Gold Loans

While pawning the family jewels would be a sign of distress in the West, trading gold for cash increasingly is viewed in India as the equivalent of taking out a home equity loan to expand a business or simply to buy things. It's true. It's easy. Period.

Useful links:
www.manappuram.com
www.muthootfinance.com
www.gold.org

Can't Remember What I Forgot

Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research by Sue Halpern is a wonderful book for everyone. A must read.

Useful link:

www.suehalpern.net

Hedgeable

Hedgeable, an investment start-up has come up with a neat gimmick to draw attention to its launch: a nationwide contest to find the three investors whose portfolios lost the most value between October 2007, when stockmarkets began to tumble, and March 2009, when they hit bottom. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Hats off to Michael Kane!

Useful link:
www.hedgeable.com

Random Thoughts

In the past, we thought that the carbon dioxide in the bubbles just gave the wine an acidic bite and a little tingle on the tongue, but this study shows that it is much more than this. Glasses that encourage more bubbles to come up are going to be better. At the bottom of proper champagne glasses, they put a little bit of (rough) glass, which encourages the nucleation of the flow of bubbles.

- Dr Jamie Goode
www.wineanorak.com

It's good to know.

London Design Festival 2009

Old is new again. www.londondesignfestival.com

John Cassidy Viewpoint

John Cassidy's opinion piece in the New Yorker was spot on. A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier and less amenable to reform: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity. So true!

Useful link:
http://hyunsongshin.org

Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman's 'Shape of Jazz to Come' is still as relevant as ever.

Useful link:
www.ornettecoleman.com
www.jalc.org

Grown In Detroit

Grown in Detroit, a documentary by two Dutch filmmakers was brilliant. Inspiring, really.

Useful links:
http://grownindetroit.filmmij.nl
www.grownindetroit.tv