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Its been a crazy two weeks in the financial markets, let’s recap:
- SocGen announces a USD 7.1 billion fraud in plain vanilla Euro indexes
- Euro markets fall on Jan 21-22, maybe due to SocGen unwinding those positions
- The Fed reacts to the falling European markets with an emergency 75bps rate cut before the markets [...]

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The amount that Soc Gen should have told analysts was due to write-off’s related to subprime loans. Instead Soc Gen CEO Daniel Bouton insisted the USD 7.14 billion fraud was due to a single trader using “plain vanilla” hedges on European stock-market indexes, whatever.
Personally, if they would have said subprime losses it would have sucked [...]

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By now, I’m sure you’ve seen that the Indian markets are getting knee-capped and it ain’t fun. It’s part of the global sell off that is happening as we speak.
When the Sensex opened on Tuesday at 9:55am it was halted within 35 seconds by then the markets fell 10% - which is around 1700 points. [...]

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Stanley “Stan” O’Neal joined Merrill Lynch in 1986 and after various positions took he over as CEO and Chairman of Merrill Lynch in 2003. Net profit for each year he was CEO:
2003 - USD 3.8B
2004 - USD 4.4B
2005 - USD 5.2B
2006 - USD 7.5B
2007 - USD -7.8B (yes, that’s a rather large negative)
In the 4 [...]

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I’ve been training for about 10 weeks for the half marathon (21km) in Mumbai. I’ve jogged over 170km over those 10 weeks mainly on Marine Drive. I ended up finishing the half-marathon in 2 hours and 16 minutes, which is exactly the same time I had during the 2006 Mumbai Marathon.
After finishing the [...]

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Wow, is all I can say. The Reliance Power IPO was fully subscribed in 60 seconds, around USD 3 billion was snapped up in seconds. As of Wednesday night the over subscription is running at 14x. The average retail investor is expected to get around 40 shares at Rs 450, for a total cash [...]

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After being in India for a couple of years, I tend to look around and notice things that potentially might work from a business angle. Although many of the things I’d like to see are around efficient process flows, below are several ideas that are not necessarily game changers but still have large appeal.
1. Consumers [...]

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After much speculation Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group and Tata Motors, unveiled the Tata Nano, the most inexpensive car in the world at USD 2500. The idea for the USD 2500 car was conceived 5 years ago when commodity prices for things such as steel were much cheaper but Ratan Tata said “a [...]

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The Indian car scene these days is down right exciting for a car guy. Unfortunately, it’s not about the horsepower or hotness of the cars but instead the business side of it. Everything from clean energy to low priced cars. Just 20 years ago you had two options if you wanted to buy a [...]

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When a new place opens up in Bombay it gets lots of press since there are so few entertainments options. For the past month, everyone has been talking about Blue Frog and how it will jump start the Mumbai music scene. I finally had a chance to check it out over the weekend and it [...]

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