Aother slumdog piece.

Ed. Glaeser at Harvard writes “India is a nation where private citizens, both rich and poor, do amazing things despite tremendous failures of the public sector”.

Read Glaeser’s piece on entrepreneurship in Mumbai.

Kiplinger rolled out their picks for the ten best cities in America of 2009. Most of them are either college towns or places with a lot of government jobs or new alternative industries.

I always imagine myself settling down in a college town. Among the college towns in the pick: Austin is really nice and I have been there many times before; Madison, Wisconsin is very vibrant but a little bit cold for me, and I have been there once in 2003. I will visit Charlottesville, VA and Releigh, NC this summer. I have high hope for the Releigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle area. I will soon find out.

Kiplinger 2009 Best Cities

No. 1: Huntsville, Alabama
No. 2: Albuquerque, New Mexico
No. 3: Washington D.C.
No. 4: Charlottesville, Virginia
No. 5: Athens, Georgia
No. 6: Olympia, Washington
No. 7: Madison, Wisconsin
No. 8: Austin, Texas
No. 9: Flagstaff, Arizona
No. 10: Raleigh, North Carolina

A slideshow on the ten best cities of 2009

Bonds beat stocks in the last 40 years, from Feb. 1969 to Feb. 2009. If you sold stocks right before the dot com bubble, your return on bonds is even greater: almost 4 times of stock returns.

Watch this nice debate on investing in stocks vs. bonds between Robert Arnott and Jeremy Siegel.

Arnott is the guru in quant investing, and he also sits on the editorial board of Financial Analyst Journal and Journal of Portfolio Management; Siegel is a finance professor at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

A nice presentation from Richard Suttmeier, an expert on Chinese Science & Technology and innovation, on whether China is becoming a scientific superpower.

Link to the online presentation

(Powerpoint courtesy of Prof. Suttmeier)

There is also a YouTube video from a similar talk:

Bloomberg interview of Paul Volcker, arguably the most respected central banker. The interview was done a few weeks back.

Paul Volcker, “I would have never thought I would see this degree of government intervention…”

The unemployment rate in the US is likely to surpass Europe.

(click to enlarge; source: NYT)

The US dollar often moves in the opposite direction with the market during this crisis, i.e., when stock market is down, dollar is up. But Peter Schiff noted something has changed —we may have dollar, stocks and bonds decline at the same time. And he thinks inflation is coming.