اخبار 1

Well, John Oliver got on the bandwagon too.

                                                                      (Photo : Google Maps)   The world's costliest building it has become. Yesterday, "The Center" in Hong Kong - a 73 storey landmark was sold for $ 5bn. Yes, FIVE BILLION US DOLLARS. For a single building. No you are not hallucinating. It really did happen. The Centre was a jewel in the portfolio of Li Ka-Shing. If you don't know who he is, well, he was, and probably is, Mr Hong Kong.  One of the richest men in the world. For long he has symbolised money, power and all the glamour of Hong Kong. This post is not about the old man. It's about insanity in property valuations. Yes land is scarce (anybody who has been to Hong Kong knows how scarce). And yes, it is demand and supply that sets prices.  And yes, it is a free market - nobody is compelled to buy or sell at any price. But even then, it is only right to pause and reflect on what such insane property valuations mean. It means, most of the world...

The title of this post is directly stolen from The Economist which ran a cover story by this name a year or so ago. They themselves were punning the quote from here . The much awaited China's People Congress ended today with the expected climax - the unveiling of the new Politburo Standing Committee ; the men who will run China for the next five years. More of this in just a little while. This ended a week of speechifying and staged events. First, the two things that stood out during the days preceding the event today.  Xi Jinping opened the Congress with a speech lasting an incredible three and a half hours, reaching new heights of torture and boredom. It was a hugely self confident China strutting about as a world power, with Xi vigorously patting his own back. He outlined some of the directions for the next five years which were typically broad motherhoods, but gave some clues on where they are heading. The most important outcome was the enshrining of "Xi Jinping Thought...

If you are an American, here's a a nice issue to distract you from your fixation about you know who and direct your attention to a different issue you can get all worked up about. Witness each city falling over each other and doing the most stupid of things to land HQ2. Tucson Arizona, where one of the readers of this blog lives ,  uprooted a 21ft cactus and tried to deliver it to HQ1. The mayor of Kansas City actually bought one thousand items from the company in HQ1 and wrote a review of each one of them. Mayors of cities are looking silly in videos that they have made asking Alexa where HQ2 is going to come up and Alexa answering of course, the city they are mayors of. Shall I go on ? If you are wondering what all this hullaballoo is  about, this is all to do with attracting Amazon's second head office. Amazon is based in Seattle (this is HQ1). They want to create a HQ2 somewhere else. And why are cities willing to stand in a line and kiss Bezos' ass (cue the nod to the ...

Who is the person I hate the most ? No; not that one, whom I frankly don't care about . He is half the planet away and troubling other folks; not me. My visceral hate is reserved for somebody much closer home. The "dotard" called Ramamritham. Allow me an unhinged rant please; I badly need it ! You see, the problem is that Ramamritham has fallen head over heels in insane love. We all know how crazy he is even when supposedly normal. Now that his brain circuits have been singed with love, he has become a monster. The delectable damsel who has swept this idiot off his rockers is called Aadhaar. For the benefit of the one American reader who claims to be ignorant about India (no; not the lady - she is an expert !), Aadhaar is the national ID that every resident of India is supposed to get. The government introduced Aadhaar some 5 years ago ostensibly as a way to identify individuals to whom subsidies could be paid directly and thereby minimise leakages.  The government gave p...

The world's richest woman just died. If you didn't know this, please stop focusing on the tweets and turn your attention to more weighty matters of the world. Liliane Bettencourt passed away four days ago at the age of 94. She was the heiress to the founder of L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetic company; the only child of Eugène Schueller who founded L'Oréal in 1907. She herself worked in the company from the age of 15 and rose to become its deputy Chairperson. The future of L'Oréal is now in play. And therein lies a story that could give a beating to any soap opera on television. In 1974, fearing that France would nationalise the company, Bettencourt did a deal with Nestle wherein she offloaded about half her holding in exchange for shares in Nestle. Since then Nestle and Bettencourt have had one of the longest tangos in business history. Nestle, a food company, with no presence at all in cosmetics, had a 30% stake in the world's largest cosmetics compan...

Anybody who predicts what the next Standing Committee and the Politburo will be is almost certain to be wrong ! This is why most newspaper columnists are content with naming possible candidates and leaving it at that. This blogger does not care if he is proved wrong or even as a fool. There are no consequences to getting it dead wrong. So here's my prediction what's going to happen ! There are only two near certainties in this political game. One is that Xi Jinping will continue as Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and as the President. The second is that Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zengsheng, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli will retire from the Standing Committee . Everything else is up for grabs. Two of the key moves that is the subject of much speculation is what will happen to Li Keqiang the current Premier (most views are that he will stay on as Premier) and that of Wang Qishan (Xi's ally in the anti corruption drive, but who is crossing t...