For Good Cup of Tea After Good Cup of Tea

Stopped using Bois-Cheri vanilla tea bags soon after I had one cup of Freshpak’s rooibos tea. That was years ago. It has a strength and consistency in taste I didn’t find in the local brand. I use my phone’s timer to steep it in fresh boiling water for exactly two minutes and then add some milk but no sugar. Great habit to skip sugar in tea as we drink several hundreds cups in a year. Have made quite a few friends try it. Most if not everyone of them have switched. 

Pope Should Squeeze Botanical Garden in Tight Schedule

Because there might be a six-lane motorway and a couple of shopping malls right in the middle of it the next time he or his successor visits our island. Granted promoters would have promised to plant 300,000 trees or whatever in Mare Chicose but it will never be the same thing. Just like trips to Beau-Vallon have been ruined forever. 

Bipolarizasyon Politik Se En Mit

Dan Lamerik ena li. Parti Demokrat ek Parti Repiblikin. Sa de la tu letan mate ek prezidan sorti depi en sa de parti la. Moris nu pa fin ena sa. Se ki nwena se rekonfigirasyon 4-5 parti dan de lalyans ki sanze a traver letan. Mem an 1967 pa ti vreman ena li parski dan Parti Lindepandans tiena Ptr, IFB ek CAM.

Par kont se kin arive depi 2005 se ki nun retruv nu ek ban Parlman byin regresif ki ti pur reprezantasyon proporsyonel (PR) ek ban politik iltra-liberal. Ptr su Navin Ramgoolam fin trayir ban valer sa parti ki ti lager pu lindepandans ek don nu leta providans. Setadir li pur PR, flat tax kin kas lekonomi ek li pa fin kon byin antur li. MMM usi mekonesab ek nepli ena nanye interesan pu ofer Moris. Ek depi 2015 nun truve ki MSM usi fin vin en parti neoliberal ek fin pratik ban politik bankal kin kontinye kul Moris ek pena respe pu lanatir. Tu sa la fin an parti arive parski ban parti la ena manb infliyan ki ena lintere dan offshore ek zot gayn finansman korporatif inportan.

Bon nuvel se ki lelektora fin kontinye vin pli malin. 

Nation Split Over Which is Worse

Is it his stupid flat tax which has broken the economy and created a Rs1,500bn GDP gap at the end of last year because we never got the 8% growth he promised for the past fourteen years or his ethnic electoral model which he used to forecast an 80% vote share for the LP/MMM alliance in the 2014 general election? While the problems created by his crappy economic model have partly been discussed not enough has been said of that ‘40%+40%=80%’ prediction of his faulty model which he no doubt used to change constituency — anybody thinking of changing ridings these days should avoid it as plague — and in the process elevated the status of reading tea leaves to that of an entirely respectable trade. 

The chart is a modest contribution to fill this gap. As you can see the bean-counter has made an error of 846,273 votes. That’s more than the 785,645 votes that alliance actually got. Which means that 40%+40% turned out to be equal to 38.5% — the thought of him being Minister of Finance again must have sent shivers down the spine of many voters. So the red/purple team got less than half what he predicted. It looks a lot like the GDP growth rate we’ve been clipping for the past seven years. They have all been less than half the 8% target. Is there a pattern here? Maybe. Maybe not when we look at the collapse of our savings rate. In any case 846,273 is a huge number of votes. It’s at least 400,000 larger than the votes that made us an independent country. In fact it’s even greater than the votes of the Independence Party and the PMSD in the August 1967 election put together. He’s now saying he got misreported and never said that. Even if we grant him this just for now I recall hearing him say that he’s predicting a 60-0. This implies a vote share of a little more than 65% (the vote share of the LP/MMM in 1995) and a still gigantic error of 543,667 votes. 

If you ask me I don’t think it’s important we decide which is worse. These are both catastrophes that need to be analysed carefully and prompt voters to require political alliances to have their tax policies among other things detailed in affidavits. They should also help us stay alert and not get distracted by the ethnic hogwash that’s going to be thrown our way in the next few months. Let’s stay focussed on the real issues. There’s no shortage of them. 

How Our Offshore Treaty Risk Became a Much Bigger Problem

With 640m multidimensionally poor people in India in 2005-6 and the internet making millions a lot smarter it was natural that the pressure to renegotiate the DTAA with Mauritius would increase significantly. So it was sheer stupidity for one bean-counter to flatten our tax structure to a rate (15%) that has caused serious damage to our economy in order to build a facade of low-tax jurisdiction. Besides we never voted for this crap aka Paglanomics or if you prefer Shaitanomics in 2005. Killing our savings culture was not exactly another smart move. Neither was gifting a sunset industry €138m — its weight in the economy was more than six times smaller at the end of 2018 (0.5%) than it was in 2005. Add the severance of the link between what we pay for oil and what it costs on the world market and stupid hire-fire laws to understand why we’re heading into a wall. 

And a few days ago he uttered more rubbish including that without our Global Business (GB) sector — this is where he’s been working for many years — our currency would maybe have been trading at Rs50 to the USD. Scare tactics by Dr. TINAnen. But as the chart shows it took only five years from the inception of that sector for our rupee to lose a quarter of its value and a further five to shed almost another 25% of the average value it had in 1992 — an index of the dollar value of our rupee is used so that when the curve is going down it means our rupee is losing value with respect to the USD, makes it easier to visually estimate its percentage changes and we’ve added two horizontal lines to show two values of our rupee relevant for our discussion here in the format you’re used to seeing it. 

This chart will also help put the myth that Ringadoo was a bad Minister of Finance because he devalued the rupee by 30% and 20% in a better perspective. See our rupee lost 55% of its dollar value between 1992 and 2015 in an economic environment that was incomparably better. In fact we would probably have hit another dismal low had there not been a BoM Governor who knew what he was doing between 2007 and 2014 to resist energetically an incompetent Minister of Finance who when asked why the rupee had been depreciating rapidly replied that it had not depreciated for a long time. For sure current trade imbalances reflect to a great extent the generalised policy-making failure of the past dozen years. Our rupee will enjoy better days as soon as we get our act together. Just like India who had by 2015-6 reduced the number of poor people by 271m.