“We don’t like living without electricity and water,” she went on. “We know we are not a rich country. But it is the United States that has put sanctions on us and has deprived us of these things. What did we ever do to the United States?” Paris wasn’t the only person I’d spoken with who blamed the U.S. sanctions for North Korea’s lack of electricity. 

Though the U.S. economy is in excellent shape right now, problems could be lurking on the horizon, an Aspen Institute panel generally concluded on Sunday afternoon.

Economists generally assume that more choices are better than fewer choices. But if that were so, argues Thaler, people would be upset, not happy, when the host at a dinner party removes the pre-dinner bowl of cashews. Yet many of us are happy that it’s gone. Purposely taking away our choice to eat more cashews, he argues, makes up for our lack of self-control. This simple contradiction between the economists’ model of rationality and actual human behavior, plus many more that Thaler has observed, leads him to divide the population into “Econs” and “Humans.” Econs, according to Thaler, are people who are economically rational and fit the model completely. Humans are the vast majority of people.

After Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed that the Indian government would borrow some of its funds in overseas markets in foreign currencies, there is a lot of buzz on sovereign bonds. It has been a fiercely-debated issue with a lot of highly economists. Even former Reserve Bank of India governors and deputy governors, mostly arguing against such an issuance. To top it all, now, there are news reports suggesting that Finance Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg was transferred to the power ministry because the government was unhappy with his handling of the sovereign bond issue. Here’s a FAQ on sovereign bonds.