Timeline of US Recession

Good post about Recession in US

link

Exam Time Friend :(

End term exams are going as I write..Will be over in next two days...Hope to get active on blogosphere after that...

Don't know when this trimester started lagta hai kal ki hi baat hai...aur term khatam hone ko bhi aaya...

Prowess

Used Prowess for the first time, it's really nice in terms of kind of data it provides, but in term of speed it really sucks, BIG TIME. You can press save and go and have a cup of coffee in the mean times. Compared to that Bloomberg is much better...However even it sucks some time. For who knows what reason, their financial numbers for Tata Power is not even close to the actual one, and interesting things is that they actually have put annual reports at their website.

Guys, don't panic, I haven't suddenly developed interest in anything like this..It's just one of those majboori...course requirement hai yaar karna padta IIMB mein..>We are comparing Tata Power and NTPC...by their balance sheets. as if we know..I guess only take away for me would be that I got to know that Kanti Thermal Power Cooperation is actually a subsidiary of NTPC...Why they run it in such a bad shape..(for those who don't know where Kanti is, it's at Muzaffarpur, Bihar quite close to my native place Motihari and it's major source of power for North Bihar).

Up for now 25 hours..gotta catch a nap...

I love Wall Street :P

It has been a couple of months when everyone was cursing Wall Street guys for their extra advanced sense of innovation of securitizing mortgage products and selling them to innocent pension holders. I thought it will take at least couple of years for them to get back with something like this. But, these are not the guys who relent...They have come up something quite interesting...

"The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."

The idea goes like this. Every policy holder knows he is gonna die and someone is going to claim their pension money. Let's say pension money is $ 1 million and the old man lives for next 10 years, assuming prevailing market interest rate of about 3.5%, one can calculate present value of $ 1 million would be $708,918.81. The pension holder can actually sell this to any financial institute at $ 400,000. It's a Win-Win situation for all, the banker earn and as well as the poor pension fund holder earns too. The sooner the old man dies, the better return one can have. Now, the banks can create collateral of thousand of such loans and sell in tranches to different class of investors.

Imagine, a pension holder in Sweden, praying for death of an Insurance holder in US for better return, so bad.

Read the full article here...

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

Being a great fan of Nobel Prize Winner, Paul Krugman, I find any of his articles quite interesting. This time, he has written a great deal about origins of failure in curbing recession.

Do read this here

Yesterday, while browsing through Crossword at Bangalore Airport with no intention of buying anything, I bought One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Let's see when do I get time to read that...currently so many books are in Read Me list.

Guess what, what for our project on Improving Primary Education, we have made a video apart from 10 point agenda. We will share that once presention is done this afternoon.

Bloody Hell

Its really amazing when people remember their roots. Take the recent case of Designer Anand Jon...who was convicted for 59 years for serious charges like raping a minor and sexually assaulting countless number of girls. I mean, it's okay that he was born in India that doesn't mean Indian govt. will start on defending every criminal..and why should Indian govt, everyone should be prosecuted by the rule of the land, it's not that he was some secret agent of RAW, a partiot Indian. He was having fun...so face the burn.

I just saw the video of his sister Sanjana Jon pleading Indian govt to intervene, for no reason at all. Another designer, claimed to be a friend of Anand Jon, says that he was such a talented designer who could have taken India's name further, lamenting on sad ending. Its not clear whether he supported the judgement or not. Sanjana writes that do one need to be a Khan to get Indian govt's attention...comparison itself is preposterous.

The law is above all. What would we have done had there been some foreign national caught doing somethink like this in India. Remember, what happened with Michael Jackson who was so popular, he still faced jury.

Check out the video here

Know more about Anand Jon from his website and his wikipedia page...

Coming to sex, look at the new kind of crime...It can't get worse than that. What's the underlying reason for such heinous crime, is it new or is it first time when something like this is being exposed in India, follow the link

Economist version of love

I loved these lines

"As an economist I think that a good marriage, like a good employment relationship, emphasizes shared vision, common interests, complementary abilities, and gains from specialization."

I am currently studying a course on Microeconomics, I can very well imagine how they think ...

Read the full version here...

By the way, did I tell my tiny poem....

you make me cry

with each of your good bye :(