Manu Held To Home Draw As The Reds Try To Stop City

City has a chance to widen its lead by 7 points if it beats Liverpool. But that's not going to be easy after what the Reds showed us they were able to do at Stamford Bridge last week. Suarez, Kuyt and Johnson make a very intimidating trio that could hand City its first defeat of the season. And open up an already very interesting Premiership even more.

Let's see what unfolds at Anfield in an hour or so.

Kee Chong Hinting He Will Be MMM's Finance Minister

And not Lutchmeenaraidoo. That was in an interview he gave to L'express on Sunday. Whilst it's true that he has been in the limelight more often than Vishnu because he's in Parliament -- thanks to getting a ticket in a safer riding -- and Lutchmeenaraidoo is not, he has not convinced many in his party and elsewhere that he shares a philosophy that's different from the Paglanomics practised by at least half of the two university buddies since July 2005.

What do you think? And don't forget to vote in our latest poll: Vishnu or Kee Chong as FM.

21-year Old Meets Horrible Death

Xavier Luc Brondon Lallsingh was crushed in an ash-mixer a week ago at Medine Sugar Estate. And now UASI (Union of Artisans of the Sugar Industry) President, Serge Jauffret, wants the board of Medine to suspend its General Manager until the ongoing inquiry is completed. Jauffret is saying that the safety of temporary workers is being compromised for the sake of a better bottom line. Especially after skilled artisans are being replaced by less-skilled seasonal workers.

What are your views on this?

State in A Hurry To Spoil School Holidays

At least for those kids from Standard IV and V who will take part in the Summer School Programme which begins November 24. This is our Government's response to the high failure rate at the CPE exams. I don't think this will really work because almost everybody knows that the problem is not with our kids but with the curriculum which needs to be redesigned to make learning more playful and relevant. Besides there is a much easier way to dramatically reduce the end of primary education failure rate: bell curve the results to allow a few thousands more children in Form 1 in January 2012.

For sure we can learn from Finland where kids begin school only when they're 7, spend the least amount of time in classrooms and yet are at the top of the PISA rankings. By the way, I am hoping Mauritius will start participating in this serious survey in the next few hundred years. Once we get tired of gazing at our navels that is.

Finally, there is another reason why we don't want to go ahead with the summer school programme. And that's because we know that kids now are not as physically strong as they were before. So the last thing we want is to have them spending still more time behind their desks slowly morphing into obese parrots. Nope. We better have them enrolled in a Summer Football Programme.

Mansoor Pe Dir Reform Finn Port So Frwi

Pu li reform kinn kumanse depi 2006 finn fer nu gagn bon rezilta depi kinn diminie bann tax rates: nun gagn plis reveni et pli importan nun resi kree enn bann jobs a traver relans investisman.

Ah bon? Abe kifer alors li ti pe dir dan so bann sirkiler ki reveni pu en bes ziska 2013? Ek kifer malgre nun gagn 40 milyar FDI buku dimunn finn vinn mizer? Ek kifer so larme sek kinn donn li job FS la pann poze kuma independan dernye eleksyon zeneral? (En plis AM ti kav fer so campaign manager). Ek kifer nu depans plis kas pey linteret lor nu det ki nu investi dan ledikasyon?

Eski nu bizin koz lor kinn ariv nu savings rate? Uswa ki moris pann partisip dan rebondisman ekonomik mondyal? En plis li pa paret konn fer diferans ent monte ek bese.

Pa fer riye do...

Education Spending Not Alone in Falling Behind Inflation

So we learned today from the DPM. Expenditure on major pipe replacements for the past five years have been as follows: 2005/06: Rs225 million; 2006/07: Rs200 million; 2007/08: Rs160 million and 2008/09: Rs150 million; and Rs210 million in 2010. But Rs400 million have been spent in 2011.

The only two things that seemed to have kept up with rising prices are the crappy working paper industry and the attention given to crappy bean-counting indices.

Hallelujah!

Smokin' Joe Gone At 67

Many heavyweight boxers said that Joe hit the hardest. One even said that Ali hit like a butterfly but Frazier hit like a bee. Which is roughly what Foreman told the BBC on learning the passing away of his friend:

"The first thing I remember is when he missed [hitting] me. Just missing scared me so much that I knocked him down six times."

Watch Ali talk about Joe and George. Sound quality not too good.

Mauritius Ranks 77th in Human Development

Out of 187 countries according to the 2011 report published by the UNDP a few days ago. This puts us in the high human development category but we're 25 spots lower than the first African country: The Seychelles. Which is by the way only 5 spots from the very high human development group of countries.

This is definitely a much more interesting Index to track. Unless of course if you happen to be a bean-counting junkie.

P.S. Make sure to check Figure 5.1 which captures pretty much Kozelidir's idea of development. And to have some fun with the data explorer.

China Not In A Hurry To Bailout Europe

Listen to this very interesting interview of Jin Liqun, Chairman of the China Investment Corporation. Where he is essentially saying that Europe is not sustainable as it is.

So, How Did You Find XLD's 1st Budget?

I am asking this because I didn't listen to the speech. Please educate me.

Papandreou Wants Greeks To Vote on Rescue Plan

That would happen in January and increase uncertainty substantially. Or things could get out of hand if markets assume that the plan will never be approved by the Greek voters given how often the latter have been in the streets lately. But Papandreou's government may not survive a vote of confidence on Friday.

The effects of Greece defaulting or not implementing the strict austerity measures in the rescue plan are widely expected to be much more severe than when Lehman Brothers defaulted in September 2008. Which was considered as the triggering event of the last global financial recession. Greece is, at about USD300 billion, the 32nd largest economy.

Mauritius should be able to ride through whatever crises happen given how much slack we've got here.

Remembering Ms. Gandhi

Wealthy French See Wish Come True: Pay More Taxes

Indeed those earning in excess of EUR250,000 will pay an extra 3-4% as per the French 2012 Finance Bill. They have probably asked for this after realising that their continued prosperity inextricably depends on average citizens having enough discretionary income to spend. And also because they are the ones who can shoulder the brunt of putting back national finances on a sustainable track.

The French are not alone: billionaire Warren Buffet too asked the US government, earlier this year, to make him pay more taxes. All of this comes after wealthy Germans requested Chancellor Merkel to raise their taxes two years ago when some of them found that they had a lot of money they didn't need.

iBio To Hit Stands on Monday

The much-awaited authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson has been no. 1 in books at Amazon for a number of days now. BBC broadcasted yesterday that Jobs had vowed to destroy Android as he viewed it as a copy of its own iOS. And the NYT mentioned how when SJ met with Bill Gates for a last time they concluded that their wives had kept them "semi-sane". It should make a very interesting read.

How Much Sleep Should You Lose Over The Doing Business Rankings?

None. See, it's not correlated with any of our national priorities. But we just lost 3 spots I hear a few of you say. Indeed, but that's 3 times less than the 9 spots we lost back in 2007, the year of the... ahem... early harvest. Still, given that we don't want our friends at the Joint Economic Council to do anything foolish during the week-end here's something to cheer them up: Mauritius has moved up 50 places in the Logistics Performance Index in the last few years from a miserable 132nd spot. By the way, if you average out our rank in these two indices you end up with 52.5 which is very close to our 54th place in the recently published 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness Report. Which is a more comprehensive yardstick.

Sleep tight.

What Singapore Wannabes Cannot Miss

The following Lee Kuan Yew's quote:

The World Bank report's conclusions are part of the culture of America and, by extension, of international institutions. It had to present its findings in a bland and universalizable way, which I find unsatisfying because it doesn't grapple with the real problems. It makes the hopeful assumption that all men are equal, that people all over the world are the same. They are not. 

Amen.

Hollande To Face-off Sarkozy in 2012

He just defeated Martine Aubry in the second round of the Primaries organised by Le Parti Socialiste. But it's true that the incumbent President has not yet declared that he will be running again although this is widely expected. Recent polls have predicted that either Aubry or Hollande would defeat Sarkozy next year.

Five years ago, Sarkozy defeated Hollande's spouse, Dakar-born Segolene Royal in the race to L'Elysee. Still, they managed to do something the Clintons did not: both spouses getting their party's nomination in the Presidential Election.

Sims and Sargent Win Economics Nobel

Was quite happy to read that Chris Sims had won it yesterday given that he has always been kind of a rockstar in econometrics. That's especially true when you consider how he provided policy makers in the beginning of the 80s with a simplified tool, the vector autoregression, to carry about their business. That was a huge improvement over the large and messy macro-econometric models like those built by Fair.

Incidentally, I was dragged into an econometrics symposium at the end of the 80s in Montreal by one of my university buddies where many of the discipline's Gods were meeting: Zellner, Pagan, Wallace, Geweke along with Sims, Sargent and more. There seemed to be some rivalry between Sims and Sargent and we got a little proof of that when Chris was running down his presentation. Indeed Sargent asked a question that appeared to me to be in quite an aggressive tone: What's the trace of this matrix? My friend too agreed that was rude but told me that she read in one of Sargent's book that he thanked Sims for teaching him all that he knows. Which is a bit what he said yesterday. He also doesn't seem to have any solution to the current global economic problems. I think we should have him as our next Financial Secretary.

And don't miss listening to Chris Sims talking to someone from the Nobel Foundation. Sounds a bit more down-to-earth.

MEF Wants To Resume Talks About Decent Work

This comes right after Minister Shakeel Mohamed pointed an accusing finger at the Mauritius Employers Federation for the failure of Mauritius to ratify the Decent Work Country Program.

Well you can't really blame the MEF: they've been way too busy promoting the indecent rupee depreciation program for so long.

But it's great that the talks are set to start anew.