- Tim Harford in the Financial Times on the skepticism about the extent to which microfinance matters.
- London's attempts at turning away international finance: from the Economist, and Mint. Also see this piece from the Economist.
- M. R. Madhavan in Financial Express on the ineffectiveness of the UPA in translating Parliament time into economic reform.
- Michael Pomerleano on financial stability reform proposals.
- An idea from Ila Patnaik has popped up again.
- Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times, on Syed Babar Ali, who started LUMS. Here's a comparison, of the footprint of the name of the institution upon google scholar, of LUMS as compared with India's ISB. LUMS was founded in 1986, and is well ahead of ISB in the extent to which they have evolved away from being a pure MBA program [undergraduate] [graduate].
- Ila Patnaik on the questions that RBI now faces on monetary policy.
- An eBook on financial reform, released by the Stern School of Business. A quick read of their chapter summaries gives you a sense of what they have done, and the questions faced in financial reform today on an international scale.
- In continuation of my recent article on the Bombay Club, do look at this view of Bajaj Auto by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar.
- In Businessworld, Ashok Desai discusses a recent speech by Dr. Subbarao, and worries about competition amongst Indian banks.
- Ramachandra Guha in The Telegraph on India's nuclear energy program. Also see these two old pieces (from 2005) by Ila Patnaik: one, two.
- Protectionism alert.
- Deborah Solomon interviews Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, in the New York Times. More CEOs in India should learn to speak like this.
- The meaning of open, a beautiful essay by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Google. More SVPs in India should learn to think like this.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Interesting readings
6 comments:
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LaTeX mathematics works. This means that if you want to say $10 you have to say \$10.
thanks for the list.
ReplyDeleteAshok desai's article raised a lot of questions. He does not talk about prepayment risk in his article about high prepayment penalties. For floating rate loans, future higher interest rates will increase prepayment rates. Vice versa for fixed rate loans.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much indian banks hedge their loan portfolios against things like prepayment. It would reduce the exorbitant prepayment penalties atleast to some extent?
Also noticed that ICICI charges something like 1.75% to convert from floating to fixed or vice versa. I wonder why its so high! Also, raises doubts about whether the fixed rate is fair compared to a swap. Can one find info on Indian IR swap rates (OTC?) anywhere?
The NYT article only talks about LUMS. Where is the comparison of LUMS vs ISB?
ReplyDeleteNice information on gst in india. For more updates please see my site www.gstindia.com
ReplyDeleteThe progress of UPA II in financial reforms has indeed been disappointing. So in the two sessions so far what has been legislated upon?
ReplyDeleteSwami’s statement that India's big advantage lies not in cheap labour but in cheap design and engineering skills was very interesting. We do not have cheap labour because the government does not allow it. If labour mobility was allowed along with hire and fire we would potentially have a very deadly combination of cheap engineering and cheap labour.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of alternate scenarios I often think what would have happened if the NDA had been reelected in place of UPA 1. Everything privatized, bank reform, faster moves on pension, Sensex at 40,000. I think there was even talk on labour reform – reducing the threshold of number of workers in a factory which require government permission before retrenching.
Sure there may have been some missteps on the way (troop deployments in Iraq/Afghanistan?), but then the stronger growth and institution building would have more than compensated.