guest post – The Acorn

Wall Street woes

By V Anantha Nageswaran

In the last few months, financial markets had got used to the idea of the authorities conjuring up some solutions to problems in the US financial industry over the weekend and announcing it on Monday morning (Asian time) in time for the Asian stocks to open higher. This routine worked initially but when problems did not go away, the impact became rather muted.

Unfortunately for Lehman Brothers such a weekend solution did not arrive. Late on Sunday evening in the US it announced that it was going to declare bankruptcy. Wanting to avoid that fate, Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America. Some called it tectonic shifts on Wall Street. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve said that America was facing once-in-a-century financial crisis. He should know better because he played no small role in creating it. Continue reading By Invitation: Buy lots of mattresses

The costs of giving in to separatist demands are exhorbitant

By V Anantha Nageswaran

Pratap Bhanu Mehta has arrived at, in more elegant prose, the same conclusions that Swaminathan Aiyar advocated in the Times of India and Vir Sanghvi did in Hindustan Times.

Dr Mehta asks: “Will (India) live with the permanent rebuke to its democracy that Kashmir represents, or will it risk a new paradigm that might achieve what this endless cycle of mutual suspicion has not?”

The problem with these columns is that they end with a tantalising question and with an implicit answer (explicit in Mr Aiyar’s column) that India let Kashmir go. Go where? To what state? What would be the consequences? Costs and benefits under different scenarios?

It is incumbent on those who advocate change from the status quo to spell out the rationale for change and make a case that it would improve things at the margin from their perspective. One presumes that that perspective is that of the rest of the billion-plus Indians. That the present is unsatisfactory is a necessary but hardly a sufficient condition to recommend change without even attempting to make a case for it.

[Update: Dr Mehta clarifies his position in a comment.]

Continue reading By invitation: No time to lose heart on Kashmir