boloboffin
25th March 2008, 11:18 AM
From Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=adE4jmu3KzeI&refer=home):
Tshering Jamtsho uncoils the burgundy robe from around his chin and smiles as the first light of a Himalayan dawn streams through the casement chiseled into a stone-cold cell at the Pangrizampa Monastery.
Twigs crunch outside, a voice calls out from the dark and an apprentice enters the chamber gripping the "Mopai." The ancient 250-page goatskin volume provides human calculators, called "tsips," with intricate mathematical and astronomical formulas to compute a client's fate and fortune before birth, during life and in the afterlife.
"I am one of the 40 calculators," Jamtsho says over cups of the pungent yak-butter tea his predecessors began serving clients here in the Kingdom of Bhutan more than 1,500 years ago.
"What is your investment question?" the 25-year-old financial analyst and Buddhist lama adds. "Large numbers of Western businessmen come for our guidance."
...Many institutional investors at first called it witchcraft when Adam Smith said that money made beyond conventional market norms was the work of an "invisible hand." Yet Bhutan Prime Minister Kinzang Dorji says he won't be surprised if Wall Street isn't ready to embrace a capital market that's mostly regulated by entrepreneurial spirits.
There must be a better way to promote tourism.
Tshering Jamtsho uncoils the burgundy robe from around his chin and smiles as the first light of a Himalayan dawn streams through the casement chiseled into a stone-cold cell at the Pangrizampa Monastery.
Twigs crunch outside, a voice calls out from the dark and an apprentice enters the chamber gripping the "Mopai." The ancient 250-page goatskin volume provides human calculators, called "tsips," with intricate mathematical and astronomical formulas to compute a client's fate and fortune before birth, during life and in the afterlife.
"I am one of the 40 calculators," Jamtsho says over cups of the pungent yak-butter tea his predecessors began serving clients here in the Kingdom of Bhutan more than 1,500 years ago.
"What is your investment question?" the 25-year-old financial analyst and Buddhist lama adds. "Large numbers of Western businessmen come for our guidance."
...Many institutional investors at first called it witchcraft when Adam Smith said that money made beyond conventional market norms was the work of an "invisible hand." Yet Bhutan Prime Minister Kinzang Dorji says he won't be surprised if Wall Street isn't ready to embrace a capital market that's mostly regulated by entrepreneurial spirits.
There must be a better way to promote tourism.