IIFT EMIB

IIFT EMIB 2004 - 2006 (Source: http://www.iift.edu)

It’s been exactly five long years since I joined for my EMIB (Executive Masters in International business) from the prestigious Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), New Delhi! I joined it on 9th August 2004. Time flies! But can say for sure that this degree has been my best investment made on education till date. With zero opportunity cost (it was held only on weekends – non stop for one and a half years) and the schedule was honestly grueling with no respite and kept us busy on weekdays with assignments, quizzes every weekend, mid-term exams, classes and of course, the end terms.

Can large banks fail / CITIBANK on the brink

I saw the developments of the last week where CITI (NYSE: C) shares really fell to $3 a share and was in danger of going bust as public confidence was eroding sharply. CITI faces a real threat of a collapse.

There were two options open to the board: 1. Fire the CEO, Vikram Pandit as a sacrificial lamb, 2. split the company and sell the parts or whole of the company.

Why am I crazy about Wall Street/US monetary policies?

Simply because, it has a huge impact - no matter where you are in this world!

What happens out there impacts every single country in this world. It impacts you you and you. It impacts the decision making we make on our jobs etc. It impacts our local domestic economy. No matter how much we claim of ourselves being insulated from Wall Street, the truth is its just an eyewash. We will all get affected by the mayhem on Wall Street and the effects take at least 6 months to trickle into economies such as India and China. This is what happened in 2001 and I was a very close observer of what happened then and used to take very conservative decisions that paid off on multiple fronts and hence it is imperative I do the same again.

AIG struggling to stay afloat – no pun intended!

http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/the-us-subprime-crisis-increasing-chance-of-a-us-recessionburst-of-the-us-housing-bubble/

If you have read Warren Buffet’s letters to shareholders and his book – The Warren Buffet way (2nd ed.), then you know what a float is. I am not trying to strike a relation or anything to this problem but am just stating that insurance business is supposed to insure others and AIG (American International group) had that obligation to keep but something clearly went astray.

Three point something – MBA courses/CGPA and their grading methodology

I was just ruminating on my IIFT roller coaster ride completed over two years ago and was pondering over their associated letter grades that they had assigned over my three trimesters over a span of 1.5 years and another three months for my research project (which was a 6-credit course).

My IIFT EMIB CGPA was 3.63/4 and I was in the top 10% of my class of practicing managers across the country, with an average class work experience of over 10 years.

Ecofinglobe.com and its statistics from an year ago

I was chancing to look upon my blog’s readership and it has skyrocketed in last few months. To give you an idea of how much the readership for http://www.ecofin.wordpress.com has gone up by, Alexa rating has shown a consistent rise in my webpage ranking (it currently stands at 755139 worldwide and its India ranking is better at 58137. Furthermore, my year old blog stats shows my blog to have averaged 9999 hits way in May 2007. The current count stands at 77791.

Above means nothing if people don’t read posts. Simple page views/hits serve no value absolutely. The most important indicator that indicates the health status of a blog is its post:comment ratio. My blog’s average post:comment ratio is at about 1:2. This means, for every post I put up, I get double the # of comments. This ratio was about 2:1 last year at about the same time and it had not even reached breakeven. So, it is a satisfaction that my blog is a success in terms of these critical metrics.

Thank you, all for making this blog readable! Its only my readers who can turnaround this blog and I hope to keep you as repeat readers so the value of this blog is enhanced further!

Keep visiting back – you know where to look for me: http://www.ecofinglobe.com!

Lalunomics on Globonomics!

Source: Wiki

http://www.indianrail.gov.in/

http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Railways

This has been the single biggest turnaround in recent days of the Indian PSU sector! Indian Railways making a cash surplus (before dividend) of Rs. 25000 crore for 2007-2008 with an operating ratio of 76%.

Blogging guidelines – my two cents

What are the important factors one needs to consider before one begins to blog:

1. First, get over this obsession of Google adsense. 99/100 bloggers I meet first think of making a quick buck on adsense rather than focus on quality of their blogs and its relevance towards the topic(s) chosen! This is really very disturbing statistics.

Times NiE (Newspaper in education)

I was first exposed to this concept a long time back when I started becoming a news junkie. This was in school (Bishop Cotton Boys’ school, St. Marks road, Bangalore) where I did my schooling. There were journalists who were visiting us from Times of India to promote this NiE program – if I recollect, it was sometime in 1991/92.

Carly Fiorina’s memoir – Tough choices

http://www.amazon.com/Tough-Choices-Memoir-Carly-Fiorina/dp/159184133X 

For some reason, I have admired Carly Fiorina and publicly so on my peer networking group – Eco_Fin. I somehow felt that this lady had reached the upper echelons of a top US technology enterprise (to be the CEO of HP) by sheer guts and determination.

There are quite a few lady CEO’s who I admire who have made it big.

- Indira Nooyi – Chairman and CEO, Pepsico (NYSE: PEP)

- Carly Fiorina – ex. Chairman and CEO , Hewlett Packard company (NYSE: HPQ)

There was another book of Carly’s titled “Perfect enough” and the reinvention of Hewlett Packard that I had purchased and read up way back in 2003. It was good and spoke a lot of the aggressive and the controversies/hostilities surrounding the merger of HP and Compaq in 2002.

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Enough-Fiorina-Reinvention-Hewlett/dp/1591840031/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7956418-4984732?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173590442&sr=1-1

I have so far not got to read the following books:

- The HP way

- The Toyota way

I will do so shortly.

I am still reading up this book but she highlights the difficulties of her earlier years while at AT&T (American telephone and telegraph – NYSE: ATT), how Lucent technologies (NYSE: LU) was spun off, how the red splash logo of Lucent was conceived, how the baby bells were born etc.

I did not know that she did an advanced management programme at Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT), Boston, MA for an year while taking a sabbatical from AT&T.