The Economist - Can anyone stop Narendra Modi? Part 9

Stockmarkets: Fast times.

New fiction: Go for gothic Avian zoology: Fairy creatures Cesar Chavez: The grapes of wrath New American theatre: Mind the gaps Contemporary art in LA: Homebase Stockmarkets.

Fast times.

The author of "Liar's Poker" uncovers more shenanigans on Wall Street Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code. By Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton; 274 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; 20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk WHAT can you do in thirteen-thousandths of a second? It is not even enough time to blink your eye. But it does give so-called high-frequency traders (HFTs) enough time to buy and sell shares in today's stockmarket. Most people would mark down such frenetic trading as a sign of technological progress and forget about it. But Michael Lewis's new book, "Flash Boys", alleges that this hyperactivity is a sign of how rigged today's markets are against ordinary investors.

Mr Lewis recounts how a group spent $300m to lay a cable in the straightest possible line from Chicago to New York, cutting through mountains and under car parks, just so the time taken to send a signal back and forth could be cut from 17 milliseconds to 13. In return, the group could charge traders $14m a year to use the line.

Traders were willing to sh.e.l.l out those fees because those fractions of a second might generate annual profits of $20 billion. That money, Mr Lewis alleges, comes from the pockets of other investors. The problem was first noticed by investors in the middle of the last decade. Suddenly they found that when they placed an order to buy or sell, the market price would move against them. Somebody appeared to be one step ahead. That was the HFTs at work.

The HFTs' trading edge comes from two different sources. When an investor presses the b.u.t.ton to deal, that signal is sent to a broker or bank, who in turn is supposed to search the many different stock exchanges for the best price. But because of the time taken for trading signals to be sent down the wire, those orders arrive at different stock exchanges at separate times. The HFTs were sitting in wait, and used their advantage to exploit the time differences.

Often, the HFTs place buy or sell orders for small amounts at individual exchanges. When those orders get filled, that is a signal that a big investor has a much bigger stake to offload. Sometimes the HFTs' orders are designed not to be filled, but to flush out which way the inst.i.tutions are planning to trade; HFTs comprise half of all trades on the American market but submit almost 99% of the orders.

Perhaps the best a.n.a.logy is with the people who offer you tasty t.i.tbits as you enter the supermarket to entice you to buy; but in this case, as soon as you show appreciation for the goods, they race through the aisles to mark the price up before you can get your trolley to the chosen counter.

The second edge comes from the existence of "dark pools"-trading venues set up, usually by banks, that were designed to give investors anonymity. Banks, says Mr Lewis, have been allowing HFTs access to those pools in return for a fee, allowing them to prey on unsuspecting investors.

The HFTs vigorously counter Mr Lewis's criticisms. One trade body sent out its response before it had even had a chance to read the book. Markets now are much more liquid, they say, and the spreads (the gap between buy and sell prices) are lower. But as the author points out, the numbers can be illusory; the average size of trades has fallen sharply. If you have 10,000 shares to sell, the fact that you can sell the first 100 at a tight spread does not help if you are forced to offload the remaining 9,900 shares at a lower price.

"Flash Boys" makes a strong case. Whether it will sell as well as two of Mr Lewis's earlier works, "Moneyball" and "Liar's Poker", is unclear. His hero is a former Royal Bank of Canada trader, Brad Katsuyama, who recognised the problems caused by HFTs and set up a trading forum to treat investors fairly, in the face of much industry resistance. But Mr Katsuyama comes across as earnest, rather than colourful, and offers the author few chances to indulge in his trademark humour. Meanwhile the general reader may struggle with the minutiae of stock-trading.

As a piece of investigative journalism, the hardback edition of the book has a few holes. There is no index, nor are there any charts or tables to bolster Mr Lewis's case; readers hear very little from the investors whom the author says are being ripped off. If Mr Lewis is right, the victims should start making their voices heard.

New fiction Go for gothic A scary debut for fans of Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition The Quick. By Lauren Owen. Jonathan Cape; 517 pages; 12.99. To be published in America by Random House in June; $27. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk LAUREN OWEN'S debut, "The Quick", a long and complex gothic fiction, has been praised by Kate Atkinson and Hilary Mantel. It starts in about 1870 in Aiskew Hall, a "mostly shut-up" old house in Yorkshire. From there it plunges into a murky late-Victorian London of secret gentleman's clubs, glittering ballrooms, East End doss houses, steam trains and rattling carriages. (The familiarity of the setting is acknowledged by pa.s.sing references to novels by Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.) Extracts from scientific treatises and the notes of a would-be detached observer called Augustus Mould explain the mysterious deaths and woundings that are taking place. Details of nasty procedures, such as the "Exchange" (a blood-brothers ritual) and "Mazement" (the invasion of another's thoughts), explain why fresh blood is needed, and describe the undead's constant chill and fear of light, as well as the efficacy of holy water and silver knives.

London's quiet yards and back streets are named and specific. Set-piece scenes, such as the destruction by fire of the Aegolius Club and an encounter in the catacombs under Kensal Green cemetery, are full of detail-blood on a white shirtfront, a body in a sack "all heavy and broken odd angles". The characters weep and tremble and feel their vital fluids drain away. Above all they are gripped by fear.

This fear derives only in part from the premise of a cabal of bloodsucking undead who roam the streets in search of victims. Amid violent encounters, graphic fights and shocking plot twists, deeper terrors come from paranoia; strangers spotted in the street might be simple predators, agents out to round up escapees, the surviving undead, or simply ghosts. Two sympathetic protagonists, Charlotte Norbury, who is trying to save her brother from the vampiric sect, and Arthur Howland, a rich young American who wishes to help her, undertake a quest that takes them across Europe. The novel's last few short chapters follow the logic of the plot to a mysterious escape and the promise of continuation. The book's energy, its wide reach and rich detail make it a confident example of the "unputdownable" novel.

Avian zoology Fairy creatures Two legs and good eyesight are just a few of the things that birds and humans have in common Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Family man The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human. By Noah Strycker. Riverhead; 288 pages; $27 and 16.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk PLATO suggested that humans were "bipeds without feathers". People walk on two legs like most avian species. They are also largely diurnal and rely upon sight as their primary sense. All of this, incidentally, is unlike most mammals. Yet how much do humans really share with birds?

More than people admit, argues Noah Strycker, an American field biologist, in a new book. The author wants people to appreciate birds "one feather at a time". He trawls through an impressive amount of field research and introduces readers to some flabbergasting facts.

A manx shearwater, for instance, was once kidnapped from a burrow on the Welsh coast and flown 3,200 miles (5,150km) before being released in Boston harbour. In less than 13 days it had found its way home. Mr Strycker also alights on the amazing biometrics of hummingbirds, whose pea-sized hearts are the largest of any bird when measured in proportion to the bird's body ma.s.s. These vast organs can pound away at a staggering rate of 1,200 beats a minute.

What makes Mr Strycker's hummingbird essay particularly engaging is his concern to explore how the avian facts carry implications for human beings. It turns out that humans and hummingbirds, despite differences of scale and style, enjoy a lifespan of about a billion heartbeats, a rule that holds good for many warm-blooded animals, from mice to elephants. But hummingbirds are "trapped" in an evolutionary sense at the outer margins of warm-blooded existence, locked by their relentless quest for high-calorie foods into a cycle of aggression, isolation and the constant threat of starvation.

None of this would matter were it not for the fact that human lives are also moving this way. The pace of life is quickening in wealthier countries; one study shows that it takes people an average 10.5 seconds to cover 60 feet (18.3 metres) of pavement in Singapore, 18 seconds in Bahrain and 31 seconds in Malawi, indicating marked differences between developed and developing nations. Overall, people walk fastest in the world's biggest cities. Mr Strycker thinks people should heed the hummingbirds-creatures that are "slaves to speed, desperately fighting for control of calories".

"The Thing with Feathers" turns a shrewd, comparative eye on a succession of bird families to explore what he calls their "human" characteristics. Most striking are the gorgeous Australian fairy-wrens (pictured), whose intergenerational altruism looks uncannily like humans' supportive family life, and the bowerbirds of New Guinea: avian painters and decorators that construct fancy little "gardens" of sh.e.l.l, pebble and foliage where they lure potential partners into a mating mood. Could these bowers emanate from an aesthetic appreciation comparable to that manifest in human art? And does the albatross, always so loyal to its single long-term partner, raise the possibility of "love" and "commitment" that matches people's own marital lives? This is an engaging work which illuminates something profound about all life, including our own.

Cesar Chavez The grapes of wrath Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition The Crusades of Cesar Chavez. By Miriam Pawel. Bloomsbury; 588 pages; $35. To be published in Britain in May; 25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk ON THE last day of March, California, Colorado and Texas celebrated Cesar Chavez day, marking the memory of a man who is the closest thing America's 53m Latinos have to a Martin Luther King. The date is Chavez's birthday; it was also, he would tell journalists, the anniversary of the day in 1962 when he resigned from a community service group to form his farmworkers' union. Yet among the revelations of Miriam Pawel's detailed biography, which will become the definitive life, is the news that he actually quit two weeks earlier. A minor infraction, perhaps, but it illuminates how willing the man, whom many came to see as saintlike, was to construct his own creation myths.

Ms Pawel, a former journalist, regards earlier Chavez lives as hagiography. She might say the same of a new Hollywood film directed by Diego Luna. Her book, by contrast, does not shy from the more troubling sides of her subject. Charismatic, if unprepossessing in his plaid shirt and olive trousers, the gap-toothed Chavez inspired thousands of Hispanic and Filipino farmworkers to down tools on grape farms in California's Central Valley with cries of "Huelga!" (strike). Crippling consumer boycotts, organised by Chavez-followers across America, drove intransigent growers to negotiation and sometimes capitulation. Farmers who had sworn they would never recognise farmworkers' collective representation found themselves signing away their hiring rights.

Chavez was a media-savvy pragmatist not averse to dealmaking. Yet unlike the hard-headed Anglos who ran the industrial unions, he saw himself more as a spiritual guide than a labour leader. He despaired of the tendency among poor workers he helped to desire colour televisions and golf clubs as they grew richer. He distrusted colleagues who sought pay rises, and rejected them for himself; sacrifice, he urged, must be the mark of the movement. He embarked on regular fasts, both to draw attention to the cause and, in trying times, to strengthen his own fort.i.tude. Gandhi, rather than King, was the role model.

Such personal commitment inspired fathomless devotion among Chavez's acolytes, among them student dropouts, wealthy socialites and Bobby Kennedy, as well as members of Chavez's United Farm Workers Union (UFW). Legal reforms were achieved, rival unions stared down. But Chavez's single-mindedness also brought forth eccentric decision-making, autocratic leadership and administrative chaos that would ultimately undo a lot of the earlier good work. Many cesarchavistas, for example, were dismayed by their hero's dalliance in the late 1970s with the leader of a drug-rehabilitation group with cultlike qualities, who advocated mandatory vasectomies for men.

By the time of Chavez's death in 1993 the UFW had dwindled to around 20,000 members from a peak of 80,000 in the early 1970s. He was lauded more by politicians in distant states seeking the glow of his aura than by those who knew him. The endless schools named after him were populated with children who knew more about his namesake, a world-champion boxer, than the man who had inspired their parents to form picket lines.

Today Chavez's memory is being pressed into service in the fight to reform America's immigration system, including legalisation for the 11m-12m illegal migrants. There is an irony here; Chavez was hostile to illegal Mexican workers for undercutting his ability to withdraw labour from the fields, even reporting some to officials. Yet were he alive today he would surely not be deaf to the laments of the families broken by America's deportation machine. His battle cry S Se Puede! (later adapted by candidate Barack Obama) was originally formulated as a response to cynics who said change was impossible.

New American theatre Mind the gaps The super sad, true plays of Will Eno Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Whittling in the dark SO MUCH theatre is big and juicy. People fall in love and sing about it, or they murder someone and rue the day. But much of life is made of small, modest pleasures (tasty mints, starry nights) and tiny tragedies (an errant comment, an uncomfortable shoe). The real dramas are not easily dramatised. They involve quiet feelings of disappointment or vague questions about what const.i.tutes a meaningful life. These are the concerns, at once existential and ba.n.a.l, that drive the plays of Will Eno. The results are moving and rather funny.

After more than a decade of steady work and critical acclaim on small stages, mostly in New York and around Britain, Mr Eno is about to have his Broadway debut. "The Realistic Joneses", starring Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts and Marisa Tomei, opens at the Lyceum theatre in Manhattan on April 6th. Meanwhile another new play, "The Open House", just ended a successful off-Broadway run. For a playwright whose characters often seem to be grasping for affirmation-a feeling of security that is just out of reach-this is a nicely gratifying moment. At 49, Mr Eno is ready for his close-up.

"The Realistic Joneses" considers two couples, both called Jones, who are neighbours in a small town near the mountains. Mr Eno wanted to write about "how people deal with the seemingly undealable with". The men are both ill with some mysterious malady. Their wives handle the grim uncertainty in different ways: one is stoic, the other retreats into denial. But this makes the play sound much heavier than it is. "The Realistic Joneses" is thrilling to watch for Mr Eno's way with dialogue, which eludes melodrama and embraces a rhythmic and humane weirdness.

In one scene, for example, two neighbours run into each other at a supermarket. Their fumbling conversation is like an inept game of catch. They grasp vainly at language that might bridge the gap between them. This is typical of Mr Eno's work. His plays toy with the gaps of life, recognising not only the breaches between people, but also the s.p.a.ces between what they say and what they feel, or what one says and another hears. His characters are often lonely and a bit self-conscious. "This was fun," says one. "I mean, not fun, but, definitely some other word." It is the theatre of awkwardness.

"On its own terms, awkwardness must be entertaining," Mr Eno explains. "It is a sort of a tipping point. Things are going to get better or they're going to get worse." In his hands, awkwardness feels not just uncomfortable, but dramatically vital. His recognition of the frailty of language-his delight in the drama of subtext, the real mode of 21st-century communication-creates s.p.a.ce for the audience to interpret what they are seeing. Stellar acting makes Mr Eno's stilted, stylised dialogue plausible. Mr Hall is particularly impressive, inhabiting his odd character with a wilful guilelessness.

This talent for finding light in life's shadows first earned Mr Eno serious attention in 2005, with the New York debut of "Thom Pain (based on nothing)". An extended monologue, delivered by a "skinny, wounded" man in a shabby suit, it is full of the patter of someone who is just old enough to be burdened with regrets but not so old as to be without hope. "You really are very forgiving", Thom Pain tells the audience, "to let me get lost like this." In a breathless review, Charles Isherwood of the New York Times anointed Mr Eno "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation". The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, marking a turning point in Mr Eno's career. Yet he still lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and helps support himself by painting houses and other odd jobs.

Mr Eno "whittles every single word," observes Sam Gold, who directs "The Realistic Joneses". In person, the playwright is affable and at ease, even as he embodies some of the self-consciousness of his plays. (After referring to some of the "missteps and foibles" of his youth, he pauses to correct himself: " 'foibles' doesn't sound like a painful enough word.") He is also quick to acknowledge Beckett's influence, less for the writer's formal inventiveness than for his "simple human stuff". For example, he cites the line in "Endgame" when Hamm declares, "Get out of here and love one another."

Mr Eno's plays are, in the end, the work of a man who sees life for what it is, but who believes it is all worth the fight of another day. As Bob (Mr Letts) tells the others near the end of "The Realistic Joneses": "I don't think anything good is going to happen to us. But, you know, what are you going to do?" He then discovers a mint in his pocket and pops it in his mouth: "I like mints. Mint."

Contemporary art in LA Homebase The many influences of Mike Kelley Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition MANY artists have been vital to Los Angeles, but for some the city's seminal son is Mike Kelley, who committed suicide two years ago, aged 57. More famous names have sp.a.w.ned greater legions of imitators or improved the business side of art in LA. Kelley put down roots here, tapping into the underbelly of America's shiny exterior. Now a sprawling retrospective opens at two Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) locations. It shows more clearly than either of its previous incarnations (at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and PS1 in New York) just how productive Kelley was, spilling forth ideas that continue to inform not just LA and the art world, but mainstream American culture.

Kelley arrived in 1976 to study at the California Inst.i.tute of the Arts (CalArts), north-west of the city. He quickly found that he hated driving, a perverse characteristic of someone born in Detroit (America's "Motor City") who then chose to work in a place where cars play such a central role. He also felt trapped by rival factions at CalArts, flanked by followers of traditional painting on one side and on the other by those who preferred the more conceptual art that was in vogue during the 1970s. So he looked for a way out.

Kelley found this first in music-or more accurately, in noise-and then through performance. He also created props for his acts, some of which are in the show. When his Mid-Western parents asked about his profession, he told them he was a stand-up comedian. It was easier than trying to explain his art. Kelley was not fashionable and he never expected his art would sell. He had grown up in a blue-collar family and worked in his 20s to support his pa.s.sion. "I wasn't pretty enough to be a waiter," he told friends. "I had to moonlight as a night guard on movie sets."

Kelley came to LA just as video was becoming the new canvas for the avant-garde. The MoCA show provides multiple opportunities to experience Kelley's first video work, "The Banana Man". It is a profane, Dadaist parody of a children's show, but one can see in it the seeds of his breakthrough piece, "More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid" (pictured). Kelley became known for his melancholic work with toys and dolls. The MoCA exhibit is being called "The First Comprehensive Retrospective", and it rightly emphasises the importance of his video work.

The main atrium of MoCA's Geffen Contemporary is filled with Kelley's sprawling "Day is Done". This very personal piece, part of a larger planned work, is the first thing people see when they enter the show. At PS1 it stood alone in a claustrophobic former cla.s.sroom, which did not do it justice. These pieces, which feel like tableaux from a grand pa.s.sion play, benefit from the large MoCA galleries. Kelley's ideas need room to breathe.

About 20 works have been added to the show. A major piece is the giant two-part sculpture, "Framed and Frame", which pays tribute to LA's Chinatown district-in Kelley's youth one of the centres of the punk-music scene that so influenced his work. Whether making junk-like props for performances or large pop-art sculptures (like the shimmering Kandor pieces from later in his career), Kelley's craftsmanship was never shoddy. The care with which he recreated a real-life, almost Gaud-like fountain in "Framed and Frame" is impressive; it clearly inspired the ornate "Memory Ware" collages that followed a few years later and which hang on the wall nearby.

Kelley was included in MoCA's first show back in 1983, so the museum used the opening of this retrospective to host a gala evening celebrating its history. After the well-heeled guests filed out of the galleries to the opulent dining tent, the night guards in the museum stayed at their posts. As the evening wore on, they gathered together to take photos of Kelley's art, some of them posing alongside it.

Kelley would have liked the way his work appeals to the smartphone, video-sharing, mash-up popular culture of today. He liked the idea of inspiring creativity in others. Kelley was always collaborating with fellow Angelinos: Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy and other artists pop up in various works in the show. Kelley left most of his estate to the foundation he created to a.s.sist young artists.

The MoCA show cannot really be called a homecoming. Kelley never left LA, despite his hatred of driving and a growing distrust of the burgeoning art scene here. But seeing this retrospective in the artist's adopted city provides a strong sense of why he stayed. Kelley loved the other artists, young and old, who chose not to go to New York, but rather made Los Angeles home for the same reasons he did.

Obituary.

Khushwant Singh: India's gadfly.

Khushwant Singh.

India's gadfly Khushwant Singh, India's pre-eminent gadfly, died on March 20th, aged 99 Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition AT THE mere age of 28, when he was still a briefless barrister in Lah.o.r.e, Khushwant Singh wrote his own death notice. Besides his grieving family, he left "a large number of friends and admirers". Among the visitors to the residence were "several ministers, and justices of the high court". He would have been shocked to know that, when he actually died, the president of India, Sonia Gandhi of the Congress party, Narendra Modi of the BJP and a broad selection of editors sent their condolences. For by then he had also written his own epitaph: Here lies one who spared neither man nor G.o.d.

Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod.

For 42 years, as editor of the Ill.u.s.trated Weekly of India and then as a columnist for the Hindustan Times, Mr Singh seized India by the collar and shook it. His was the most unb.u.t.toned voice in the whole English-language press. In the 1970s he turned the Ill.u.s.trated from a drab ex-colonial publication into a racy, s.e.xy must-read, filled with counter-cultural news from the West and bikini babes on Goan beaches. Over his nine-year tenure circulation soared from 60,000 to almost 400,000, more than the publisher could cope with; he was therefore fired, and circulation collapsed.

His Hindustan Times column, widely syndicated, was eventually called "With Malice Towards One and All". Singly and collectively he shot them down: the power-crazed politicians, the Hindutva fanatics, the "barbaric" mullahs of Pakistan, empty-headed Bollywood stars, commercialised cricket, modern cricket fans with their bugles and firecrackers, and the bare-bottomed defecators who lined city avenues in the mornings. Poetry and jokes leavened the invective. If he ran out of "loud-mouthed, sweaty, smelly" Indians to pillory there was the country itself, impossible India, like an overcrowded room or a swarming dung-heap-though, affectionately, "my dung-heap".

His column featured a cartoon of him sitting guru-like inside a light-bulb, with a pile of books beside him, girlie magazines to the fore and a Scotch and soda waiting. Those who visited him in Delhi found the cartoon exact. Scotch, certainly: always single malt, taken both in the evening and at dawn, as he rose to write his column. Books and papers everywhere, tokens of the scholarship that had produced fine translations of Urdu poetry and a highly regarded two-volume history of the Sikhs, despite his claims to be no scholar. And there, on the wall, naked female b.r.e.a.s.t.s, this time in a large oil painting that threatened to steam up his bifocals.

s.e.x was something he was famous for. No condom on his pen, he liked to jest. His several novels were full of uninhibited couplings, sultry eyes lined with antimony and lamp-black, and "little mango b.r.e.a.s.t.s" under tight shirts. He was no womaniser himself, happily married to Kawal for years, but he wanted to make the point that India was too constrained about s.e.x. Though the country's art and literature suggested otherwise, s.e.x was no fun there, mostly because there was so little privacy. Celebrate it! cried Mr Singh.

Warring over G.o.d Religion was another favourite target. India, he wrote, was "constipated with a lot of humbug". G.o.d was Bade Mian, "Big Brother", in whom he did not believe, nor in heaven, nor h.e.l.l. Though he was a Sikh, with uncut hair and beard and public turban, he enjoyed his alcohol and never said his prayers. He hoped the culture would survive for sheer variety, and not much else. Sikh secessionism got such short shrift from him that for a decade he was given an armed guard against militants. His serious point was that modern India was meant to be, and had to be, secular.

Sectarian strife had scarred him deeply. His boyhood home had been Lah.o.r.e, then a centre for Urdu writers and poets-though he had also been educated outside it, including a spell in England. After part.i.tion in 1947, when Lah.o.r.e fell into Pakistan, he left for Delhi and did not return, though he hoped some of his ashes might. The carnage visited by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs on Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims was chronicled in his short and immensely powerful novel of 1956, "Train to Pakistan". It told the story of one border village, Mano Majra, in which everyone worked, lived and loved together, returning a "Salaam" for a "Sat Sri Akal", until the bad times came, pitting neighbour bloodily against neighbour.

Later in his life he saw more of the same: the storming of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, allegedly to clear out Sikh terrorists, by Indira Gandhi in 1984; the anti-Sikh riots that followed her murder later that year by her Sikh bodyguards; and the killings of Muslims in Gujarat, on Mr Modi's watch, in 2002. He lamented all of it. His closeness to Congress waxed and waned; what he constantly preached was rapprochement and non-violence.

And freedom. To proclaim the truth, and not be mealy-mouthed about it. To live pa.s.sionately, l.u.s.tily and wittily, and not apologise. To point out what was wrong with India and how, with hard work, it might improve. To go on doing so, week after week. The tormented worthies who mourned his death, sincerely or not, could not imagine his booming voice would be silenced even then.

Economic and financial indicators.

Output, prices and jobs.

Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates The Economist commodity-price index The Economist poll of forecasters, April averages Markets Output, prices and jobs Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition The Economist commodity-price index Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition The Economist poll of forecasters, April averages Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Markets Apr 5th 2014 | From the print edition Table of Contents The Economist The world this week Politics this week Business this week KAL's cartoon Leaders India's election: Can anyone stop Narendra Modi?

Turkey's elections: Be merciful, great Sultan The Cuban embargo: If not now, when?

Higher education: Making college cost less Democracy and lethargy: Britain's idle Parliament Letters Letters: On Russia, Brazil, guns, policing, Taiwan, infrastructure, college fees, Jay-Z, Turkey, crocodiles and hippos Briefing India's new voters: We are connected European energy security: Conscious uncoupling United States Higher education: Is college worth it?

Political corruption: Gun-banner and gun-runner?

Money in politics: Sky's the limit South Carolina politics: Conservatives of every hue Silicon Valley on TV: "Girls" for geeks Property in Miami: Erectile resumption Lexington: The home-school conundrum The Americas Investment in Cuba: Strait talk Elections in Quebec: The s-word Scandal in Mexico: A trashy tale Bello: A political FUTbol Asia Indonesia's elections: Democracy's big bang Filthy India: Mucking it up j.a.panese whaling: Harpooned Gays in Central Asia: Criminal relations Banyan: Don't count on it China Pensions and retirement: Paying for the grey Politics and the mafia: Web of intrigue Abandoned babies: Bundle of tragedy Middle East and Africa Egypt's probable president: Pretending to be a civilian The Saudi succession: Next after next...

Israel and Palestine: Last-ditch bargaining Iran's universities: Breathing again South Africa: Why invest?

Kenya: Muslim martyr Ghana: He won't give up Europe France's new government: Valls triste-or happy?

Turkey's local elections: Erdogan on a roll Hungary's election: Four more years Water in Berlin: The moisture down below Charlemagne: Trading places Britain Politics: Winding down Ever-smaller offices: Pressed suits Commuting: Metroland spreads out Scottish independence: Nothing sticks Language: Great Scots!

Official statistics: Con census Overseas students: How to ruin a global brand Nuclear decommissioning: A glowing review Lads' mags: Nuts goes t.i.ts up Bagehot: The pinstriped proletarian Bagehot: Internship International Post-conflict societies: To h.e.l.l and back Illiterate voters: Making their mark Business Petrobras: Two heads are worse than one General Motors' woes: What do you recall?

Health care in America: The geek guide to insurance Mobile phones: The rise of the cheap smartphone German companies and China: Mittelstand and Middle Kingdom Italy's state-controlled companies: Letting go, slowly Crowdsourcing "Monopoly": The Mayfair shuffle Schumpeter: Flower power Finance and economics Frontier markets: Wedge beyond the edge b.u.t.tonwood: Now you see them j.a.pan's economy: Out of the zone Banks and fraud: Hacking back Cash and crime: Less coin to purloin Reforming the audit profession: The cost of cosiness The euro-zone economy: Frost in spring Free exchange: Financial indulgence Science and technology Climate change: In the balance Psychology: Sweet little lies Beer and barbecues: A marriage made in heaven Books and arts Stockmarkets: Fast times New fiction: Go for gothic Avian zoology: Fairy creatures Cesar Chavez: The grapes of wrath New American theatre: Mind the gaps Contemporary art in LA: Homebase Obituary Khushwant Singh: India's gadfly Economic and financial indicators Output, prices and jobs Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates The Economist commodity-price index The Economist poll of forecasters, April averages Markets.