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 [...]

Someone tried to make the point that the making the Yuan more flexible was already “priced in”; well it might be of course, but so far markets are bathing in serious risk on mode. Copper futures up some 4.5%, AUD/USD at 0.88ish and I could go on and on …
Enjoy it while it lasts …
(quote [...]

Two news stories in my inbox this morning from Sharelynx:
Demand Up: Gold a ‘Good Choice’ for Boosting Global Use of Yuan
“China’s trade in yuan-denominated gold investment products moves the currency closer toward global acceptance and the country should develop more of them, a central bank official said.”
Supply Down: South African gold output falls hard
“In an [...]

Yours truly is actually a macroeconomist, indeed with a knack for financial markets, but still; a macroeconomist nonetheless. However, you would not have gotten that impression from the writings here end last week where I worried a lot about the worry of financial markets. I still do, worry that is, mostly because we are in [...]

There is no bubble in gold. Watch the first past of this news story on gold buying in China. When you see similar crowds in Western countries desperate to hand over paper banknotes for gold then you’ll know we are in a bubble.
h/t to Sharelynx

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express on the problems of getting to an effective State.
Can the courts help get us out of the mess that is Indian labour law? A report in the Indian Express says that the courts are inclined towards penalising striking workers of [...]

Here’s a brief reading list on the issue of China’s exchange rate and US manufacturing jobs:
Simon J. Evenett and Joseph Francois on whether Chinese currency revaluation will create net jobs for the US economy (link).
William R. Cline’s discussion of estimating the effect of renmimbi appreciation on American jobs (link).
Abdul Abiad, Daniel Leigh and Marco E. [...]

Barry Eichengreen wrote a thorough defence of China’s exchange rate policy response to the global demands for letting the Renminbi appreciate and thus stimulate the reduction of US trade deficit.
US Treasury Department recently launched a series of initiatives which labeled China as a currency manipulator and a true source of America’s widening trade deficit and [...]

Paul Krugman (link) and Greg Mankiw (link) analyze the costs and benefits of China’s exchange rate policy.

There are two paths to nice cities: to take a messy old city and fix it, or to start from scratch.
The process of solving the problems of an old city is hard. Some cities started over owing to the destruction caused by war, an earthquake, or a great fire. We wouldn’t wish that [...]