Thirsty Rock

A nervous Mervyn King appeared before the Treasury committee to defend his performance in the weeks leading to the near collapse of Northern Rock, a mortgage lender. Legislative shortcomings, pleaded King, prevented him from acting swiftly in dealing with liquidity problems at the Rock. That single stroke of a masterpiece diverted the committee's attention to the Financial Services Authority, the UK financial services watchdog. Earlier, Ben Bernanke had his day before a House committee to explain the ongoing turmoil in the financial markets. Whereas King had sat back to wait out the markets at the height of the liquidity crunch, Bernanke intervened with large dollops of cash to oil market machinery. Neither stance appears to have calmed the markets. King opted for hands off crisis management to avert moral hazard, preferring tough love to bailing out wayward lenders. In the event the Bank of England Governor inadvertently left a marker unattended at a kindergarten. Bernanke...

A mobile phone is a miniature telephone exchange. It accepts incoming calls, initiates outgoing calls and can act as a repeater by forwarding calls or as a switch through teleconferencing. These are the basic features of a telephone exchange. TerraNet , a Swedish firm, has exploited these features to facilitate free mobile-to-mobile calls. Using peer-to-peer technology, a cluster of mobile phones can communicate without the need to go through a base station (switch) provided they are within 1,000m of each other. This technology, being trialled in Ecuador and Tanzania, is perfect for developing countries where infrastructure is as limited as disposable income. Because mobile phones can forward calls, the effective communication distance can be extended from a 1 kilometer radius to about 20 kilometers. That is sufficient to cover most rural communities and, for example, university campuses. Like Skype , this is a subvertive, effective and disruptive technology. While manufacturers...