The heavens are falling!! Heavens are falling!! Such a headlines will surely catch your attention, will it not? Media TRP / clicks are a function of excitement in the market – not a bull run or a bear run. Similarly brokers revenues are a function of frenzied activity by the client. Not just a buy […]
I have had at least 13 calls asking me a simple question: “Should i sell my units in Dsp Merill Lynch?” and “Should I surrender my TATA AIG policy”. Surprisingly the answers to both the questions are a little different. A mutual fund has 2 distinct parts. One is a Trust – which has all […]
So at last the world is telling America a simple thing. You cannot live beyond your means for too long. When they had a huge deficit, they went to war at Afghanistan. Then at Iraq. It does not matter how much money you have – if you burn it fast enough, it will be over! […]
Governments have two major advantages. One they have an unlimited scope for income – agricultural tax, excise duty, service tax, income tax, estate duty, etc. The more worrisome advantage is their ability to print currency notes. Ask Ben Bernanke – he converts coniferous trees into billions of dollars! The worry is for people who lend […]
Over the past 20 years I have dealt with the financial markets. Here I have obviously met all kinds of people – brokers, bankers, owners of brokerage houses, life insurance salesmen, relationship managers, and of course the guy who pays all the bills – the “investor”. Here is a summary of mistakes I have […]
I was talking to a friend in the US of A…he was amused by the statement of some of the “big” banks who said “we will recover our sub-prime losses by our fee-income in Asia”. Fee income in Asia – read India and China has to go up so many times :). Read an article […]
This is the headline that Jonathan Weil used in his article in Bloomberg. You must read the full article. Here is a summary: Freddie had accumulated $ 34.3 billion (yes Billion) of paper losses, but excluded them from calculation of regulatory capital. All Freddie had to do was say the losses were “temporary” and they […]