By Ajay Shah, on August 6th, 2009
The most basic public good of all, which should be the first priority of the government, is law and order. If you think of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and State, citizens would want to tie down the State to first focus on law and order, and deliver results on law and order, before embarking on mission creep. One of the unhappy consequences of India’s socialist adventure was a breakdown of this principal-agent relationship, and a loss of focus on this core function. See a recent column by Avinash Persaud in Financial Express.
Today, Human Rights Watch has released a top quality and incredibly depressing report on India’s police. (Via Nandkumar Saravade). We need to reorient government — as in financial resources and top management time — towards the police and judiciary.
Also see Bibek Debroy in Indian Express, and my blog post on the Bombay attacks.
By Eldon Mast, on August 6th, 2009
On Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors announced that the pending home sales index for June jumped 3.6 percent. The gain is the fifth such monthly gain in a row and represents the longest string of surges in six years! Year-over-year comparisons also now show improvement — up 6.7 percent since June of 2008. In fact pending home sale contract levels are registering their greatest activity since June of 2007 — two years ago.
The consensus forecast was that the index would increase only 0.7 percent. In fact in a Bloomberg survey of 35 projections everyone was surprised by the strong jump. Forecasts had ranged from predicting a 1.2 percent drop to a estimate of a 3 percent gain.
Tuesday’s report from the national association follows the July 23 release showing home resales in June rising for a third straight month. That was following by further good news on July 27th when data showed that sales of new homes soared 11 percent in June, the most since 2000.
In early June we made the claim that recovery had started for this US growth cycle. All of June’s housing data now supports that claim as well.
Another big surprise to most economists will be the strength of the recovery as measured by GDP growth in Q3.
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts
Most Popular Posts