Here is an awesome AP story explaining how the cell phone market is changing African life for the better. Cell phones are circumventing government controls connecting brokers and consumers more efficiently. Prepaid minutes are a form of currency. Cell phones are adding true wealth to the African capital structure that can’t be done with foreign aid and isn’t tracked by Keynsian statistics.

“Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems.”

NYAG Eliot Spitzer has sued Dick Grasso former NYSE chief to “recoup” over 100 million in “unjustified” pay.

Now when do the taxpayers of New York get back the extorted and unjustified compensation of public officials like Eliot Spitzer?

Spitzer’s purge on Wall Street has become so bad that Mark Haines of CNBC joked, “the government might as well throw all of Wall Street in prison and release anyone they find innocent.”

In the spirit of Jeffrey Tucker’s essay on book publishing, there is a great website offering all sorts of free books. It is Bartleby.com. They strive to be:

The preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse providing students, researchers, and the intellectually curious with unlimited access to books and information on the web free of charge.

The site features reference materials including numerous encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, Gray’s Anatomy, Menken’s Language, the King James Bible, etc. Poetic verse includes a number of Oxford anthologies, modern and classical verse, and the greats from Dante to Yeats. The numerous fiction includes Aesop, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Twain. The nonfiction includes many of the great essayists and philosophers. These classics are available to all and they are all online and free to the consumer.

James Grant examines a crucial problem with Treasury Inflation Protected Securities: they don’t necessarily protect against inflation!

Grant writes:
Inflation, after all, is a matter of dollars–an increase in the supply of money not offset by an increase in the demand for money. People will say, “Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods,” but there’s a lot besides goods that too much money can chase: stocks, bonds, houses, foreign currencies, etc. The cause of inflation is always the same, yet the symptoms are ever changing, and TIPS protect against only one set of symptoms. link

Andy Mukherjee of Bloomberg writes about the improving relations between India and Pakistan, and the potential benefits of trade.

“Cricket is just a symbol of the backlog of goodwill that’s only now starting to get cleared,” says Jafri of Avari Lahore. “There’s huge demand for visiting Pakistan on the other side of the border. Normalization of relations is good for business.” link

“The Dufaur de Gavardie de Monclar family, who jointly own Bastiat’s property in Souprosse, inform us that they have reluctantly decided to put it up for sale, as no one member of the family is able to purchase it. It consists of a fine 17th century manor house, with early 20th century alterations, approached via a long tree-lined driveway, a barn and an outbuilding, all set in grounds of 28,000 m².” [MORE]