I have a column When should a government agency have autonomy?, in the Financial
Express today. This is a hot subject in India today, in the aftermath of the ULIPs ordinance. While on this
subject, also see:

An editorial in Mint.
Tamal Bandyopadhyay in Mint.
Gautam Chikermane in the Hindustan Times.
Jayanth Varma in the Financial Express.
[...]

BBC’s travel program Fast Track had a story about how Santiago has been working hard since the earthquake to (re)build its position as a cool global city. I have never been to Santiago (let alone Chile) so I cannot say whether there is any position to rebuild or whether Santiago isn’t [...]

The top selling Indian newspapers according to Amazon’s kindle subscriptions.

India’s courts may be in a slow process of reshaping India into a liberal democracy. Here is a Supreme Court ruling which blocks the Maharasthra government from interfering with the rights [...]

RBI raised rates, saying that they are concerned about inflation. What is the state of inflation in India? I find it useful to look at an approximate `core WPI’ that is obtained by removing food and fuel from the overall WPI. This has to be done carefully because some food is present in WPI Manufacturing.
The [...]

Negative moods in Europe are finally being calmed by news on Wednesday that the European Central Bank will likely lend less money than expected for the next three months. The data suggests that region’s banks’ cash needs were wildly overblown again by the crisis fear-mongers.
“The result of the ECB’s money market operations indicated that [...]

On 18th June, the President signed an ordinance that would settle the recent spat between SEBI and IRDA over unit linked insurance plans (”ULIPs”). The ordinance makes it clear that ULIPs cannot be regulated by SEBI and places them within the jurisdiction of IRDA. The ordinance also tries to prevent further disputes by setting up [...]

The Budget Speech of February 2010 had announced a `Technical Advisory Group for Unique Projects’ (TAGUP). The press release about creation of this group is out.
Anil Padmanabhan looks back at year 6 of the UPA.
Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar [...]

As it seems that we are finally about to get something which resembles a stable summer here in Denmark it may seem strange to suddenly start talking about snowballs. Yet, the idea of debt snowball is very relevant in the current environment as it relates to the potentially unstoppable development in public/domestic debt levels despite [...]

Gary Becker (link) and Richard Posner (link) have initiated an interesting debate on low economic growth as the main macroeconomic concern of European economies in overcoming the increasing burden of public debt.

In the WSJ, Vaclav Klaus, the president of Czech Republic, draw important conclusions from the long-term economic sustainability of the Eurozone (link), arguing that the Eurozone is not an optimum currency area as suggested by the famous four criteria from economic theory. In a puzzling essay, Mr. Klaus demarks the Eurozone as a monetary union [...]