A column in today’s New York Times suggests Indian microfinance institutions might soon be subject to regulations, such as interest rate caps, that would force them to dramatically reduce or even halt operations. Why must governments see the private sector only as a threat, and never as a partner?

Read past the break for excerpts from the article and my analysis.

Yesterday, I recommended a back issue of IDBAmerica; today, I’m piggybacking on conventional wisdom to determine my book recommendations. I am an infrequent Amazon.com user, but I am sold on their community-driven recommendation feature. You know what I’m talking about – if you click on a given book, Amazon runs a query through its database and tells you that other people who bought this also viewed/bought/enjoyed X. For instance, if you search for "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid", Amazon would tell you that others interested in it also purchased "Capitalism at the Crossroads." The search results are weighted using algorithms I could never claim to understand, but certain books appear before others in what seems to be a logical arrangement based on popularity or number of copies purchased.