meek-investor

Answering inane questions is an unfortunate fact of life these days. Especially since security has taken centre stage in life, you are constantly asked useless questions at any place which has a security check. I was subject to a special dose of inane questions recently and hence this post. The occasion was the renewal of my US visa which was expiring. In my line of business, a US visa is one of the necessities of life – like food, water, etc etc. Now the US visa process, for those who only want to visit it,(as opposed to immigrate), is actually a very good process. You apply on line these days, wait for an interview slot, go in person and spend half a day waiting. If you are a regular traveler, you are usually given a long term visa – usually for 10 years. Wasting half a day once in 10 years is perfectly acceptable and nobody should mind. But in typical American fashion, you are asked some inane security questions in the visa form. Here are some gems. - Are you coming to the United St...

The right to strike work is one the basic rights of workers and is recognised in law in most countries. But should this right be unfettered – and is the right to strike as valid now as it was when the principle was first enshrined ? The right to strike was first recognised when the balance of power between employers and employees was heavily tilted towards the employer. The company could basically exploit workers as they pleased – a situation which is, alas, all too common even in present day China. Make people work in unsafe conditions, handle poisons, face serious risk of injury, withhold wages, employ children, take away passports / ID cards – these are the conditions that labour often found itself in the past, and still finds itself in , in some parts of the world. The only weapon that workers have to defend themselves is to organise themselves into a union and threaten strikes. But in many other parts of the world, the situation is very different now. Power is much more balanced ...

Pakistan seems to have caught the China disease. It has banned Facebook, YouTube, et al. Because some idiot somewhere in the world launched a Facebook campaign “Everybody draw Muhammad day”. As is well known, any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is considered blasphemy in Islam. People who volubly deny the holocaust, draw cartoons of the Prophet, etc must be quartered – they are deliberately inciting religious hatred and violence. Freedom of speech is a precious freedom, but does not extend to shouting Fire in a crowded theatre. The reaction from Pakistan has been to ban Facebook. Facebook is not doing this – somebody is using Facebook to create mischief. But then, as said in the immortal lines from Casablanca – “Round up the usual suspects”. Ban them all. There's a furious debate going on in Pakistan on the sense, or senselessness, of this move. Almost certainly, proxies will see a sudden surge of business from Pakistan. Pakistan has a vibrant social networking community – espec...

There is a time and place for everything. Many of the players in the oil spill drama in the Gulf of Mexico need to consider this truism. If you haven’t been following the events, here’s a quick synopsis of what happened. An explosion happened in the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform, in the Gulf of Mexico, some 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. 11 workers are feared dead. Oil is now gushing out of the well , some 1 mile beneath the waters on the ocean floor. Stemming this oil flow is presenting a massive engineering problem – how do you try and do damage control one mile below on the ocean floor where the pressure is massive. The oil is gushing out every day. By any account this is a big environmental problem and could become a disaster if the oil slick reaches the Louisiana coast. The oil field’s principal developer is British Petroleum (BP). The drilling rig was however run by another company Transocean. Everybody loves to hate the big oil companies – so its very easy to vilify...

The earth shook yesterday. If you are a sports fan, you would have felt it. And if you are a badminton fan, it measured 10 on the Richter scale. The Thomas Cup and Uber Cup tournaments are going on in Kuala Lumpur. These are the Men's and Women's badminton world team championships. The Uber Cup , for women, is the private property of China. For the last 12 years they have been invincible. They usually complete the entire tournament without dropping a single match. Everybody else fights for the second place. The same was expected this year – in the world rankings in singles, the top five are Chinese. In the doubles, the top two are Chinese. Each tie in the Uber Cup consists of three singles and two doubles. What hope had anybody else got when China fields World No 1,2,3 in singles and Nos 1 and 2 in doubles. China took its appointed place in the finals without losing a single match. In fact in all the matches, it dropped only a single game – thanks to Saina Nehwal of India. Faci...

Last Thursday, something peculiar happened in the US stock markets. The markets were jittery due to the unfolding crisis in Greece. The market was down by some 1.5% or so , but nothing extraordinary. Then at 2.32 PM something happened. It started falling steeply. By 2.42 PM it had fallen by 3.9%. By 2.47 the bottom had fallen out; in 5 minutes the index fell another 5.5%.By 2.49 it went back up by 5%. Nobody knows what happened. Multiple theories abound. Hacking or terrorist activity have been ruled out. The rumour that a trader keyed in a trade in P&G shares for billions instead of millions by mistake has also not been borne out. The SEC is still investigating. What triggered the fall is not clear, but what happened next is certain. A lot of trading is computer driven these days. When something happens there are automatic triggers to buy or sell. When the first fall happened, it triggered an avalanche of computer generated trades. Hence the free fall. These days competitive advan...

Commercial media have faced product and price challenges in 2-sided markets for more than a century, but are encountering greater difficulties in getting it right as they try to effectively monetize multi-sided markets. 2-sided and multi-sided markets are ones in which more than one set of consumers must be addressed and there is an interaction between strategies and choices for each set of customers. Prices for one group of consumers affects their consumption quantity and this, in turn, affects the prices for and consumption by the other groups. Optimal revenues can only be achieved by dealing with all groups of consumers simultaneously. Newspapers are a classic example of 2-sided platforms. The first product is the content sold to audiences and the second is access to audiences that is sold to advertisers. This has been the basis of the mass media business model since late 19th century and the strategy has been to keep circulation prices low to attract a mass audience and then to mak...

An atom bomb was set off yesterday. Only nobody noticed it. Because it was high economics that nobody but the geeks understand. But an atom bomb, it surely was. I am referring to the nearly € 1 trillion “bailout” package for the Euro zone members that was announced yesterday. Even if you have only a passing interest in economics, you would have heard of the travails of Greece over the last few months. This was snowballing into a crisis that was threatening to spread to the other vulnerable members of the Euro zone - the so called PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Hence the shock and awe tactics of detonating an atom bomb. € 1 trillion rescue package. Wow ! Greece started it all. For a long time it was fudging figures that, if done in the corporate world, would have surely sent the Chairman to jail. But it is, of course, perfectly acceptable to do so in politics. Truth will always out, and when tougher financial markets laid bare who was naked and who was not, Greece got caugh...

I am confused. You may be forgiven for the retort of “what’s new? ” but tell me, should I aspire to be “cool” ? Or “warm”. Or else “hot” ; Or what ? Over the last few weeks, I was given to understand that I wasn’t “cool”. It all started with a stupid question I asked – Who is Tamannaah ? Then I compounded the problem by asking a series of questions – Who is Asin ? Who is Vijay ? And so on … I was made to realise that I was not cool. So to be cool, I thought I should read up on the said ladies and gentlemen. I was told that, with diligent study, I could even aspire to be “uber cool”. But then I was made to realise that at work, I was not supposed to be “cool”. Apparently a “cool” guy is one who is losing deal after deal. So you should at least be “warm”. Preferably “hot”. Like on a hot streak – winning deal after deal. At the same time you could also be “cold” actually ice cold – I believe you are good if you can remain "ice cold", while you are "hot". Doesn’t th...

“This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer” – this is the current live debate hosted by The Economist here . This blogger is a complete and unabashed fan of The Economist and subscribes to the view that it is the best publication in the world. The Economist debates are a fascinating discussion of very relevant issues and it would be difficult to find as interesting a debate on economics as between fair trade and free trade. The context must be clearly understood. Despite all the tall claims made, the world is nowhere close to free trade of an acceptable sort. The bastions of free trade are all fiercely protectionists in their own areas – agriculture in both Europe and the US, and pretty much everywhere else in the developing world. Everybody wants free trade in other’s homes, but not in their own backyard. Tariff and non tariff barriers abound. The crawling pace of the WTO talks, which go on for decades is testimony to this, although it has to ...

By now there is every chance that you have heard of credit default swaps, the instruments at the heart of the financial crisis of a year and a bit ago. Unless you are like me and the Tamil movie scene, that is – surely I must be the only Tamil in the world who hadn’t heard of Asin (for non Indian readers, this lady seems to be the Tamil equivalent of Zhang Ziyi/ J Lo (?) ). So I can’t say that there you cannot, but, have heard of that silly acronym CDS. All derivatives, like credit default swaps, spread risk around; they don’t reduce or eliminate it. Most derivatives are fiendishly complicated, so much so that the most simple and basic derivative, which would surely tax the intellectual powers of the aforementioned Asin, is called “plain vanilla” by the geeks. But all they do, for their incredible complexity is play pass the parcel – they simply pass the risk to somebody else. Or chop it into individual bits and toss the bits around. Or find all sorts of devilish ways to spread it. B...

But for the chance discovery of the Rosetta Stone , we may have never learnt about the wonders of the ancient Egyptian civilization. The tombs and the monuments had, of course, been known for a long time. But nobody could understand the hieroglyphics, for the language had died long long ago. So we knew very little about this wonderful civilisation, until by sheer accident , a stone was discovered in Rosetta on which was written a fairly unimportant decree from Ptolemy V. The information in it was utterly irrelevent, but the beauty of the finding was that the writing was both in ancient Egyptian and in Greek, a language well known now. Voila – With a small primer, and the heroic efforts of Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion, the hieroglyphic script was deciphered. We know so much about the ancient Egyptian civilization because of this chance discovery. Contrast this with the ancient Indian civilization, where, despite the findings at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, we know very little...