time. Newspapers in Gujarati such as Jansatta, Gujarat Samachar and others carried on a vigorous debate with opposing points of view to the Indira Gandhi government at the state and federal level of the 1970's. Most people in places like New York and London fail to understand or see the local language newspapers or are totally unaware of their existence, and the debate carried on in their pages. So that they falsely assume what a small group of English language newspapers tell them about the vigor of Indian democratic debate that is truly unmatched anywhere in the world. And in terms of its 22 languages in one nation one could say in the entire history of the world. Swapan Dasgupta in the Times of India gives the staggering number of publications today in 2023- 144,520 publications reaching 386 million people every day. And 392 television news channels . All in 22 languages. To ignore the local languages as if they did not exist is to ignore India as if a billion people did not exist. Or as it is for China to say that everything written in Chinese papers and Chinese news channels did not exist. Dasgupta also points out that one should take Mr. Modi and the BJP out of this as at the national level its a 10 year old phenomenon. Look back from 2010 for the sixty years from 1950 to 2010 and India was as badly misconceived, misrepresented, and misperceived back then. India he says fell from 105th place in Freedom House rankings in 2006 to 140th place in 2013. Mr. Modi only enters the picture after that. Dasgupta points out the small sample for these ratings 150 respondents and the methodology having missed much if not everything that is needed in a robust democratic debate. There is another aspect which is present which is prominent in New York and London and Washington D.C. and that is that non-alignment is not popular.  One has to see the way Adlai Stevenson running against Eisenhower twice in the 1950's very warmly received Jawaharlal Nehru on his visit to the US and compare it with the way the US perceived India under John Foster Dulles after Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952 to understand this aspect of American perception. Dulles was facing the Soviet Union and the British under Churchill then Macmillan had an equal disdain for Nehru's non alignment and tilt towards the Soviet Union. These root perceptions did not change with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and continued into the 1970's when Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minister and continued non alignment.  India's political alignment after the pandemic is anything but non-aligned. It thinks, acts and lives in a way that is similar to the people of the US and Europe. Not even because it chooses to but because of what it is, coming from being part of its ancient path of Vedanta and Buddhist civilization that is the core Asian experience. It also needs to bring 400 million out of poverty and build the next phase of industrialization and modernization that requires fossil fuels in large quantities at lower prices to sustain its rapid growth. Some of it comes from Russia purely as an economic decision during the pandemic. The Biden administration fully supports India in this task of rapidly growth to meet the aspirations of a mostly young population- sourcing fossil fuels from whichever source that makes sense. To become a key part of the US new supply chain that reverses the overconcentration of the supply chain in China. It can only be said then that Freedom House has the peculiar affliction left behind from the John Foster Dulles period, combined with a bit of arrogance in failing to grasp the central fact of India which is its 22 languages forging one nation- a task nowhere seen in the history of the world. ...

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This is an indepth article on Donald Trump's financial holdings, looking at the debt that Trump has built up in his real estate dealings, by Susanne Craig of the NYT. To get a detailed look of this the NYT inquiry into the holdings engaged RedVision Systems, a national property information firm to search publicly available data. Much of Trump's business is shrouded in mystery. But it is well known that Trump has used debt to build his business in a way that is not considered good practice in business, having led to three bankruptcies. Trump says he "is the king of debt." And "he loves debt." The recovery of real estate values during a rescue effort for the country's financial system also helped Trump tackle debt in a way that was not available to other entrepreneurs who suffered from the oil price collapse- one of them McClendon also used debt aggressively and his business collapsed leading to suicidal car crash. You can love excessive debt only if the government supports you with some sort of financial guarnatee misplaced, or you are lucky to get away with it- just ask McClendon. The irony is that the rescue of the financial system led to the low interest rates that hurt savings of the middle and working class, and the lack of help to Main Street in the home foreclosure crisis also hurt the same people disproportionately. The Obama administration policies in this regard rescued the very same business interests such as the New York real commercial estate symbolized by Trump, that are now appealing to those hurt as president Obama worked to let the financial system recover. The intention was never to support excessively overleveraged banks or overleveraged real estate built on debt, but in reality this is what happened. A nation cannot run its financial affairs in this manner of overleveraging to extract high profits that an investment bank such as Lehman or Goldman Sachs does, or a real estate company such as Trump's does- if regulators let them do this. Normally after the financial crisis of such dimensions that it shook the world economy in 2008-2009 leading to fears of a collapse as happened in the 1930's, the same faces would not still be there. But this is a strange period or a transition period where things are being sorted out, and the same faces Blankfein at Goldman Sachs and Trump in New York commercial real estate are with us.  And though the bashing of Goldman Sachs connection to Clinton is evident in the campaigns of Trump and Sanders, the bashing of Trump real estate and finance companies with its overleveraging and bankruptcies is evident in the campaign of Clinton against one posing as a representative of the working class. John Paulson who benefitted by shorting mortgage securities that caused the financial crisis of 2008 is on Trump's top economic advisory team, including the hedge funds and financial interests on Wall Street that Trump is saying support Clinton. No one, not the NYT or WSJ, can answer this, its just the paradox of today's situation. Hillary Clinton can say she has learned her lesson, with her Methodist upbringing and her own supporters such as Robert Reich and others, and break with the past especially as it in no way contributes to her success as president, not one bit. In fact rebuilding the middle class and infrastructure require entirely different connections and views on life, a different imagination.  Trump has billions of dollars and a real estate business that is so complex that even the NYT and property information firms can only say that in the end it is shrouded in mystery. Companies owned by Trump says the NYT from this inquiry have debt of $650 million. Other Trump business activities through 3 passive partnerships owe an additional $2 billion. It is a lot easier for Hillary Clinton to put the speech fees behind her as they have little to do with what she is as a Methodist and a proponent of improving women's lives, than it is for Donald Trump- for whom his business is everything that he is including his art of the deal- to reject who he is. ...

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What were the stories in the Economist magazine that were the most read stories of 2019? Not on president Trump. On Malaysia, China under Jinping, and exodus from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The most read article was on the newly elected president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. The mismanagement of the economy particularly extravagant state spending on the Olympics and soccer stadiums for the World Cup at the expense of basic sanitation services, bus and transport services, health services, led to the result of a majority of Brazilians rejecting the Workers Party and its leader former president Lula. Unfortunately most of the media including the Economist did not draw attention to this gap. During a period in which income from mining with export of iron ore, and soyabeans to China, enabled Brazil to live beyond its means, there was no effort to draw attention to glaring gaps in development of public services such as sanitation, bus services and transport, lack of building infrastructure other than to support mining. Glaring gaps in education and health services made the situation worse. The second most read piece in the Economist  was on March 10th- Malaysia's PM is about to steal an election. Here the Economist magazine joined the Wall Street Journal which originally broke the story on the 1MDB fund and irregularities in Malaysia where a development fund was misused by the government. Najib actually lost that election and the WSJ covered the story of the developments that followed in which Malaysia's new governemnt led by a returning former prime minister in his nineties Mahathir Mohammed, ousted his own protege Mr. Najib.  The third most read piece in the Economist magazine was - How the West got China Wrong.  Unfortunately the Economist magazine and most of the media covered China in the two decade long boom years without covering the other emerging story as well in which Mr. Lighthizer (now president Trump's top trade adviser) and others questioned the huge unsustainable trade surpluses in U.S. trade with China. With the economy facing huge downside risks and rising trade tensions with the U.S. Chinese president Jinping's move to remove the limit on terms in office in the Constitution was considered a shift from the notion that China was likely to turn into a democracy. Mr. Jinping had already completed his first term in office and the anti-corruption campaign, managing the economic boom for a soft landing, was carried out with the central leadership of the party, after the destabilization evident in the early part of Xi Jinping's first term. Much of China's path was predictable and rational behaviour in its national interest, what was not clearly defined or defended was the way the U.S. could sustain the trade deficits that had reached a billion dollars a day. Leading to Mr. Trump seizing on this as an election issue to form a bloc of voters separate from the two main parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. The fifth most read piece was on Oct 11, 2018- the next recession. It pointed out that with low interest rates central banks in the U.S. and Europe and America could not cope effectively with a recession. The sixth most read piece was on June 29, 2018- Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism. It cited Prof. David Graeber of the London School of Economics, who wrote a short essay that went viral on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to exist, work he called "bullshit jobs". Graeber said people want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that is leading to a positive difference. No. 7, 8, 9, were on Bitcoin, Netflix and programming language Python. No. 10 most read was on Aug. 30, 2018- Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley. It showed that in 2017 more people left the county of San Francisco than entered. The main reason the cost of living was burdensome and out of control. As Amazon shifts attention to India and Brazil, and Apple pulls back from India, social media companies coming under fire for disinformation, this period of Tech is making way for a shift in a new direction. A direction that focuses on people's lives, wages, spending on much needed infrastructure and services. ...

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Reaction to Sheila Bair, chairwoman of FDIC 's proposal to help solve the mortgage and housing crisis. The Bush Administration and Treasury react coolly. The WSJ report indicated no legislation was required, but the NYT report here says the program would require legislation. In Congress Barney Frank who has a bill of his own to help homeowners says this shows the Bush administration was not doing enough. his concern with the FDIC proposal is that it gives the money directly to lenders.

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The FDIC help to troubled borrowers with housing loans from IndyMac which was taken over by the FDIC, could serve as a model for help to other troubled mortgage holders.

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GE's Jack Welch on a preplanned bankruptcy with government financial, and debtor in posession financing including finacially backing all car warranties, as the best solution to the GM and Chrysler crisis. Will it be tough? Jack Welch says this task would be at the outer limit of difficulty and leaders may balk at leading such painful change, but it is necessary. He says for the sake of self-respect, national defense, and jobs, the country needs to keep the auto industry, and even after the loss in market share during the transformation ahead GM and Chrysler could still have 25% of the market. This is the first time a seasoned veteran of American industry of the stature of Welch, who is known for tackling such problems with realism, gives his approach to the auto companies problems. He sees the problem with a bailout with strings attached as simply letting the Big Three heave along basically as they are on life support, because a bailout simply won't enable the transformative change required....

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Monica Langley provides an excellent account of how U.S. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is using the $100 billion from the Stimulus funds in the 2009 Recovery Act to implement the Common Core education program in U.S. states and districts. Common Core is about raising student math and reading scores and standards, and implementing teacher evaluations based on test scores to make teachers accountable. This is the one significant area in which the Obama administraton in the U.S. is likely to leave a valuable legacy. Republicans in Tennessee, including Lamar Alexander, have embraced the program, showing how Duncan is using his persuasion skills to speed up the implementation across political party lines in a period of strong partisan feelings about programs. When governors have hesitated, Duncan has gone straight to the school districts using the funding. Teachers union say the program is moving too fast as evaluations would affect teacher careers, and Duncan agreed to a one year reprieve on the consequences of new teacher evaluations for states applying for an extension. This makes Duncan uncomfortable. He says he has only three and a half years left and he is going tooo slow. Business leaders such as P&G CEO, Robert McDonald, say the only political party they have is their educated workforce. Duncan has persuaded 40 states in the U.S. to sign up for higher standards in reading and math. Democrats see the Duncan initiative as helping poorer schools, which is also important to reduce the increasing inequality in the U.S. Since 2008 high school graduation rates increased by 3 percentage points, with a 5 point gain for black students and a 7 point gain for Hispanic students. After $4 billon in new funding to low performing schools, so called "dropout factories," the number of such schools has declined to 1424 from 1746. Teachers unions are only gradually adjusting to the need for accountability in math and reading scores. Duncan's father was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, and Duncan grew up in Chicago neighborhoods before attending Harvard and playing for the basketball team. Duncan tutored younger school students in the afternoon at his mother's after school program in a black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. In 2001 he was made the head of the Chicago public school system by Mayor Daley, where he took action to shut down poorly performing schools and reopening them with new staff. All the time he pushed for greater parental choice, charter schools, new teacher talent and using data to track school and student performance. ...

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A 35 year old Engineering professor from Texas who studies how transportation systems propagate infectious diseases and her 2 graduate students from China started and since January maintain the database of coronavirus confirmed cases and deaths. This is one of the widely used databases, also used by public health officials in the U.S. The database was started with a hunch from one of Lauren Gardner's students from China Ensheng Dong who comes from Shanxi province, north of Wuhan. A geography and mapping specialist he had studied in the U.S. since 2012, and spent many hours inputting data by hand following his classes. This WSJ report says the website was built in 1 day and was launched on January 22, when the coronavirus cases were practically nonexistent in the rest of the world and were concentrated in the Wuhan area. This report says behind the data reported in the media everyday is a complicated supply chain filled with challenges that come with data, what is reported, underreported and with what assumptions it is reported. Dr. Gardner says she is dealing with so much data on her dashboard, 4000 points of data, that its hard enough to pull all the data scraped together from different sources, its impossible for her to check the assumptions behind the data for consistency and trying to figure out facts underlying the data.  One of the ways the virus developed in the rest of the world is the surprise with which it caught western countries and then the rest of the world. As a result something that the government authorites would do such as the Centres of Disease Control is being done in a totally ad hoc manner. The U.S. government uses the University of Washington Health Metrics database, and in turn the University of Washington Health Metrics database takes some of the data from the John Hopkins database. Because a complacent population in the western countries were relying on numbers counted as cases to know how serious this epidemic was or whether there was an epidemic, the significance of data count from China assumed a signifcance far out of proportion to what it might normally be. This was because the western countries in Europe and America never encountered an epidemic of this kind in living memory, the last one forgotten from 1917 hundred years ago. Researchers in Gottingen University study in Germany conducted analysis of data in studies of cases published in Lancet Journal and found that only 6% of cases were being shown- that a much larger part of the population was infected. A researcher at Princeton University Ramanan Laxminarayan says countries tend to delay reporting until a problem becomes certain, because telling others comes with economic costs such as a rapid drop in trade and travel. Yet he says early warning systems are key to prevention. Early warning from the different publicly available data bases was not possible for many reasons. Relying on such ad hoc data was hazardous considering that as the NYT reported recently when there was the first confirmed detected case reported in New York there were already 10,000 persons estimated to be undetected. James Glanz and Benedict Carey, say in the NYT.com on May 7, that hidden outbreaks spread through U.S. cities far earlier than Americans knew, estimates show, which makes the publicly available databases giving a false sense of security, and not acting as an early warning because of the inadequacy of the resources for this task for individual researchers to handle. Not depending on  hurriedly put together databases with inadequate resources and having an independent sense of what the danger was as German chancellor Merkel described it in her first coronavirus address in March, was a better early warning signal than the databases in retrospect. And this too had come late. The reason is that the response had to be fast, very fast, and public perceptions had to be shaped quickly about the magnitude and speed of enormous proportions of the coronavirus, so that actions could be shaped quickly and executed quickly to stop it in its tracks.    ...

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Martin Feldstein gives his observations after his visit to India last month, one of several visits over a number of years. He met with people in business, in the government and private individuals to see where India is and where its headed. He gives his gut feel about what he sees and also his thoughtful assessments of failures and of achievements in areas such as education, telecommunications, electricity, information technology, transportation, industrial development and employment, the political process and of the motivation and determination of private industry, government officials and of the general mood of the country. Its an upbeat assessment and he sees decades of remarkable achievement if the mood and the change he sees is kept up.

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Timothy Roemer, U.S. ambassador to India, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in May 2011. He is completing two years as ambassador to India and returning to the U.S. He describes the challenges facing the Indian government in the areas of growth, inflation and corruption.

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On the 100th anniversary of 1947 and 1949 the Republics of China and India in about 25 years will have become fully developed modern states with science and technology by 2050, leaving behind memories of the colonial period. As the mother of Asian Buddhist civilization this region of northern India would be seen by a new generation of Chinese as part of ancient Chinese Buddhist culture from the days of Lord Buddha and Bodhidharma, and a gradual shift will lead to China leaving Tibet and the border regions of India in Kashmir, Arunachal and Ladakh of its own decision. China's entry into border regions- Kashmir region, Ladakh and Arunachal are a result of China under Mao and the Communist party decision to occupy Tibet and Indian border areas. A result of the memory of occupation of China starting from the border regions in the north Manchuria by the Japanese, and the Kwantung peninsula by western powers Russia, Britain, Germany. And the need to protect its frontiers in the border regions used as buffers by the British Empire, after the Communist Party under Mao created the People's Republic in Beijing. New technology in the 20th century made the high plateau's of Tibet accessible after 2500 years by construction of roads rail transport in high mountain terrain.  What this occupation of Tibet as a border region has done is to put China within a short distance, just days from the plains of India- a situation that has no precedent in the entire history of the world dating from Lord Buddha. Compared to the desolate regions of Manchuria in the north this has an Indian population in the plains of India of as much as a billion people. Just as China sought protection from its own memory of occupation by the Japanese and colonial powers, India seeks protection from colonial powers and the Chinese now in Tibet similar to the Japanese in Manchuria just days away from the plains of the Chang Jiang (Yangste) and  Huang He (Yellow River) of China, China just days away in 2025 from the Ganges/ Brahmaputra , and the Indus river regions. The British Empire no longer exists. British names such as McMahon for McMahon Line frowned upon by anti-colonialist China, no longer exist. India also an anti-colonial power frowns upon such names and the arbitrary way the British (also the Portuguese, the Spanish, Dutch and the French) decided what belonged to whom, including whole nations. As early as 1505 Portuguese occupied Sri Lanka (Ceylon), occupied by the Dutch as part of cinnamon supply zone by 1700, and transferred by treaty to British in 1802, the memories of colonialism date back on the shores of India to 1505.    ...