1. With an extra-large rate hike last mouth, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is trying to pull off some delicate maneuvering.
2. Economists are watching to see whether the economy would follow the lead and cool to a more sustainable pace (the proverbial soft landing) or whether the economy would come to a screeching halt (the dreaded hard landing).
3. To butcher a Bob Dylan lyric, the answer, my friends, is blowing in the stock market.
4. Economists poring over inflation and productivity data for clues are looking in the wrong place.

1. In fact, trying to calculate an element of chance.
2. The rather fanciful idea of Lady Luck favouring her own can be traced back to pagan times when lucky gamblers were thought to be the beloved of the goddess of good fortune.
3. Risks were taken in order to gain her approval, and one of these risks was trying to guess what would happen – for example, which way a leaf would fall, which way a frog would jump.
4. She was seen as being capricious and prone, occasionally, to mockery.

1. In a sharply polarized world, where dire poverty and extreme wealth co-exist, the gulf between the rich and the poor is steadily growing.

1. Expanding global markets and the ethics of globalisation which link countries in an iniquitous economic order have contributed significantly to this.
2. Globalisation is creating new inequalities and as the Report points out, it is poor people in poor countries who bear the cost of unequal consumption.
3. Well over a billion people are deprived of basic consumption needs including water, sanitation, health care and basic education.
4. Last year’s Human Development Report (HRD) showed that globally, 20 percent of the world’s people in the highest income countries account for 86 percent of total private consumption expenditure.

6. More worrying, the HDR 1998 found that the definition of what constitutes a ‘necessity’ is changing with lines blurring between luxuries and necessities.

1. Thirteen hundred years ago there was a great traveler from China to India in search of wisdom and knowledge.

1. And he journeyed all over India and studied the people that lived in this great country in those far off days.
2. His name was Hiuen Tsang and over the deserts and mountains of the north he came, braving many dangers, facing and overcoming many obstacles, so great was his thirst for knowledge.
3. Hiuen Tsang became very learned himself and he was given the title of ‘Master of the Law’.
4. And he spent many years in India, learning himself and teaching others, especially at the great University of Nalanda.

6. Later, he wrote a book of his travels and it is this book, which contains the story of a ‘very wise man’.