THE videos were set to the James Bond theme tune and labelled as a “shocking mega-exposé”. They were released by an investigative website called Cobrapost on March 13th, and have hit the share prices of India’s biggest private-sector banks.

MILTON FRIEDMAN once compared the business cycle to an elastic string stretched on a board. How far the string is plucked determines how much it springs back; similarly, the depth of a recession decides the strength of recovery. America’s recent experience has not been kind to the plucking model. Although the recession was the deepest since the second world war, the recovery has been a disappointment.

EVERYONE agrees that taxpayers should be protected from the cost of bailing out failing banks. But imposing blanket losses on creditors is still taboo. Depositors have escaped the financial crisis largely unscathed for fear of sparking panic, which is why the idea of hitting uninsured depositors in Cypriot banks has caused policymakers angst. Derivatives counterparties have usually been made whole. Senior bondholders have generally been protected, too (although that will change with a new European “bail-in” regime, due by 2018).There is one easy target, however.

THE World Trade Organisation’s general council will skip the plume of smoke when it chooses its new director-general in May. But what it would give for just a fraction of the attention bestowed this week on the cardinals gathered in the Vatican to choose a new pope. Since the Doha round of multilateral trade talks collapsed in 2008, the WTO has struggled to rebuild interest in broad liberalisation. The nine nominees to succeed Pascal Lamy in the WTO’s top job are busily campaigning for support in its Geneva headquarters and in member countries.