The Londoner

  By Sikander Hayat  The urge in the US these days is to delegate everything to do with South Asia to India and make India a defence wall against Chinese aspirations . President Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan fully and to that end he was supporting and sponsoring talks between President Ghani’s government in Kabul and the Taliban . Trump drew down American troops in Afghanistan to put pressure on Ashraf Ghani's government to talk to the Taliban. Trump wanted to concentrate on the United States as the debt mountain continues to reach new heights as the  current US debt is $27.3 trillions as of January 2021. The United States needs to get its own house in order, keep its currency as the reserve currency of the world and to do that it needs to bring down the debt levels to manageable levels and cut deficit spending.  Right now the Biden government is doing exactly the opposite by doubling down on deficit spending, spending trillions on cheques to people who in some cases don&#

By Sikander Hayat Under President Trump , the United States of America did not invade any country. On the contrary, the US army started drawing down its operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria along with other engagements around the world. Afghanistan saw the biggest drawdown with now only 2500 troops in Afghanistan .  The big question now is if the Biden Presidency will go back to previous years and start again the policy of invading far away places to help cement its imperial role which was reversed by Trump’s America first policy .  Mr Biden supported the Iraq invasion by voting for the war and by supporting President Bush . When Mr Biden was a vice president to President Barack Obama , he supported increasing troop numbers in both Iraq and Afghanistan . Clearly, there is a tendency where Mr Biden tilts in favour of foreign wars .  If there was one good policy pursued by President Trump, that was to stop engaging in foreign wars and concentrate on America and Americans. If cov

By Sikander Hayat  The problem with the Euro is that it treats a country like Greece as if it is the same as Germany in terms of its economy, politics, culture and other aspects of its social fabric. We know very well that this is not the case as countries and cultures acquire ways of doing things in their own way. Greece cannot be turned into Germany, Germany cannot be turned into Greece and yet the single currency euro tries to do just that. Since 2008, Greece's economy has gone down 25%, loosing millions of jobs, forcing citizens to emigrate, pension schemes to collapse, loss of sovereignty and directly leading to the rise of ultra right and ultra left wing political parties. Germany is widely blamed by the Greek for their country's problems. People of Greece invoke second world war and occupation by Nazi Germany as an earlier example of German belligerence . Greeks argue that what Germans did militarily during the second world war , they are now doing to

Book Review by Sikander Hayat  As far as I have been able to decipher, this book is about the emergence of an event which  is  totally unforeseen, unpredictable and which cannot be modelled for by our usual  forecasting models . Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a great book to read despite  its length and tone which shows its anger against the current establishment in academia,  industry and just about anyone in high places. Nassim has been a quant in his previous life,  has practised financial forecasting methods in trying to choose the eventual winners and has  tried to use his practitioner's knowledge to inject life into the idea of his Black Swan thesis.  Although he has used forecasting models in his life as a trader, he is fully aware of the short  comings of these models and in fact, he makes a strong case against modelling risk with the  current tools at our disposal. These models are fine as far as life