February 2012
2 posts
“I know we’re gonna meet someday
In the crumbled financial institutions of this...”
– Check out this completely mad bridge on Andrew Bird’s Tables and Chairs. It’s part of the end-of-days daydreaming that everyone is feeling these days, but done in a joyful, totally fun way.
“When it comes to public utilities, the Italian Prime Minister said he put...”
– In a sentence, Monti reminds us that the debate on privatisation needs to get more complex.
January 2012
2 posts
“But an additional contributor to inequality in America is our immigration law,...”
– Alan Greenspan in the FT. The man who lowered interest rates to zero and then left.
BUT he deserves major kudos for banging the drum on immigration in consistent, thoughtful, and surprising ways.
December 2011
2 posts
Vincere →
I took Pier’s advice and watched Vincere, an operatic film about Mussolini’s first wife. It is quite brilliant, has beautiful and disturbing set pieces, and is very Italian. This is one of them, and uses an aria from an American opera—Philip Glass’ Akhnaten—to effect.
November 2011
3 posts
The New Republic: I Studied Here, Then Was Forced...
Sahil Mahtani, November 30, 2011 | 12:00 am
Jakarta—Despite the boom of recent years, Indonesia is still the sort of place from which young people seek to escape. Nearly all Indonesians who can afford it send their children to study in universities abroad, and my parents were no different. But where many of my former classmates have since become Canadians and Australians, I am again in...
Book: Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
“It is difficult to remain an emperor in the presence of a physician,” the emperor Hadrian tells us in Memoirs of Hadrian, a fictionalised retelling by Marguerite Yourcenar. It is a book famed for its imaginative recreation of Roman antiquity, not just through a correct inventory of objects but by conveying the mental landscape of the period. For her learning, Yourcenar was the first...
Anonymous asked: Dear Mahil, thank you for understanding & reviewing my book in this way, w. regards, Lizzy van Leeuwen
October 2011
4 posts
Air-conditioned Man: How Jakarta's new men...
Lost in Mall by Lizzie van Leeuwen
reviewed by Sahil Mahtani
30 October 2011 — Early in Lost in Mall, an anthropological account of middle-class Jakartans in the 1990s, a elderly lady enquires, weeping, whether “demokratisasi means she has to allow her servants to sit on the chairs from now on.” Lizzy van Leeuwen, a Dutch anthropologist with Indonesian relatives who spent much of the 1990s...
“Moderator: “Switzerland’s very high there.” [Pointing to a...”
– @Americatalyst 2010
My take on the most obvious crisis ever:... →
Economist.com: Bungle bungle election in trouble
Indonesia’s election machinery
Steady at the ballot box
Oct 5th 2011, 7:35 by S.M.| JAKARTA
AT LOEWY’S, the South Jakarta hangout favoured by the city’s glitterati, the atmosphere is distinctly boom-time. An odd but amiable population of Australian miners, local soap-opera stars, foreign diplomats, and minor tycoons rule the roost. The impression is leisurely, if colonial—waiters...
September 2011
1 post
Economist.com Indonesia uproots its banking system
Indonesia’s banking system
A shaky time to shake things up
Sep 29th 2011, 9:45 by S.M. | JAKARTA
JAKARTA’S financial circles are atwitter over a proposed change to banking ownership laws. in August, the government announced that it would soon be disallowing ownership of bank shares by financial entities beyond a certain threshold. That threshold was undefined, as was the...
June 2011
1 post
Economist.com: Free Exchange: Life is elsewhere
May 24th 2011, 0:01 by S.M. | SINGAPORE
IN MILAN KUNDERA’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, the character Tomas falls in love with a woman after imagining her as a child in a bulrush basket. “Tomas did not realise at the time that metaphors are dangerous,” Mr Kundera tells us, “A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
Economists are not immune...
May 2011
3 posts
“A fan of bird watching, he declined in his first press conference in 2008 to...”
– -Masaaki Shirakawa, the Japanese central banker
“George [Brown, Harold Wilson’s deputy, a notorious drunk with an eye for...”
– Philip Coggan quotes Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat.
“A beautiful 20 year old can do no wrong. I would have thought you of all people...”
– A.S., with some wisdom. (Also, I finally succumb, Pier-style, to quoting my milieu.)
April 2011
3 posts
Economist.com: Free Exchange: Fraud and death in...
Apr 7th 2011, 11:19 by S.M. | JAKARTA
FOR a week now, Jakarta’s rich and connected have been appalled by twin scandals at Citibank’s Indonesia operations. A relationship manager at the bank’s wealth management division appears to have stolen Rp. 17 billion ($2m) from clients. In what must be a terrible coincidence, Citibank debt collectors also seem to have killed a customer—a local...
Economist.com: Banyan: Clean toilets and mud...
Mar 25th 2011, 11:48 by S.M. | JAKARTA
TOILETS at Indonesia’s nuclear agency headquarters in south Jakarta would not ordinarily attract comment. But state technocrats trying to make a case for nuclear energy in recent years have unwittingly drawn attention to their own plumbing.
“ Look at the toilets at five-star hotels operated by Indonesian corporations,” remarked Asnatio Lasman,...
February 2011
10 posts
Economist.com: Free Exchange: Indonesia's bank...
Feb 11th 2011, 15:07 by S.M. | JAKARTA
JUST a month after the Financial Times compared the Garuda Indonesia IPO to a soaring phoenix, shares have slid 21% on its opening day. This is not entirely surprising. Investors were understandably wary when in October, Garuda declared a loss of $4.4m, then promptly corrected itself, saying it had, in fact, made a profit of five times that amount....
Indonesia: Not Too Clever
I have just been billed Indonesian customs duty of 66% on a review copy of an academic book mailed from a UK publishing house. This hasn’t usually happened with review copies, though it often bedevils shipments of panama hats, ivory shaving kits and monogrammed shoe-trees. My guess is that the neanderthals at Soekarno-Hatta have decided to tighten customs this month to appease the new head...
WSJ: Malaysia no paradise, says former U.S.... →
“Stuart told me what he considers the worst thing ever said of anyone: John...”
– James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954.
“I simply don’t accept that there is just a choice in life between, on the one...”
– Someone should tell him that childish petulance is no substitute for an argument.
FT.com: Tax, Trouble to Avoid →
The problem with public finances in the US is not just that spending is too high. It is also that income is too low. Tax income as a percentage of GDP in the US is almost the lowest in the developed world, at 24% of GDP compared to, say, New Zealand’s 31%. This, despite the fact that New Zealand’s top tax bracket pays a lower income tax than the United States—33% to 35% respectively....
Found myself talking to an NGO-type with sympathies toward Papua. Couldn’t help repeating BoJo’s fracas, where he described Labour party infighting as akin to “Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.” Also, his apology: saying he meant no insult to the people of PNG and that no doubt, they lived lives of “blameless bourgeois domesticity in...
“I think what’s interesting, Tom and Ken, is not just what’s...”
– M. El-Erian on Bloomberg Surveillance, Feb 1.
“[In 1991 India had] a noxious combination of elevated fiscal deficits, a high...”
– Niranjan Rajadyaksha says 2011 is India’s year of living dangerously, ie. a fiscal crisis is possible. It is worth pointing out that inequality is partly the cause of the fiscal deficit—to prevent the rest of the country from feeling left behind, the government is using borrowed money to...
“Egyptians are rightly upset. Have you seen the price of caviar these days?”
January 2011
12 posts
Bob Shiller thinks more inequality is better
Tom Keene: The conservative response to this [plutocracy argument] is let the elite and the people aspiring to be elite…let them make their money and they will lift the others up with their American spirit. Comment on that. Robert Schiller. I am actually sympathetic to that view….The thing is, the United States is right now going through a philanthropic revolution. Notably we have Bill Gates...
Radio FM4: From the memory of the Swiss-Austrian... →
Switzerland: How red-blooded capitalism requires... →
Anat Admati, sharp as a knife and mischievous as the cheshire cat, writing that banks should hold multiples more equity than they currently do, in some cases by almost an order of magnitude. My banker friends would be outwardly dismissive but secretly alarmed by the wicked bit where she compares financial businesses to non-financial ones. But Ms. Admati has already lost this round on a...
Baruch makes Gordon Brown blush, repeatedly →
The Strange Rebirth of American Leadership by... →
Ken Weisbrode puts Farid Zakaria in a larger context and makes him look very small indeed
China doesn't want to be the United States. It... →
The Economist vs. Raghuram Rajan
A blundering editorial from the best newspaper in the world. For example, this is how it responds to Raghu Rajan’s claim that inequality created the conditions for the financial crisis:
As for the mooted link to the financial crisis, the timing is dodgy: America’s poor fell behind in the 1980s, the credit bubble took off two decades later.
Factually, this is not true. Leverage of...
In praise of a twit, Asia.View @ The Economist
Jan 11th 2011, 11:29 by S.M. | JAKARTA
IT WAS not without some pride that Indonesians awoke one November morning to find that their minister of communication had become a star performer in that American circus, “The Colbert Report”. Tifatul Sembiring had shaken Michelle Obama’s hand but felt terrifically embarrassed by it. In an apparent gesture of Islamic piety, the minister had warned...
Indonesia's Oil Problem, on Free Exchange, The...
Jan 11th 2011, 15:01 by S.M. | JAKARTA
WERE one told a decade ago that oil prices would quadruple but not seriously hurt growth in emerging economies, it would have seemed fantastic. (After all, the oil shocks of the 1970s substantially curtailed growth in Latin America). Yet this is precisely what has happened. As oil prices approach $100 a barrel, economists are wondering why.
Jon Anderson at...
December 2010
2 posts
Economist.com: India's languishing countryside: a... →
A fantastic story
The King and SBY, Asia.View at The Economist
The king and SBY
Dec 13th 2010, 9:34
by S.M. | YOGYAKARTA
EVEN in the rush hour traffic on Jalan Solo, a central artery of the ancient Javanese city of Yogyakarta, no one honks. An increase in bank credit over the past year has meant an influx of cars and motorcycles, a development that has driven residents of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, into bloody incidents of road rage. But in “Jogja”,...
November 2010
6 posts
Towering Ambition in Malaysia
by Sahil Mahtani, The Diplomat
Are plans for a new 100-storey skyscraper a sign of strength or weakness? Either way, they make little economic sense.
November 21, 2010
Even just a glimpse of Kuala Lumpur’s 88-floor Petronas Towers is a reminder of Malaysia’s pharaonic ambitions. The reasons for building them were partly economic, but mostly symbolic—Malaysia had arrived, the...
“God damn the United States for its vile conduct in the Philippine...”
– —William James, on American exceptionalism, in Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, p. 219, (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
Every generation unlearns its myths, even if the myths themselves were important.
The Filipinos were on the receiving end of the “blessings of liberty and...
“Bethany McLean: My big fear is that we don’t have as much time as...”
– What does that mean? Gregory knows what that means, of course, but he constantly asks the panel to spell out things that might seem complicated to an average reasonable American. What this means is that America is psychologically unprepared for that, as a solid Meet The Press discussion this...
East of Arabia
More Muslims live east of Afghanistan than west of it. The countries with the four largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Yet the Middle East continues to retain its prominence in discussions about Islam.
A fascinating example of this is former WSJ-writer Tunku Varadarajan’s piece in The Daily Beast on this very subject. Can you spot the error? He...
Is America's greatest strength also her greatest...
1.“A nation of immigrants is more permeable than say, Chinese society.” From David Brooks, with MBB adding,”The strongest argument for the United States’ sustained competitive advantage is its open culture — openness to ideas and peoples.”
2. Unfortunately this is also America’s greatest weakness. Major studies, most notably Putnam’s, have shown that...