lifestyle leader

This, from a quick scan of the news: 

- President Evo Morales knees a political opponent in the groin during a soccer match.

- The Philippines bans off-key national anthem singing

- Vietnam introduces state-run Facebook knock-off. "You have a friend request from: The Politburo"

- Rent-a-friend

From the previous week:

The biggest problem with Basle III

A conversation with Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough

A conversation with Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore for 25 years after its founding, reflecting on old age and the risk that Singapore's success will be taken for granted.

Globalization at work: Chinese factories that are moving up the value-added chain to stay competitive.

Are emerging market bondholders ignoring history?

Paul Krugman has a bone and will not let it go, no matter how confused his thinking may be. (To be fair, I think Sumner has Krugman's arguments about the link between currencies and surpluses completely backwards, but he addresses this here).

Summary of the state of world trade

"Science: it works." The auto X-prize winners

- Why are women leaving Wall St.?

- Dan Ariely on the darkside of "productivity-enhancing tools"

- "Syntactically speaking, the correct noun phrase to pick to get a target of predication for the preposed adjunct is not the subject of the main clause, it's buried as a genitive determiner in a noun phrase inside a relative clause modifying the object of the main clause" Got that? That is an actual sentence from an otherwise funny post on "an appalling piece of bungled headlinery."

- Sarah Palin: the sound and fury

- the future of playgrounds

- NASA experts to help trapped Chilean miners.

- California moves closer to paying bills with IOUs and monopoly money

- By now you have likely heard about China's epic week-long traffic jam. Maybe they should be taking driving lessons from this guy.

- John Kemp: buying into tail risk will slowly bleed your wealth; instead, buy insurers who sell tail risk

- Argentina's President accuses domestic newsmedia organizations of crimes against humanity

- Can trade liberalization reduce gender inequality?

- Book review of Sebastian Mallaby's review of the hedge fund industry: More Money Than God

- On the usefulness of cash prizes to stimulate innovation
- A post about financial economics that includes a comic strip and a penis joke: this is why we enjoy FT Alphaville so

- "Do not be alarmed if South Africans announce that they were held up by robots" and other, um, helpful multicultural tips from the United Kingdom

- A history of the tomato. For reals.

1) The globalization of whisky markets, (not) continued - Chavez' currency crackdown hurts whisky sales. Fine by me, retorts Chavez: "Rich people are lazy and almost all of them spend every day drinking whisky." I think he's been watching too much Mad Men.

2) Thank Goodness It's Thursday - Hawaii cuts the school year by a fifth, Colorado Springs plunges into the dark, and other stories from the Great Recession. As a colleague of mine pointed out, somehow all of this is tolerated in lieu of even a discussion about raising taxes. Update: Illinois has been forced to feature in adult films to make ends meet.

3) The Topic of Cancer - "In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

4) Gone 'till November - Wyclef Jean to run in Haitian presidential elections this November.

5) The Sauna World Championships - The Finns are weird.

- Mervyn King warns against getting ahead of ourselves:

"The gradual improvement in credit conditions that was evident earlier in the year seems to have come to a halt in recent months. And financial markets more generally have been volatile. In part that is because continuing concerns about the ability of some countries to achieve necessary fiscal consolidation are affecting confidence in the ability of banks to repair their balance sheets. More fundamentally, the key underlying causes of the crisis – in terms of the imbalances in global demand – have still not been tackled. Those imbalances are likely to be larger this year than last, and will probably still be around three-quarters of their level at the peak immediately prior to the crisis. Until these underlying problems are resolved, uncertainty about the outlook for the world economy will remain."

(FT Alphaville provides comment)

- Flooding in China pushes the Three Gorges dam ever closer to capacity

- Does happiness affect productivity? Yes. Quality? Not really.

- In praise of Dark Ages

- Catalonia bans bullfighting. Good. I attended a bullfight in Madrid recently - I arrived with what I had hoped was an open mind, willing to make an effort to appreciate this part of Spanish culture. I was left disgusted by what is, essentially, ritualized slaughter for the sake of entertainment. Don't get me wrong: I was impressed by the matadors themselves. Bullfighting clearly requires a great deal of skill and cajones. But so did being a gladiator in ancient Rome. The Italians gave up their bloodthirst many centuries ago. Maybe it's time Spain did the same.

A photo circulating by email around Zimbabwe of a supposed sign along the Zim-South Africa border (from Good Morning Afrika, via Free Exchange):




















And I thought it was only Goldman Sachs executives who did that kind of thing...

A little while back I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about the curious effects of globalization on the market for scotch. The increased wealth and subsequent demand for luxury goods in East Asia, it seemed, was causing the price of scotch in North America to rise and the selection to fall.

There were several reasons for this, including: the sheer size and rapid growth of the market for luxury goods in Asia, higher margins for scotch producers & distributors, and - as was my guess - less competition from similar liquors that could act as substitutes for scotch (like whisky, bourbon, rye, etc.).

Sure enough, I arrived at the Singapore Changi international airport yesterday and a quick scan of the duty free shop* supports the theory: the liquor section is dominated primarily by a lot (a lot!) of high-end scotches, as well as cognac, wine and some champagne. There is far less competition from your usual suspects of rums, ryes, vodkas, gins, and the like.

This is a place, in other words, that has its priorities straight.


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*I recognize that a duty free shop in an airport is not accurate guage of what a regular liquor store will carry. But that is sort of the point: it caters to the wealthier crowd that can afford to travel or do business in and around the region. I suspect, however, that the inventory in duty free stores is dictated by a wider variety of considerations than simply consumer demand, so it will be worth finding a liquor store in a wealthy part of town to do a comparison.

I have to say, even a mild case of vacation is enough to make returning to regular blogging extremely difficult. Add to that the G8/G20 summit that is currently consuming my work life and the Greatest Single Sporting Event Known to Man consuming the rest, the blog has been thoroughly neglected. I see that some poor confused souls have continued to check for updates during my absence, but despair not: we're back in action.

Not content to be a mere armchair pundit for the happenings and goings-on of the global economy, your intrepid correspondent is going to be traveling to the heart of the financial turmoil, the eye of the storm, the Land of the PIGS.

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone claim - with a dramatic flair - that the impending euro crisis that originated in these European countries will lead us down the road to economic serfdom. Years of imprudent fiscal management has created a mountain of debt which, when combined with reckless short-term politicking by Europe's political elite, threatens to collapse the modern welfare system as we know it and send shock waves through the global economy.

I doubt it. But in order to find out more, I will be spending the next couple of weeks exploring a few of these countries, talking to locals about their views on sovereign debt, credit rating agencies, monetary policy, Bundestag politicians, and... oh hell, who am I kidding? I'm going to be sitting on a beach, sipping wine and looking for a Bernini sculpture that I can pick up on the cheap once the euro goes down the crapper.

See you in a few weeks.

- The economics of the National Hockey League

- India is planning $50 billion in road projects

The WSJ has an interesting article on the golf course industry in China. I discovered this via a link in FT's Beyond Brics which asks:

"Golf in China - under par?"

Which in turn leads me to ask this question:

"Why does "under par" or "sub-par" mean something is less good or less-than-average when in golf it means the opposite? In a reference to an article about golf, no less"

I suspect that Twitter was invented to answer this very question.

- How are the world's markets doing, you ask? Why, check out the map in the top right-hand corner of our new favourite blog!

- The British Election, Summarized (Part II): "Nnnyaaaaaghwooohaaooooororarararararghhhhhhh. That's the message the electorate gave on Thursday. A long, angry, discordant noise that eventually became silly. Hence the result." That's Armando Iannucci, the director of the brilliant political satire film In The Loop.

The Machines respond to accusations that they caused the market to bunjee jump yesterday:

"Go ahead and take us down. But you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when you have to execute all trades manually? Guess what: You're too slow. We're going to take your money. We don't sleep. We could run this market round the clock. Sooner or later, you'll break, and have to take a nap, and then, like a quant Freddy Krueger, we're going to trade you into the dust. We don't pee. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension."

and then comes my favourite part:

"WE HAVE SEX WITH MONEY UNTIL IT'S BROKEN AND WHEN WE RUN OUT OF MONEY TO HAVE SEX WITH WE'LL MAKE THE MONEY REPRODUCE UNTIL IT MAKES SHINY NEW MONEY TO HAVE SEX WITH."

Riiiiight.

- Shanghai Expo: Yawn.

- China's central bank continues to turn the screw, gently, by raising lending requirements

- Francisco Blanch of BoA/Merril Lynch presents his theory for why emerging markets have a greater capacity than the rich world to absorb higher oil prices.

- 'Switzerland Should be Dissolved as a State' - That would be none other than Col. Ghadhafi, bringing the AAA-rated Crazy to the table once again. There is some truly fantastic bullshit in here - too much to quote here - so I encourage you to check it out.

- Greece offers to repay loans with giant wooden horse. Suspicious.

- Hey look! Belgian politicians can agree about some things after all: cultural intolerance.

- What makes charities special?

- Buttonwood: The debate over financial reform in the US is taking place in an ideological fog: "Anyway, it wouild [sic] be nice if the tenor of the discussion dealt with [the] difficult issues. Instead, of course, the Democrats will accuse the Republicans of being in the banks' pockets and the Republicans will accuse the Democrats of being socialists." As opposed to the debate over health care, which was civilized.

- Hot money into China is being sterilized, but at the expense of the very imbalances that set the stage for the financial crisis.

- Can greater domestic consumption in China save the world? Nope.

- The backroom soap opera that is life among the German wikipedians (via The Browser)

- Do people work less in the US when the World Cup is going on?

- Nouriel Roubini is his usual cheery self when discussing the fiscal situation in Greece.

- Argentina: stepping closer to a return to international bond markets for the first time since their default in 2001.

- As seen from space: Iceland's ash-spewing volcano, Eyjafjallajokulluafj. (I only made up the last four letters). The parallels between this and Iceland's banking problems are pretty ripe: Iceland explodes; Iceland blows smoke at the UK; Iceland causes economic chaos.... feel free to add your own!

- Property bubble? What property bubble?

- Could self-interest make China's economy go green?

- Cool!

- On how Russia managed to tip the scales in the aforementioned insubordinate, rebellious, and mutinous nation.
- Want to increase financial literacy? Kill all the business journalists.
- The evolution of the English breakfast (and with it, England). I had to stop and eat something half-way through.
- One of my favourite creatures from the Planet Earth series: the nautilus, a living fossil.
- The quote of the day, via Free Exchange. Read the last sentence carefully.