Willem Buiter is a wonderful blogger. I cannot recall seeing his entries printed in the paper. He produced a wonderful post recently about how the Treasury conducts itself. I don't suppose he is always right. Someone with such a breadth of coverage surely could not be. He has had Martin Wolf write articles explaining why he disagrees with him, which at the very least shows that he if he is wrong he is interestingly wrong.
This post is notable if only because of its (surely unique in the FT.com) use of the verb to asperge (click on the link to find out what it means) and in having a title which is in latin. The freedom of the blogger definitely results in a more interesting copy.
I have downloaded standard mandarin. This comes with the Lua Meng seal of approval, and seems pretty good, but to be honest I haven't really spent a lot of time using it. It is hard to get back in to the habit of study at my age. I am, as you will have guessed, having a go at learning Mandarin. At my current rate of progress I should be ready to take 'O' level by the time I am 100 years of age.
I have called a huge number of construction companies with remarkable lack of enthusiasm for an industry that is close to meltdown. My key problem is understanding who does what. It seems that there are really very few integrated builder developers out there: the industry is very vertically segregated. I was warned a month ago by John Myers that a lot of main contractors were 'management only'. I suppose I'll discover more, but it is proving to be an expensive process.
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