Interesting readings

• Writings about Lehman, in the broad Indian discourse, are a reminder of the low quality of the Indian economics discourse. Meghnad Desai looks back at a year after Lehman, in Financial Express. For a person who was in my father's class at M.A., he is remarkably free of socialist cobwebs of the mind. And, for other interesting treatments, see : see: Jayanth Varma in Financial Express, Dhiraj Nayyar in Indian Express, Andy Kessler in Forbes, Avinash Persaud on bankers pay in Financial Express.
• P. Vaidyanathan Iyer in Indian Express on some thinking about the role and function of government agencies in finance that is afoot at MOF. Hmm, I could get used to a Financial Stability and Development Authority.
• Subhomoy Bhattacharjee on India's capital controls and the proposed Bharti/MTN transaction.
• Bibek Debroy on the role and function of the Chief Economic Advisor to MOF.
• Sangeeta Singh and Rahul Chandran have an article in Mint on one of the most important infrastructure projects in India: the Bombay-Delhi freight corridor. It is going to work wonders in establishing the straight line connecting Bombay to Delhi as an axis of prosperity. See the CMIE Capex database on this.
• The `trilemma of the international financial system' in India by Koji Kobayashi of the Mizuho Research Institute.
• The Afghanistan impasse by Ahmed Rashid in The New York Review of Books.
• In the New York Times, Steve Dougherty has a great idea: to walk through today's Warsaw trying to reach the locations of Alan Furst's great book The spies of Warsaw.
• Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?