Expense Account, Mint The Rs2.9 trillion Indian life insurance industry has, for the first time since privatization in 2000, seen contraction over two consecutive financial years. Fiscal 2010-11 saw a shrinking of 20% and the full year 2011-12, estimates the insurance regulator, will contract 15%. This means that enough of us did not buy an...
Expense Account, Mint No. The Indian fund industry will not shut shop, but the news that Fidelity mutual fund may be on the block did burn the financial industry airwaves earlier this week. The possible sale of the almost seven-year-old fund house known for its retail focus, mature industry practices and its stable performance did...
Expense Account, Mint What do you expect your mutual fund to do? It is worth asking and answering this question as we carry out Mint Money’s biannual exercise of examining Mint50—the portfolio of investment-worthy funds that the Mint Money team curates. A quick word on why we do this. Indian households have a high savings rate but most...
Expense Account, Mint In the market for a TV, I checked out all the vendors nearby. In the Sony and Samsung showrooms I got the Sony and Samsung TVs. In Croma, I got a variety of brands. On one TV it said Croma. That was the in-house brand which was cheaper than the other branded...
Expense Account, Mint The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has taken a welcome step to bring in a set of adviser regulations. It has released a concept paper on the regulation of investment advisers. India needs a new set of regulations to bring order to a marketplace that moves money between households and...
Expense Account, Mint If 2012 is the year in which the world will end, 2011 was the year in which the world prepared to end. We heard that the euro zone break up may take Europe back to the fall of the Roman empire. That the sins of bowing to Wall Street will make the...
Expense Account, Mint If Hollywood movies and interactions as tourists make us believe that all Americans speak like Californians and live in Manhattan, then the urban mass affluent Indians who reach US shores confuse them about who the real Indian is—the poor child with a tear in one eye they see in the ad asking...
Expense Account, Mint Why aren’t people out there on the street, burning a bus or something?” I’ve been asking this question for almost as long as it took me to absorb the fact that the generation going to be worse off than their parents, for the first time since the 1930s depression, seemed to be...
Expense Account, Mint One of the first things you notice about New Haven, home to Yale University, once the senses have taken their fill of freshly brewing coffee, the natty boutiques and the buzzing bars, are the people who rummage through dustbins and ask you for some change. Adding to the feel of big-city crime...
Expense Account, Mint It’s been three weeks since I left home. Three weeks since I stitched together another reality in a different country, with different people using Skype and Gtalk as a way to keep the thread of my other reality going. Three weeks that saw two natural disaster events in the US—an earthquake that...