New Tool to Curb Corruption - Pocketless Pants

Take heed all you corrupt workers/officials at Nepals main airport. With pocketless pants, now there is no place to hide all your ill gotten wealth. According to one official:

We sent a team to observe the growing complaints about the behaviour of airport authorities and workers towards travellers and we discovered that the reports were true. So we decided that airport officials should be given trousers with no pockets. We have directed the ministry of civil aviation to implement our order as soon as possible. We believe this will help curb the irregularities

I can only imagine the thought process in the person designated to observe the officials.If the team observed that government officals were taking bribes and keeping them in their pant pockets, wouldnt catching the culprites red handed serve as a right deterrant. Why waste the taxpayers money with the new policy of supplying pantless pockets to all officials? What say you...

Quote of the Day

The current financial crisis has stirred a debate on whether this is the end of Free Market Capitalism as we know it. Morning Edition on NPR is running a series on this same topic.

Robert Barbera captures the debate in the quote of the day

"We sort of morphed from Adam Smith's invisible hand, that markets move things in a very helpful direction, to some notion [that] free markets have an infallible hand".

Listen to the complete series at Free market debate

Higher Education with Student Loans - Good or Bad?

Its that time of the year again. Proud parents, high hopes and expectations from the class that graduated, young minds eager to join the workforce, etc etc. As if it was not enough that this year is one of the worst times to graduate out of college, what with the economy not doing that great, add to that the fact that this years graduating class will be one of the highest debt ridden class coming out of college.

According to the latest available data, the graduating class of 2007, carried a debt of about $20,000 for public universities, and about $25,000 for a private university after finishing a four year degree.

Everybody talks about how getting a college degree is so important in todays competitive world, how it is one of the most important things that you can do in your life, which will make or break your career. But this college degree comes at a price and it is not cheap. When you have 22 year olds, barely out of college, carrying levels of debt that can most of the time take years to pay off, aren't they setting foot into this whole new world of expectations on a back-foot.

NY Times in its series, Room for Debate discusses the topic, "When it comes to student debt, How Much is Too Much".

Graphic below provides the student loan debt by each individual state.



Detailed picture at BrokerGradStudent

Woes of the Indian IT Industry

Global recession has hit the Indian IT industry hard. An article in the Outlook Magazine captures the worsening woes of the Indian IT industry. Things have become so bad according to some anecdotal accounts, if you are an eligible bachelor working for an IT company, your chances of finding a groom are lets say abysmal. The paragraphs below capture the contrast between the heady days of 2005 and 2006, when an IT job was a sure shot ticket to wealth, and the woes of today.

Multiple job offers and generous pay hikes were nothing unusual in the IT industry. Talent was hard to come by. Companies had to pay plenty in cash, bonuses, perks and stock options to retain existing employees, and attract new hires by the thousands. New contracts from US clients were flowing in easily and IT companies had a simple formula for success: they could grow as much as they could hire. They often behaved like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They hired indiscriminately.

The city’s IT wealth was once the envy of the rest of the nation. The software professional was once the dream job of millions of students. There were over 10,000 individual dollar millionaires (with an investible surplus of Rs 4.5 crore) and 60,000 super-rich people (investible surplus of Rs 50 lakh) in the city in 2006. Bangaloreans invested Rs 22,000 crore in mutual funds in March 2006, up from Rs 8,000 crore in June 2004, according to a study by American Express. But all the fame and wealth of the IT professional is slowly melting away.

Pubs in Bangalore are empty; one is even offering “recession discounts”. Real estate prices, both housing and commercial, are sliding. The Promoters and Builders Association of Pune has launched a scheme where the developer will pay three EMIs in case a customer loses a job. Senior officials in a private sector bank confirm employees in the IT sector are in the negative list of borrowers. Many jobless are putting their cars and houses up for sale. Parents don’t want to marry their daughters to IT professionals.

Read the complete article at Woes of the Indian IT Industry

Unemployment Funds Running out of Money

In a sign of the times and an indication of how bad the recession is, most states are running out of money to pay for unemployment benefits. The map below shows which states are borrowing money from the Federal government to pay the unemployed, and which states have a solvent unemployment fund.

No surprises here. The worst states affected by the recession like Michigan, Ohio, California are the ones who are borrowing money.



More details on state by state fund balance can be found at Unemployment System in Danger

Link obtained from Marketplace