Generational change

Bibek Debroy and Pratap Bhanu Mehta ponder the young and the old, in Indian Express.

Interesting internships

by P. V. Shathish.

SEBI

Planning Commission

Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance: The interested and eligible students to send their applications, along with their CVs, in the prescribed format to Joint Secretary (Administration), Department of Economic Affairs, North Block, New Delhi latest by 15th January. [link]

Crisis watch, 10 November

TED spread	2.01
S&P 500 returns	+2.89%
VIX	56.10
Nikkei 225 (9:35 AM IST)	+4.64%
US Financials index	+2.48%
ICICI Bank ADR	+8.93%
Call rate on 8th	7.812%
Currency futures (9:35 AM IST)	47.37

• A dollar swap facility.
• I have an article in Financial Express today: The US dollar is an unstable yardstick.
• Indian Express interviews Bimal Jalan; Business Standard interviews Mahesh Vyas; S. Narayan in Mint.
• Business World on the regulatory strategy of RBI.
• Editorials in Business Standard and Financial Express on the monetary policy process of recent weeks.
• John Steele Gordon has an article where he describes three fascinating financial crises: the banking crisis in the US of 1836, the S&L crisis, and the sub-prime crisis.
• When does NBER announce that a recession began?
• I found some current CDS data for financial firms and countries (hat tip). It is the cost per year to insure $10,000 of debt for 5 years.

  Argentina	4453
  Venezuela	2017
  Egypt	663
  Indonesia	638
  Russia	523
  Turkey	445
  Philippines	418
  Morgan Stanley	402
  South Africa	397
  South Korea	335
  Brazil	331
  Mexico	323
  Goldman Sachs	305
  Malaysia	228
  Thailand	220
  Merill Lynch	212
  Citigroup	194
  China	167
  Bank of America	126
  UK	57
  US	36
  Germany	28

• China wants to prop up aggregate demand using the State. See Li Yanping and Chia-Peck Wong on Bloomberg, and David Berboza in New York Times.
• Jon Danielsson and Casper G. de Vries emphasise that resolving the crisis of the money market requires new information transfers. I wrote on a similar theme on 10 October.

Comparing international financial centres

The City of London has released two interesting documents:

• The Future of Asian Financial Centres: Challenges and Opportunities for the City of London
• The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), 4th edition, September 2008. For a comparison, you might like to also see the first edition, which is dated March 2007.

In terms of methodology, GFCI 4 uses 57 factors, including responses from 24,014 people drawn from 1,406 financial firms in a survey. To participate, go here and click on `Take the survey now'. And, see the wealth of information that's been harnessed on page 15 and page 16 of GFCI 4.

Here's a comparison of what the 1st and 4th editions are saying:

City	Mar 2007	Sep 2008	Change
London	765	791	+26
New York	760	774	+14
Singapore	660	701	+41
Shanghai	576	568	-8
Dubai	570	597	+27
Beijing	513	509	-4
Qatar		525
Bombay	460	497	+37

To be the 10th ranked city, the score (4th edition) has to be 630. Bombay's rank stands at 49.

The world of finance is undergoing great turbulence. It'll be interesting to see how the cities stack up in GFCI 7. GFCI 5 will be published in March 2009.

Workshop on productivity and efficiency measurement

A workshop on productivity and efficiency measurement will be taught at IGIDR, Bombay, from 2 to 4 January, 2009, by Subal Kumbhakar and Subhash C. Ray.

Building a bond market

Sanjay Nayar has an excellent article in Business Standard on the task ahead in creating a bond market.

Crisis watch, 7 November

TED spread	2.08
S&P 500 returns	-5.03%
VIX	63.68
Nikkei 225 (8:40 AM IST)	-4.35%
US Financials index	-6.21%
ICICI Bank ADR	-2.68%
Call rate on 6th	6.3%

• Indian monetary policy in The Economist.
• Mahesh Vyas in Financial Express on the impact of the financial crisis on the financing of firms. Also see this editorial in Financial Express on a related subject.
• IMF forecasts a 0.3% decline in GDP amongst developed countries in 2009. Also see coverage of this in The Economist.
• Stocks for the long run.