It is a little surreal to hear an economics Nobel laureate flag issues and provide solutions to some issues that personal finance writers across the world have been flagging for many years now. The occasion was the RH Patil Memorial Lecture to mark 25 years of the National Stock Exchange. Patil was the first chairman of the exchange that was set up in the aftermath of the 1992 stock market scam. Delivering the lecture was Robert C. Merton, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor of finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.