TRAVERSING HOLY GROUND – REVIEW OF DIANA L ECK’S “INDIA”

Salman Rushdie mentions somewhere (perhaps in Imaginary Homelands (1992)) that India does not exist in reality except in the minds of its people. It is a collective fiction, he says, which has to be maintained by riots and ritual outpouring of blood.

BETTING AGAINST THE HERD – REVIEW OF MICHAEL LEWIS’S “THE BIG SHORT”

Books on the 2008 financial crisis engross me. I believe, as many Austrian economists do, that the 2008 financial crisis was wrought not by excessive deregulation but by the American government’s eagerness to make every American a home-owner and also by moral hazard: if the US had not arranged for the bail-out of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and further, if not for the “Greenspan put”, Wall Street players would not have taken such huge risks as they did.