saturday notes

Last night, I actually met a sub-prime mortgage investment banker who was fired from Bear-Stearns in London. He is now in Kunming trying to learn Chinese. The grass really is greener over here on the other side. His temperament was strikingly, um, fierce and antsy. He really hated getting advice from the Icelandic guys who always tried to tell him how to invest. Ha! They are all done now. And they wish they spoke Chinese....

AND

I will post this here for now, but will come back to it. I have been telling people for weeks that we should just buy all the damn poppy in Afghanistan, infiltrate, deprive them of the revenue, save our cash, and maintain the largest national warehouse of opium. Then Christopher Hitchens has to go and actually write the article (this week!) that lays out the logic in a contextual way. I just spout. See Sudarshan, this is no joke! This is How We Win In Afghanistan.

Here:
I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.

AND

China is going to announce major land-ownership reform in the next few days?!

As the population ages and the workforce shrinks, agriculture will need to be modernized.
As the country modernizes, urbanization will draw people off the land.

I have been thinking about this issue for a long time. Wow! And now, on the 30th anniversary of the Reform and Opening, Wen is looking for a way to inject some energy into the rural economy, to incentivize efficiency and offer a pathway into the cash economy for those 800 million farmers tied firmly to their subsistence plots (by a precarious red government string, of course) What an exciting time!