lifestyle leader

-An enterprising reader of The Guardian has answered the newspaper's call to untangle the complicated web of Tony Blair's finances. Usually I would say that the business of an ex-leader is none of my business, but with Blair the scrutiny would seem appropriate, given his still notionally official role as a Middle East envoy and near-presidency of the EU.

-The FT looks at the retreat of the siloviki under the Medvedev presidency.

-Yegor Gaidar, first finance minister of post-Soviet Russia and one of the architects of the country's transition to a market-based economy, died this week at 53. Gaidar's reforms, legacy and reputation are a complex mix of historic achievement, failure and resentment. The intellectual merits and legacy of the 'shock-therapy' administered by people like Gaidar in Russia or Jeffrey Sachs (for our younger readers, yes, that one) in Poland will be debated in academic and policy circles for generations.

-One of the cultural truisms of the crisis is that wealth is out, modesty is in. The ostentatious displays of the nouveau riche (think: oligarchs and investment bankers) are not only remnants of an era passed, but universally held in bad taste. However, an aspirational lifestyle has been fundamental to the consumer-driven, middle-class wealth-creation of the western world over the past century, and with swelling middle-classes in countries like the US and England due to decades of declining real wages and wealth destruction in the crisis (think houses and mutual funds), symbols of old-money status and wealth should enjoy a renaissance as the masses yearn for a taste of the good life. In an interesting article, The Guardian looks at 'Tory Chic: the return of poshness.'

-The financial impact of Tiger Woods' indiscretions is massive, not just for the golfer, but the game he plays.