Expense Account, Mint
I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the US taxpayers. The CEO, forgetting that we now live in a flat world and that information is no longer the prerogative of the suits, looked me in the eye and said that despite illiterate journalists, he would be able to sell funds in India because of trust. Trust that his company name invoked. While I was still picking up the pieces that fell out laughing, the company quietly went and stood at the bottom of the assets under management line-up. The investors were, and are, not interested in dealing with a company whose parent is so mired in muck.