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...