Expense Account, Mint You and I are really important to the country. Did you know that we are the human shields that protect the nation? Against bank failures, against financial exclusion, against insurance exclusion, and against starvation of insurance agents. While working on the Swarup Committee Report a couple of years back, I had reason to go...
Expense Account, Mint Though I knew the extent of angst against banks as serial mis-sellers of financial products, I was a little surprised at the huge reach-out from readers after the column last week where I wrote about systematic cheating by banks (http://bit.ly/iffYbq) to collect fees and commissions on retail financial products. Apart from sharing...
Expense Account, Mint I wonder why the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has got its head buried in sand over the extent of lies that bankers tell their customers in their attempt to hit them with inappropriate financial products to earn their bonuses and meet their targets. And I wonder how banks can calmly tell...
Expense Account, Mint The murmurs heard are now backed by data. Banks and large corporate distributors are churning mutual fund investors. Mintmutual fund editor Kayezad E. Adajania’s story “Banks nudge investors out of MFs; smart HNIs stay for bull run” (http://bit.ly/aTPn2A) has data to show that banks and large corporate distributors have churned their mutual fund...
Expense account, Mint here is a famous saying: you count hours and days, while the years just fly by. This looks certainly true of changes in the road rules around banking, insurance and mutual fund products in the year gone by in the world’s second fastest growing economy. It takes a sweeping look at the...
Expense Account, Mint Unless the banks can spike it again, from 1 April, we’ll get the 3.5% on our savings bank accounts that we believed we were getting all these years. Of course, post-inflation and tax, we’re losing money every day by leaving it in that terribly convenient, yet purchasing power killer, savings bank deposit....
Expense Account, Mint Rs1,09,544 crore. According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), this is the money inunclaimed deposits in all scheduled commercial banks in India in 2007 . Add another Rs3,800 crore of unwanted money with the Employees Provident Fund. And several thousand crore more of unclaimed funds with the Life Insurance Corp. of India...
Expense Account, Mint Would you like to buy a bond that not just gave you guaranteed interest at an increasing rate but also doubled your principal in 20 years? If I were about to retire, I’d queue up to buy this product. And maybe even pay a transaction fee on it. One of the biggest...
Expense Account, Mint What if a kilogram was a variable? Or a kilometre? How’d you react if the vendor was free to decide what a kg would measure today? The vendor could then choose to give you five mangoes a kg when he bought mangoes at Rs25 a kg, he could define a kilogram such...