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 […]
Regulators around the world like to use words like “bailout” in order to help failing institutions. Which kind of institutions get a helping hand? The honest ones? The fair ones? You got to be joking. It is friends and relatives who get bailed out! Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae kept telling the whole world that […]