A man was searching for something in a dark room. He was crying, weeping, screaming and yelling. He was upset. He was making a mess of the things kept in the room. He broke some and tumbled on others. Yet, what he was searching for, he could not get. He was blaming his wife, children, […]
Ayn Rand says “money is the root cause of all good”. Indian philosophy says ‘money increases desire – and like ghee and wood to a fire – increases desire and misery’. Immaterial of whether you take the western view or the eastern view, all of us have at some point chased money, have we not? […]
A couple of weeks back I had written a post about how the slow down will hurt some industries. Fairly clearly those companies (industries) which have a high cash burn ratio – and who cannot reduce fixed costs will bleed first. Financial services industry – life insurance, broking retail, general retail – are all vulnerable. […]
Many people have asked me what is the starting point of the “sub-prime” problem. This is really very difficult to answer. Relaxing of credit standards in US, over-leveraging by the Investment banks, spending far, far beyond one’s ability to repay..all of them can be taken to be the starting point. However, 2-3 events are remarkable […]
What a move by the US regulator and followed by the European regulator. Great. Now you cannot short sell. However, please remember you can always buy put options and make money. Unless regulators around the world allow free markets to play, there is no cribbing about how the market behaves. If somebody has short sold […]
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 […]
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 […]