Is China tuning into your cellphone?

Anil Pandey investigates how import of chinese SIMs can compromise national security and he finds the DoT not ignorant but wilfully negligent

Economy - Americans and unnecessary cuts Social Security’s attackers claim that they’re concerned about the programmes financial future

About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the programme either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole. 

Can India ever match China ? TSI analyses why the dragon always outperforms the tiger

Let us start with a fact that most Indians are either unaware of, or prefer to ignore since our sense of history is as strong as our performance at the Olympic Games. Professor Emeritus of London School of Economics Meghnad Desai has written a new book called The Rediscovery of India. Right at the beginning, this is how Desai tries to put the India-China comparison in perspective in his own words: “ India, unlike China, was never a unitary or even a single federal state through much of its history. In his fascinating one volume history of India, John Keay has a diagram showing how much of India’s territory was controlled , over the last three millennia, by any ruling dynasty. The contrast with China is striking. For China, once you leave a turbulent period during 300-200 BC, there is a continuity in state formation. For India, the reverse is true. After the Maurya period of 400-300 BC, you have to fast forward (almost 2,000 years) to the Mughal rule which controlled a similar percentage of territory…India is at once a young polity and a very old culture.”

Premier calls for further reform

Premier Wen Jiabao has called for adherence to the reform and opening-up policy and rejection of regression and stagnation while making a study tour of Shenzhen, the country's first special economic zone (SEZ), on Friday and Saturday.

China premier Wen Jiabao calls for political reform

IS CHINA HEADING TOWARDS DEMOCRACY
Without the safeguarding of political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring and the targets of its modernisation drive might not be reached

http://www.project-syndicate.org/

I have come across this very nice site
YOU MUST VISIT

The China Investment Challenge

China now sits atop $2.4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, the largest stockpile of any country in the world (Japan stands in second place with $1 trillion). But this bounty comes with one big headache: where should Chinese Communist Party officials park all that money?

Hillary’s Kissinger Moment

Very nice article.... Interested in Geo Politics -- Must read
A general fear has arisen in Asia that China is seeking to use its growing maritime might to dominate not only development of the hydrocarbon-rich waters of the South China Sea, but also its shipping lanes, which are some of the world’s most heavily trafficked. So it was welcome news when Clinton later deepened America’s commitment to naval security in the seas around China by personally attending joint naval and air exercises with South Korea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula. Likewise, military ties between the US and the most elite unit of Indonesia’s armed forces – suspended for decades – were restored during Clinton’s Asia tour.

Increase in domestic demand forces car makers to cut exports

India shining


Hyundai Motor India Ltd and Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, the country’s largest and second-largest car exporters, have been diverting production capacities running at optimum utilization levels to feed the local market, where car sales expanded 33% to 756,000 units in the four months ended July.

Losses in transmission, distribution have to be cut

With one-third of power lost to pilferage and inefficient networks, the govt is desperate to plug the leakage
India’s minister of state for power, Bharatsinh Solanki, is in awe of South Korea. The reason for his admiration—while being as import-reliant as India for meeting its energy needs, South Korea has been able to bring down its power transmission and distribution losses to 4%. That’s astonishingly low compared with India’s 34%.

HP makes $1.5 billion bid for 3Par, tops Dell

Bidding war for company that provides software for corporate servers

 Hewlett-Packard Co. is bidding $1.5 billion for data storage provider 3Par Inc., offering 33 percent more than what rival Dell Inc. agreed to pay for the company just a week earlier

Mortgage Fraud Is Rising, With a Twist

Adapting to Tighter Rules After Collapse, Scammers Turn to More Complex Plots

New data suggests that mortgage fraud—which got tougher to pull off after the collapse of the U.S. real estate market—is returning in a big way.

Data prepared for The Wall Street Journal by research firm CoreLogic, examining about seven million home loans made by hundreds of lenders, show that losses from mortgage fraud—ranging from falsified credit reports to identity theft—rose 17% last year after declining 57% in the two years after its 2006 peak.

In 2009, $14 billion in loans, or about 0.7% of all mortgage loans made in the U.S., were originated with fraudulent application data.

Math becomes fashionable, focus shifts

Mathematician Stanley J. Osher, whose firms Cognitech Inc., Luminescent Inc., and Level Set Systems Inc. are all solving real world problems, says it’s an “incredible time for mathematicians”

“The whole industry of graphics in movies is using these algorithms,” says Osher, director of applied mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Titanic was the last movie to use old-fashioned technology of simplified physical models. The special effects of the recent 3D movie Avatar owe their brilliance to level-set algorithms, he adds.

An open letter to Lalu Prasad Yadav

Dear Lalu ji,
I am sad to say that your advisors have got it all wrong. Or should I say you have got it all wrong.
I still cannot believe how an astute and imaginative politician like you could be misled.
Okay, before we get into the detail. First of all do accept my heartiest congratulations on the salary hike from Rs 16,000 to Rs 50,000.
I know you are not happy with the raise. But then who is? Ask me about it. I am waiting for a job that gives me a raise of just 1% every day.
Of course the Indian media has gone to town highlighting that members of parliament like you have got a hike of 300%. That's obviously all wrong.
But to tell you the truth, I never had a great regard for the mathematical skills of the Indian media. They tend to forget their basic math time and time again.
Your salary has gone up by Rs 34,000 (Rs 50,000 - Rs 16,000). Expressed in percentage terms this is an increase of 212.5% (Rs 34,000 expressed as a percentage of Rs 16,000) and not 300% as the media has been harping.
You will definitely agree that 212.5% is nowhere near 300% and that is gross misreporting of facts as they are.

'Chance to be bigger than Coke in China'

China appears increasingly open to overseas investors willing to feed this demand. Chinese vice-commerce minister Chen Jian told the Indian delegation: "I hope you can tell Indian entrepreneurs that the Chinese government wants more and more products imported from India. I hope large enterprises from India will have a larger influence than Coca-Cola in China."

The big Bite

BEIJING: China is growing so fast it creates some sort of world record every week. With 1.4 billion people, China has more mobile phones than any other country. It has more high-speed rail lines and wind power. It has more Internet users. It is also the world's biggest importer of minerals. It has already dislodged Germany from pole position as the world's number one exporter. Just a few weeks ago, China became the world's biggest guzzler of energy, though it accepted this particular position with great reluctance.

Zoom debt cover to hit ECGC hard

ECGC has insured most of the Rs2,650 crore worth of guarantees that Indian banks extended to the ailing company
Mumbai-based engineering, procurement and construction firm Zoom Developers Pvt. Ltd, which is set to create a Rs2,650 crore hole in the balance sheets of 26 banks, may hit the government-owned Export Credit Guarantee Corp. of India Ltd (ECGC) hard.

Zoom puts banks in Rs2,650 cr hole

Very good case of Bank Gurantees & Stand by Letter of credit

As many as 26 banks have been hit hard by the firm’s delinquency; corporate debt recast close to being finalized

Foreign banks as well as overseas branches of Indian banks insisted on stand-by letters of credit (SBLCs) from Indian banks in lieu of guarantees. An SBLC gets operationalized when the party concerned fails to pay. In this case, the aggregators started invoking guarantees given by Indian banks through SBLCs when the money flow dried up.

Reading the Recent Monetary History of the U.S., 1959-2007

Very Good Research Paper............. Must Read

In this paper we report the results of the estimation of a rich dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the U.S. economy with both stochastic volatility and parameter drifting in the Taylor rule. We use the results of this estimation to examine the recent monetary history of the U.S. and to interpret, through this lens, the sources of the rise and fall of the great American inflation from the late 1960s to the early 1980s and of the great moderation of business cycle fluctuations between 1984 and 2007. Our main findings are that while there is strong evidence of changes in monetary policy during Volcker's tenure at the Fed, those changes contributed little to the great moderation. Instead, changes in the volatility of structural shocks account for most of it. Also, while we find that monetary policy was different under Volcker, we do not find much evidence of a big difference in monetary policy among Burns, Miller, and Greenspan. The difference in aggregate outcomes across these periods is attributed to the time-varying volatility of shocks. The history for inflation is more nuanced, as a more vigorous stand against it would have reduced inflation in the 1970s, but not completely eliminated it. In addition, we find that volatile shocks (especially those related to aggregate demand) were important contributors to the great American inflation. 

Is monetary policy over-rated?

Monetary policy contributed little to the “Great Moderation”. Changes in the volatility of structural shocks did.

Nice Article ..... Must Read

Ajit Ranade: A spat swallows RBI's autonomy Downgrading RBI's standing is an unwitting collateral damage of the ordinance

A year ago, the capital markets regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), asked that mutual funds not charge any entry load for investments by their subscribers. This was quite a revolutionary regulation, since it changed the incentive structure of the way mutual funds were sold to investors. Sebi was guided by two things: the cost of brokerage and distribution were anyway declining due to technology; and investors could now pay directly to distributors for services rendered, rather than have a commission sliced off their investments by the mutual fund. Prima facie this new regulation would discourage selling funds simply because they paid high brokerage or commissions to the distributor. Distributors would henceforth have to “earn their keep” by not merely pushing high-commission products as in the past, but also by becoming financial advisers to their clients. Distributors and, to some extent, mutual funds protested against this diktat, since it upset their business model. The Sebi view was that the mutual fund industry was now mature enough to be able to separate the “manufacturer” (the mutual fund itself) and the “distributor”, and there was no need to keep the cost structure opaque and clubbed together. Before the dust could settle down on this no-load rule, the rules of financial “physics” had started working.

Surjit S Bhalla: RBI 1, Subbarao 0 Unfortunately, with RBI, history repeats itself as both farce and tragedy much too often

For a moment, it looked like Indian monetary policy-making would step out into the modern world. The job of monetary policy is to be forward-looking, to anticipate future possibilities, rather than practise “rear window” economics. And, as financial and product markets around the world globalise and integrate, so should monetary policy divine not only what is happening and will likely happen in India, but also infer the same about the economies of the western world and that of our competitors in Asia. Very likely, this is what D Subbarao had in mind when he joined RBI as governor in September 2008.

Obama's window dressing US financial reforms Bill falls short of original aim

US President Barack Obama has signed into law the US Financial Reforms Bill. The debate on the Bill has been going on for quite some time now and, as usually happens in such politically charged debates, the original purpose and objective of the Bill has gotten lost in various compromises. It was important for Obama to keep his promise of financial reforms and so he came forward with an Act that introduces some reforms. Unfortunately, as is the case in most democracies with less-than-strong and visionary leadership, what one ends up with is very different from what one started with. For example, the Act does nothing to restrict the size of banks, a major objective of the original reform proposal. Admittedly, while the US could regulate the size of its own banks, it could do very little to cap the size of foreign banks. Since the US and foreign banks operate in the same global and national space, it is difficult to restrict the size of US banks if they are to compete with their bigger foreign counterparts. This once again highlights the necessity to coordinate financial market reforms across countries, something the emerging countries have been aware of ever since they were hit by the crisis they did not bring upon themselves.

Games politicians play Will CWG 2010 cross new frontiers or win new friends?

There are mind-boggling estimates of cost over-runs, with the total cost estimated to be anywhere between Rs 10,000 crore and Rs 30,000 crore, depending on what elements are included as cost of the Games. This is at least one reason why the Games continue to attract hostile media attention. The Delhi government has been increasing tariffs of public utilities and raising revenues in the name of the Games without explaining why the taxpayer has to cough up so much.

The changing climate Global slowdown and politics weaken emission reduction resolve

The decision of the US Senate not to ratify the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act, 2009, passed last year by the US House of Representatives in the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, is a reminder of the evaporating support for tough measures to deal with climate change and carbon emissions in developed economies. For all the brouhaha and the bravado of the past decade, and the pressure on India and China to make binding commitments on emission reduction, developed economies, in particular the United States, have not yet demonstrated their commitment to emission reduction. Two factors seem to have shaped political opinion in the US between last July and now.

Disasters sow seeds of success

Great disasters occur constantly. The Asian financial crisis blasted the miracle economies of Asia. The Great Recession of 2007-09 led to the bankruptcy/rescue of the five top investment banks on Wall Street, the biggest bank (Citibank), the biggest insurance company (AIG), the biggest auto manufacturer (General Motors) and the biggest mortgage underwriters (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The BP disaster in the Caribbean is the greatest environmental disaster in history. Some people fear that global warming will be the biggest manmade disaster of all.