Interesting readings

• Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times on privatisation in India.
• I had recently written a blog post on India's foolishness on visa rules for people coming into conferences. Siddharth Varadarajan has a great opinion piece on this in the Hindu. In sensible countries, there is no such thing as a `visa for the purpose of attending a conference'. It's just called a tourist visa.
• An editorial in the Wall Street Journal on India's success on establishing a private sector with competition in mobile phones.
• Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar in the Economic Times on what the budget speech should say. Also see Ila Patnaik in Indian Express on the roadmap, and in Financial Express on expenditure. Writing in the Business Standard, Sanjaya Baru is also optimistic about what Pranab Mukherjee will be able to pull off.
• An extremely insightful conversation on charges of ETFs (in the comments to this post). This is the sort of thing one hopes for in blogs.
• Give financial sector a Financial Stability Board, in the Times of India.
• Bibek Debroy in Indian Express on India's license-permit raj of exchange controls.
• I was at IFMR recently: did a talk on distribution of financial products, and looked at the `KGFS' idea on increasing outreach of financial products.
• Sanjeev Sanyal in Business Standard on the outlook for Bombay.
• Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times on new developments in the Chinese end of India's tiger extinction problem.
• John Gravois on remittances.
• We in India can look at the brainpower in the Chilean cabinet with wonder and envy.
• Catherine Rampall in the New York Times, reviewing Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller, which made me think about the different story of business-oriented ethnic groups of India.
• Robert Litan on financial innovation.
• Tarun Ramadorai in the Financial Express on hedge fund regulation.
• Alessandro Beber and Marco Pagano, on voxEU, analyse the global evidence on bans on short selling in the crisis. Hopefully we will learn the lesson for the next crisis.
• One of the great achievements of monetary policy reform in recent decades has been the establishment of executive Monetary Policy Committees (MPCs) which use formal voting mechanisms through which the policy rate is modified in order to achieve an inflation target, on a regular meeting cycle, with full transparency about how each person voted and why.
  Writing on voxEU, Tim Besley and Andrew Scott emphasise the role of `fiscal councils' where some (but not all) of these ideas are deployed into fiscal policy.
• I find it interesting to look at how the army of a great power works. See Elizabeth Rubin in Time magazine on Robert Gates (the US defence minister), and Chris Wilson in Slate on some remarkable soldiers. I suppose journalists like Elizabeth Rubin and Chris Wilson are also integral to being a great power.
• Interesting new things in the world of trading and exchanges, all from the Financial Times: Size of share orders cut in half on global markets and Small orders breed dark pools and higher costs by Jeremy Grant, Markets: Ghosts in the machine by Jeremy Grant and Michael Mackenzie, and lastly New US options exchange battles for market space by Hal Weitzman.