Silicon Valley Bank failure is a text-book case of an asset liability mismatch. It’s roots are in poor risk management practices that zero interest rate decade in the US triggered. Like an episode of a fast-paced crime thriller, the story of the 16th largest bank of America, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), moved from a...
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...
Expense Account, Mint It is finally done. The US has now moved to the next stage of the financial crisis—this is where the brooms, antiseptic and hot water come out to clean out the goop left behind by the unadulterated greed of a handful of suits on Wall Street. Even as the news of the...
Expense Account, Mint Almost at the time I was risking my neck, pushing it to the limit, trying to get the entire 508m of Taipei 101, the world’s second tallest building, into the camera frame, my home city (New Delhi) got its tallest building. The 112m, 28-storey Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Civic Centre, headquarters of...
Expense Account, Mint So we have the leader of the largest economy in the world, whose currency parallels gold as a store of value and a medium of exchange—the highest mark of respect in the non-real universe of finance—whose bonds fill vaults in China and the Oil bloc, whose people consume so that the world...
Expense Account, Mint It’s interesting how stories move forward. On 11 May the National Consumer Dispute Redressal Commission in New Delhi threw out a suit filed by Midas Touch Investors Association, an investor assocation registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), claiming damages on behalf of 300,000 consumers—shareholders of Satyam Computer Services...
Expense Account, Mint ig business and banks do not like you. Well, let me rephrase that. They don’t like you getting a fair deal, but they like the money they can make off you. And they have the power to nudge policy and regulators to do what they want. Why else would each step forward...