Giant Pool of Money

Finally got around to listening Giant Pool of Money last month which I found very entertaining but left unexplained was the origin of the giant pool of money. In some sense this giant pool of money subscribes to the global savings glut hypothesis. Menzie Chinn argues that this hypothesis should be put to rest and that it was mostly a mirage of the data. Macro & Other Market Musings expands on this.

If there was no global savings glut then where did this giant pool of money come from? Perhaps the global savings glut is no different then assertions that the world is awashed in liquidity and that money was sloshing around the globe pre-crisis. There is still much that I don't understand about this.

Manipulative economists

Source: Author’s manipulation of data from Amiti and Wei (2005), originally from IMF sources on trade in services.

Richard Baldwin's rebuttal of Alan Blinder's assertion that 30 million to 40 million jobs are potentially offshorable was striking not for the claims but the label of the graph (emphasis mine).

Perhaps rephrasing this as recomputation of data versus manipulation would be better.

Chipped credit cards

Visa and Mastercard are not quite accepted everywhere - while in Penang, shopping at the Tesco I had my Visa card refused because the card issued by a U.S. bank was not chipped. Chipped cards require a PIN for the transaction while unchipped cards require managerial pre-approval which can be a tedious process especially when the checkout lines are long. Canada, Europe and Asia have embraced chipped credit cards. It appears that U.S. is the only large country that has decided to lag behind and stay with 20th century technology.

Things I remember doing

While in Penang I was doing things that I used to do that I have not done recently:
1. Padlocking the gate in addition to locking it
2. Drinking Kickapoo

Upscale hawker food in Penang

The Starbucks phenomenon in Penang/Malaysia seems to have spawned the creation of "upscale hawker" food. These are restaurants that serve hawker food at 2-3x the hawker price albeit at a more upscale ambience - some of them even with WiFi which I discovered at the e-Gate plaza.

These establishments offered coffee at half the price of Starbucks although WiFi connectivity wasn't all that fast nor was it always possible to connect. Of the places that I tried, Noodle Station and Starbucks worked with my laptop but not Hongkie Kopitiam.

Internet access in Penang

I was too jet lagged to do anything the first five days when we were in Penang but the next time I visit I will have to try to get Internet access. The WiFi at the place we were at did not work.

There are two ways to do this:
1. Subscription with a broadband company. There are at least 3 that I looked into:
a. P1
b. DiGi
c. Celcom
The first two required a contract for 2 years so those were out. Celcom was offering month to month Internet for RM$68 (384Kps) or RM$98 (3.2 Mps, I think). I would also have to shell out between RM$160-RM$200 for a USB modem.

2. Going to Starbucks but at RM$12.00 for a cup of coffee per visit and if I were to visit 10 times I may as well start paying for Internet access. There are cheaper alternatives to Starbucks and those may be good options which I will blog about next under upscale hawker food. Visiting these places are cheaper assuming that all I have is coffee and under some circumstances it would even be pleasant but with 2 picky eaters going to any of these places was trying at best.

Visiting Penang

We stayed for 10 days at a condominium found via VRBO. For the most part the stay was good.

Pluses:
1. Right next door to Tesco which also has a McDonalds and Pizza Hut as well as a food court among other shops inside.
2. Close to my mom's condo.
3. Great pool and not very crowded except on weekends.
4. Plenty of restaurants across the street at the e-Gate plaza: Secret Recipe, Old Town, Tao's (a Japanese restaurant), Noodle Station, Subway, a pasta and pizza place, a Vietnamese place and perhaps one or two others that I can't remember. We only ate at Old Town which serves hawker food at "upscale" prices. Starbucks is also there.

Minuses:
1. WiFi in the pool area did not work for us. We had two laptops and neither one would connect.
2. Traffic noise was loud because the building and condo was right in front of the highway.
3. Not enough pots for cooking - a toaster oven would also be nice as well as more than one trash can.
4. Having a washing machine was nice but there was no facility for drying e.g. rods to hang our wash.
5. The condo also seemed to get dirty very quickly and we vacuumed every day and mopped every other day. We had to get our own vacuum cleaner and mop so it would have been nice if these were also provided.
6. Meeting the "neighbors" and presenting ourselves to the security guards was awkward since we weren't really residents.
7. The intercom system was not activated which made it inconvenient for visitors.

In the end I'm not sure if I'd stay here again mainly because of lack of WiFi and the lack of intercom. (I'd like to minimize the interactions with the security only because they don't seem too pleased to let people in and out and we had only two fob access cards.) But the convenience of Tesco, the nice pool and being near my mom's place may trump everything in the end.

Maybe other alternatives will come up when we make our next trip home.