While my peaceful Parisian peers enjoy their cup of Saturday noon Espresso and chatting with their friends, plagued by the fear of not keeping up-to-date with the financial news, I guiltily sat for an hour this morning in a cafe fanatically flipping through a mixed pile of out-dated FT, WSJ and barrron’s. Reading a couple of days of newspaper all at once can cause reflex of rapid head-nodding and physical symptoms of deep forehead frown lines—-my Parisian neighbors gawked at me with amusement. One great disadvantage of traveling (or rather, opportunity cost) is that you are so focused at the present time and your surroundings you lose attention of important events happening elsewhere in the world. Nonetheless, thanks to my compulsive old news papers collecting habits, I have an emergency pile of paper to chew on. In the week worth of news, I stumbled upon two articles that were particularly insightful. One penned by Martin Wolf and the other from John Kay. John Kay’s article introduced a new book by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg on “imperfect knowledge economics” that describes the problem of economic models created to generate ’sharp’ predictions are doomed to fail because market participants’ view on events changes rapidly and are context specific. Kay’s main point is that “the best that economist and their clients can do is identify qualitative regularities and patterns in events–as historians do–and, like historians, they can say a lot when they accept their inability to make “sharp predictions”. Kay advise us to ask the right questions, useful knowledge is better than exact knowledge; don’t let models get in the way of looking at empirical and qualitatively observable regularities and patterns. Martin Wolf commented on the state of the world economy in 2007 and highlighted the major problems that lies ahead of us. I want to share a great quote from Jean-Claude Trichet cited in FT, defending his swift decision to inject liquidity the next day after credit melt-down at a recent conference. “In the development of a very complex situation a slight change at the start turns out in very significant discrepancies after a certain period of time and these significant discrepancies can make all the difference between a situation which would be under control and a situation clearly out of control. So time is absolutely of the essence in regaining control of a hectic situation: acting expeditiously is a must.” Bravo~

After my hour long cafe, I took the subway to check into another hotel at Porte de Montreuil, located at the very edge of the city centre; it was exhausting to carry my luggages down and back up in the metro. Porte de Montreuil is at the peripheral area of Paris, where most of the residents there are immigrants from Africa and Arab countries; theres a huge black market at the metro exist; fake LV bags can be seen at every corner of the street. Arriving at the ibis hotel and paid 3 nights rent of $258 euros, not bad at all! I was assigned to room 1119, which was small and uncomfortable, so I took a bold move and demanded a better room at the reception—after some persuasion, I got a free upgrade to a better room. For dinner, I went back to Hotel de Villa at the city center because theres basically nothing good to eat or do around Montreuil. Keeping it simple, I went to the same restaurant across from hotel DuO and ordered a steak. One can rarely be disappointed by a medium rare steak in France, but for 3 consecutive days I had steak for dinners—the consequence of this immoderate diet will unravel on my face in the coming few days.