WSJ: “Every year, like clockwork, Grisham delivers a novel of suspense that ranges over the great drama of the law in America: striving lawyers in packed courtrooms, fickle juries and judges, the pulling of hidden strings in Washington, the wrongfully convicted sitting on death row. At 68 years old, he’s written 48 books and sold over 400 million copies, according to his agent, making him one of the most widely read authors alive today. What makes Grisham’s plots so distinctive in the pantheon of bestsellers, according to his editor and agent, David Gernert, is that his protagonists are laypeople. “They’re not, generally speaking, cops or detectives or FBI agents,” Gernert says. “They’re the guy next door who, eventually, for one reason or another, finds himself in an extraordinarily difficult situation…and has to navigate his way out of it.””
Anuradha Goyal: “Solopreneurs or small entrepreneurs are on no one’s priority list. We do not have an organised agency representing us at the finance ministry. It is impossible to organise, as freelancers and small service providers work in such vast domains that putting them under one umbrella is difficult. They mostly work from home or in small offices. Secondly, as small entrepreneurs, they end up doing everything themselves, from marketing to execution to accounting, leaving them little time and energy to go networking beyond what is required for their core work.”
FT: ““Shadow banking” is what some academics call the part of the financial system that resembles, but falls outside traditional banking. Policymakers prefer the less malevolent-sounding — but almost comically obtuse — term “non-bank financial institutions”. At $240tn, this system is now far bigger than its conventional counterpart. The bond market is its main component, taking money from investors who can mostly yank it away at short notice and funnel it into long-term investments. The question of how to tame shadow banking is one of the thorniest topics in finance today. For the financial system as a whole, it is arguably better that the risks bonds inevitably entail are spread across a vast, decentralised web of international investors, rather than concentrated in a narrow clutch of banks. But in finance, risk is like energy. It cannot be destroyed, only shifted from one place to another. As it gets shunted around, its consequences can morph in little understood, even dangerous ways.”
Economist on the proposals of Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian running to become the next president: “First, pro-market reforms would whittle down the size of the state. Mr Milei proposes cutting public spending by at least 15% of GDP and reaching zero primary deficit (ie, before interest payments) within his first year of government….Next, services that are usually provided by the state, such as education and health care, would see increasing doses of competition. A voucher system would be introduced in education, in which parents are given resources to decide where to send their children rather than the state transferring funds to schools…Mr Milei’s grandest proposal is to dollarise Argentina’s economy.” More: “This paper would be delighted if Mr Milei were to usher in a new age of liberalism in Argentina. However, that seems unlikely. His policies are poorly thought through. Far from building a consensus, he would struggle to govern. And if frustrated, some Argentines worry, he might conceivably turn authoritarian.”
