Expense Account, Mint When I began doing a personal finance show on TV about seven years ago, I was inundated by stock tip seeking questions. But I was clear that what we were setting out to do was financial literacy and not giving cheap stock tips. It took work to nudge the questions in a...
Expense Account, Mint Ramesh Kumar is disgusted. At 55, he’s had a long innings as the administrator of the Indian Paneer Board. (For those unacquainted with paneer, it is a milk product that used to be in short supply in the glorious socialist years of the 1960s and 70s and the government had set up...
Expense Account, Mint I must admit I’m a bit surprised by the kind of debate that the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC) Report (http://finmin.nic.in/fslrc/fslrc_report_vol1.pdf) has generated. The 439-page report has made recommendations to re-haul the Indian financial system to facilitate the journey of the $2 trillion Indian economy to becoming a $15 trillion one...
Expense Account, Mint I like to talk about the efficacy of having equity in the portfolio because that is an asset class, I have been led to believe, which gives an inflation-plus return. But equity’s image as a super asset class beating the stuffing out of inflation has been under attack for a long time,...
Expense Account, Mint We’ve shown a more mature cheek this time around when Norway did its we’ll-protect-your-kids number and accused the parents of a seven-year-old for trying to discipline him using physical punishment. The national hysteria is missing and the social media comment is more muted. At the risk of opening an unrelated debate, I...
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 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 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 My teenager is sick of me. Nothing new in the history of teenage issues with parents, but she has a unique problem. It is not the usual teenage gripe about how-dumb-can-you-be or the will-you-just-get-off-my-case grunt or even how-did-you-get-so-far-with-so-little-brain eye roll. No. It’s a totally new one that will put books on managing...