Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Can/will the US dollar be displaced as the international currency? This is the question that the book, De-dollarization , explores. The biggest grievance many countries have with the dollar hegemony is that it allows the US to impose unilateral sanctions against any country, even militarily powerful countries like Russia and Iran, as my previous blog explained.   The US has even targeted individuals in governments or countries with their sanctions. Unilaterally. Sometimes the people caught in this dragnet are just doing their job – executing their country’s policies. Over time, the extent to which this power has been used and misused has created a large “axis of resentment” .   Before we proceed further, let me clarify something. There is no contender to the US dollar today. The Euro? Too wobbly, as the EU itself looks increasing shaky. Japanese yen? With Japan not growing since the 90’s, one can’t see the global share of the yen increasing. The Swiss franc and British pound?

Soon Flipkart needed money, writes Mihir Dalal in The Big Billion Startup . Banks, of course, were out of the question. There weren’t many venture capitalists back then; and they didn’t invest easily. It was a different era. Would e-commerce even work in India? How many people even had an Internet connection? Or a credit card? What did two engineers even know about running logistics? And so the nay-sayers list went on and on. In frustration, the Bansals considered selling off Flipkart to Infibeam. The deal fell through at the last minute. It would prove to be like that time when Yahoo almost bought Google.   And then in 2009, Accel agreed to invest $1 million, but in batches. A desperate Flipkart agreed. As Flipkart began to grow with this new money, they caught the attention of Lee Fixel, an American venture capitalist. Within forty days, his fund, Tiger Global, agreed to invest $9 million. At one shot. Sachin and Binny were ecstatic – from dangerously close to running out of mon

Whites won’t be the absolute majority for too long in America. I thought this was the fear that drove so much of the Trump’ish change in their politics. But of course, reality is far more messy than that.   One set of very vocal Americans began to trumpet the impending change in demographics as a good thing – as the end of white oppression (in America). Everything white was demonized. White majority was equated with white supremacy.   Politicians did what they do in such situations. Starting with Hillary’s 2016 campaign, the Democratic party decided they should woo the groups who would collectively become the new majority, i.e., the non-whites. Which meant that more and more whites saw no option but the Republican party.   As Michael Barone put it, the way some cheered the impending reduction in the percentage of white people soon became a “message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’”. Inevitably there was a backlash, writes Andrew Sullivan: “By “boomerang,” I m

When Sachin Bansal, was in his second year at IIT-Delhi, the college installed Internet connections in the hostels. Some of the better off students then bought their own computers. Sachin went on to create a file-sharing software. This being college, it inevitably became the way to share porn. Equally inevitably, the administrators shut it down. In America, this would have been the seed from which a massive file sharing company would have grown. Not in India. At least not 2 decades back.   Instead, Sachin would almost flunk, lose a year, but eventually graduate and join a software company in Bangalore. He briefly worked at Amazon, India but then Amazon dropped its India plans – it had just got burnt in China. This was a pivotal moment – a vacuum that would lead to multiple Indian e-commerce startups, from India Plaza to Infibeam to yes, the company Sachin would co-found with his IIT batchmate, Binny Bansal (no relative) – Flipkart, writes Mihir Dalal in his excellent biography of t

Applying present day morality to someone from the distant past is, of course, unfair. Unfortunately, that’s just human nature. But nowadays, it’s even worse, says Andrew Sullivan: “Discrediting a thinker’s broad worldview or legacy by discovering some statement from the distant past revealing him or her to be a bigot by today’s standards is a depressing degeneration in our intellectual life.” As an example, he cites Picasso: “Picasso was morally monstrous; but his painting is transcendent. And if you cannot disentangle the two, you are attacking a key liberal principle: that ideas and works of art should be considered on their merits, and not on the virtue or vice of their proponents.” Other such examples include “excoriating Thomas Jefferson as a bigot and hypocrite, David Hume as a vicious racist, Immanuel Kant of all people for white supremacism”. What’s next, asks Sullivan, should we throw out Plato and Aristotle because hey, they supported slavery?   Sullivan wonders w

With World War II over, Charles de Gaulle was determined to prove that France was still a “great power”, writes James Barr in A Line in the Sand . One step in that effort was to deny Syria independence or greater autonomy – France wasn’t so weak that it would have to give up its colonies. As a betrayed Syrian populace revolted, France tried to put down them down brutally.   Britain was in a bind – they weren’t keen to stay on in most of the Middle East, but they’d look weak if they gave independence while the French held on to their colonies. But military action against France in Syria wasn’t practical – the US and USSR were openly anti-imperialism; and Britain, like all of Europe, needed American money to rebuild after the war’s destruction. So they covertly supported Syrian rebels, who eventually managed to evict France from Syria.   A furious and humiliated France wanted revenge – they decided to go pro-Zionist. Hurting the British in Palestine was now official French policy

Since Russia has veto power at the UN, how have so many sanctions been imposed on them since the start of the Ukraine war? Surely, the Russians would have veto’ed it, right?   When Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal treaty, we know none of the other parties to that deal – the EU, Russia, China – agreed. And yet, Iran was cut off from the international financial system. How could the US do that unilaterally?   I found the answer to this question – how the US can unilaterally impose sanctions on whoever displeases them – when I was reading De-dollarization .   That power, that capability is rooted in the fact that the US dollar serves as the “plumbing of the international financial system”. And since the dollar is owned by the US, they have the right to allow/disallow its usage by other countries – it’s their property, after all. And since international trade is overwhelmingly in US dollars, a country that can’t use the dollar can’t trade with anyone – it’s effectively unde

Platforms (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Android, Flipkart, Uber, Swiggy) have to juggle conflicting needs, write the authors of The Business of Platforms . On the one hand, they want more and more people on their platforms. They also want those people to add value (e.g. by posting more material, writing more apps etc). On the other hand: “(They aim at) minimizing low-quality transactions, such as weeding out low-quality goods and services, facilitating return in case of unsatisfied customers, and fighting fraud.”   But if they go too far on the latter, they are accused of censorship (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). Don’t do enough and they are accused of allowing everything – counterfeits (Amazon), porn (YouTube), and fake news (Facebook).   The authors call this fine balancing act as “platform governance”. It gets even more complicated and messy when the platform tries to sell/promote its own products. That raises accusations of conflict of interest. Examples include (1) And

When France suffered a “nauseatingly swift collapse” to Germany in World War II, Britain was desperate to find someone who could serve as the face of French resistance, to create a feeling that they (the British) weren’t as “isolated as they felt”, writes James Barr in A Line in the Sand . They picked on Charles de Gaulle.   De Gaulle struggled to wield any real influence on within-France resistance. Why? For one, he was barely known in France at the time. Secondly, much of the army in France considered itself a professional unit – if the Vichy government of the day had surrendered to Germany, well, it was their professional duty to obey the government, not become outlaws. Thirdly, for the French who did resist, who said de Gaulle was their boss anyway? And lastly, since the ancient enemy (Britain) was backing de Gaulle, it only detracted from his credibility.   When the French in the Middle East aligned with the Vichy government in France, the British had a major problem. What

Once upon a time, a photograph was proof that something was real. And then trick photography came along, and today anyone can PhotoShop an image. A photo thus stopped being a proof of something being real. This blog talks of this transition of things from being absolute proof to no-longer-a-guaranteed-proof.   History, of course, is the most notorious example how “memories” change with time. He cites a fairly recent event as an example: who do you think contributed the most to the fall of Nazi Germany? Such a poll was conducted in France right after World War II – and it found that the USSR was accepted as most instrumental (57% - USSR, 20% - USA). That was 1945. By 1994, the same survey, again in France, found a very different verdict (23% - USSR, 49% - USA): “Ask the same question about history several times, and it becomes meta-history. This survey caught live footage of collective memory being overwritten by the victors.” And remember, this happened in democratic France:

Systems getting hacked. Ransomware. (Computer) viruses. Why are these so commonplace? Marc Goodman has a pretty good answer(s) in his book, Future Crimes . A lifetime ago, computers weren’t everywhere; nor was the Internet. While all that has changed, the Westphalian system of sovereignty hasn’t. What’s that? It was a treaty signed in 1648 that agreed that (Western) countries were “sovereign in their territory, with no role for outside authorities to meddle in a nation’s domestic affairs”. “(It) was preserved through a system of borders, armies, guards, gates, and guns.” (It’s the de facto standard for all countries today).   But today? “Bits and bytes flow freely from one country to the next without any border guards, immigration controls, or customs declarations…” A (digital) crime’s victim may be in one country, the perpetrator in a second, and the money transferred to a third. Who exactly has jurisdiction in such cases? And most countries don’t cooperate with others on

With World War I over, and the end of the Ottoman empire, all promises began to get broken. All the actors (Britain, France, Arabs, and Jews) felt betrayed and angry with everyone else, writes James Barr in A Line in the Sand .   And yet, each group had to work with whichever set happened to align with their interests at that moment . Britain needed Palestine under its control for two reasons: (1) It was strategically located wrt the Suez, Britain’s must-have route to its Asian colonies; and (2) It needed a port for the export of Iraqi oil to Britain. In this regard, they were OK with either British or Jewish control of Palestine. But of course, that was unacceptable to the Arabs. Whose fury was stoked by the French.   France, on the other hand, wanted Syria and (modern day) Lebanon under its control for historical reasons as well as a safe route for the Iraqi oil flow to France. The Arabs obviously were not OK with such a setup. A sentiment (and consequent rebellions) the Brit

The list of opinions that are forbidden has been steadily increasing. Everywhere in the world. Paul Graham is only half-joking when he calls such opinions as “heresies”. In the West, while you won’t burnt at the stake anymore, such opinions sure can get you fired from your job: “There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done. ”   Graham points out the increasing number of “x-ist” words getting thrown around (e.g. sexist). He asks rhetorically: “Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth.” Obviously, the answer is Yes. Several statements can be x-ist and