Interesting readings

Mobis Philipose in Mint, Sunil Jain in the Financial Express: on the SEBI order (by Prashant Saran) on the Tayals. Also see coverage on firstpost.

The great debate about Pranab Mukherjee as President of India: read B. S. Raghavan in the Hindu Business Line; Inder Malhotra in the Indian Express.

Nick Robinson in the Business Standard on strengthening the rule-making process, i.e. the legal process for subordinate legislation, in India.

The next generation of reforms in India, a speech by Raghuram Rajan.

I just read Carnage and culture, by Victor Davis Hanson, and I recommend that everyone who thinks about India and international relations and military power should read it too.

As I read Karim Sadjadpour in Foreign Policy on prudishness in Iran, it made me think about Where boys and girls don't talk to each other in the Hindu.

M. Sahoo on SEBI's recent moves on opening up to conflicts of interest in exchanges.

Watch me talk about the current macroeconomic situation. Watch me talk on CNBC-TV18 on the day after RBI's surprising 50 bps rate cut.

I got many questions about seasonal adjustment of the CPI-IW. At our tracking page, we have a technical note on the seasonal adjustment procedure for each of the series. As an example, here is the technical note about seasonal adjustment of CPI-IW.

Financial regulation is particularly complex when the line between the government and the private sector are blurred, when the State contracts-out supervision to private parties, in the field of market infrastructure such as exchanges, clearing houses, depositories, credit rating agencies, etc. Credit rating agencies get paid by the firms that they rate; exchanges get paid by the members that they supervise. Panayotis Gavras has a good article in Finance and Development about the problems faced in the field of credit rating, and potential solutions.

Two new papers: A corporate governance index for large listed companies in India, by Jayati Sarkar, Subrata Sarkar and Kaustav Sen, and Do changes in distance-to-default anticipate changes in the credit rating by Nidhi Aggarwal, Manish Singh and Susan Thomas.

The Cabinet has cleared a Microfinance Institutions (Development and Regulation) Bill. The version of the draft Bill that has got greenlighted is not out in public domain. I hope the present version has fixed up the major flaws visible in the previous publicly visible draft Bill.

A great review by Timothy Snyder, of The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston, in the New Republic.

John Pollock has a great story about Libya in Technology Review, which helps us to think about China's future in new ways.

Everyone interested in the world economy should read The true lessons of the recession: The West can't borrow and spend its way to recovery by Raghuram Rajan, in the Foregn Affairs.

Reviewing less -- progressing more, a great editorial in the RFS by Matthew Spiegel that gives us an insight into what is going wrong in academic refereeing.

One last thing: Scales.