Expense Account, Mint What we know anecdotally is now there as data in the Reserve Bank of India annual report 20011-12, that Indian household savings are moving from financial assets to real assets. The household savings rate has remained almost constant at about 23% of gross domestic product (GDP) (at current market prices) but there...
Expense Account, Mint If the Chicago School got the world into trouble, here is an attempt by the London School to set it right. The perception across the world of economics and finance is that it was the hard influence of the market-is-always-right doctrine of the Chicago School of Economics that set off the global...
Expense Account, Mint Now that the dust has settled over last week’s announcements by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and the merits or otherwise of the hike in mutual fund costs have been chewed over, two issues have emerged that still need a comment. One, that Indian funds are the most expensive...
Expense Account, Mint A friend’s driver got a Maruti Dzire as a gift along with his son’s bride. With plenty of ancestral land at his disposal, he does not need the job to pay his bills. But his ambition was to get an “office” job as a driver so he could set out each day...
Expense Account, Mint The draft National Strategy for Financial Education (you can read it athttp://www.sebi.gov.in/cms/sebi_data/attachdocs/1342416428845.pdf) put together by the apex regulatory body, the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC), is up for public comments right now. It is a joint effort by various financial sector regulators to have a common road map for getting 500...
Expense Account, Mint As India’s various regulators meander their way through understanding what their role is, the need for a crash course in regulatory basics looks more important by the day. Registration of Pension Funds for Private Sector Guidelines announced on 12 July by Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), have changed the basic...
Expense Account, Mint I did not know that when I put my eight-year-old, beat-up Indica (should have clicked the faces of some people when the family would get into that car!) up for sale that the experience will become a lesson in developmental economics and will document a little part of the story of a...
Expense Account, Mint The increasing confidence of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) showed two weeks ago when it slapped a fine of Rs 1.47 crore on HDFC Standard Life for some five violations out of a list of 25 charges. Indian regulators are not known to levy large sums as fines. Probably the...
Expense Account, Mint Last week, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) chairman U.K. Sinha, speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry Mutual Fund Summit, said something that took many of us by surprise. It is not often that a capital markets regulator speaks about the performance of products, the lack of it and how...
Expense Account, Mint At some point I decided that to get a real flavour of what a mutual fund investor goes through, I need to stop using my agent and begin on my own. That was some time back, but the lessons from then still are sharp. And each time I facilitate somebody into using...