Here’s a list of interesting readings for this week.
In NY Times, Paul Krugman discussed (link) the painfulness of financial crisis in Ireland and the U.S and suggesting what we should learn from banking regulation in Canada to prevent future crises of similar proportions.
In Waging War on Black Teens, Richard W. Rahn and Izzy Santa wrote [...]

When central planners take the outcome away from the self-organising system of the market economy, we often get strange outcomes. At the end of June 2009, 32 foreign banks
were in India with 293 branches. In addition, 43 foreign banks were in India through `representative offices’. (Source: RBI Annual Report. Hat tip: Radhika Pandey).
In a news item [...]

The gold bars filled with tungsten story is getting another run – see Zero Hedge and RunToGold.
Nick from ShareLynx Gold passed on to me today the following from the producers of the video (all personal info was removed by him before forwarding):
vielen Dank für Ihre Anfrage.
MANY THANKS FOR YOUR ENQUIRY
Das Video ist tatsächlich bei Argor [...]

Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times on privatisation in India.
I had recently written a blog post on India’s foolishness on visa rules for people coming into conferences. Siddharth Varadarajan has a great opinion piece on this in [...]

Financial stability, regulatory coordination, financial reforms
So far, in India, regulatory coordination was based on the HLCC. This has not been a particularly good experience. The HLCC was not statutory and there was no defined mechanism through which decisions would be obtained. Many inter-regulatory difficulties simply languished. One peculiar aspect of the HLCC was that it [...]

Three fascinating new takes on Mumbai as an international financial centre:

Mukul Asher and Azad Singh Bali in DNA a few weeks ago.
In the February 2010 issue of Pragati released yesterday, there are two articles on this: by Percy Mistry himself, and by V. Anantha [...]

Ilana Mercer concisely and elegantly makes a point that I’ve been harping on among big-L Libertarians for some time.
“Targeted tax credits” aren’t “incremental moves toward liberty,” they’re just social engineering — shifting the tax burden from those who spend their money the way bureaucrats decide they should spend it, and onto those who spend their [...]

I wrote a column in Financial Express about Obama’s left turn.
Also see:

The associated editorial in Financial Express.
White House nightmare persists by Ed Luce in the Financial Times.
Neil Irwin in The Washington Post on the difficulties that Bernanke is facing on [...]

Quoth Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal last week:
This was once a familiar line of criticism: Big business’s sin was that it wasn’t entrepreneurial enough. If given the opportunity, business would use government to form cartels and suppress competition. Free markets must thus be protected from the grasp of the corporate monster. The way [...]

As the months are going by, we’re slowly building a better picture of what went wrong and why. If you want to only spend two hours on figuring out the financial crisis, then listen to this interview with Charles Calomiris, and read this interview with Raghuram Rajan.