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.

CITIGROUP takes over Wachovia banking operations

The tumble continues. The Fed’s $250 billion immediate injection to buy toxic assets of troubled financial institutions, followed by the $100 billion based on President’s approval followed by another $350 billion subject to approval of Congress did not help.

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!

Derivatives, the sub prime mess, US recession, Bear Stearns bailout by the Fed/JPMChase

 We know this story so we will not repeat this again: JP Morgan Chase set to acquire Bear Stearns for a paltry $2 a share – based on the transaction price of March 14th 2008!

http://www.bearstearns.com/sitewide/our_firm/press_releases/content.htm?d=03_16a_2008

http://investor.shareholder.com/jpmorganchase/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=299805&ReleaseType=Current

You can refer to the following article to get the update from the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) on Bear Stearns – NYSE: BSC(http://www.bearstearns.com/) and its survival thanks to the revival package of the Fed and JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120580966534444395.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Some macro economic predictions for 2008

http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/are-we-staring-in-the-face-of-a-depression-in-2008/

Here’s a caveat: I fully understand economic predictions are foolhardy and its a bunch of crap since it is not something that can be predicted. Famous investors such as billionnaire Warren Buffett etc. also share the same viewpoints about economic predictions not being practical due to the changing dynamics of economies worldwide!

I still choose to defy this and some of my predictions for 2008 are as follows. Do not worry – I will not try to state the obvious and this is a result of some tad bit of analytical analysis thrown in for it to have some meaning.

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.

Technically, what is a recession?

There is so much talk of the world’s most misused word i.e. recession. When can we exactly use the term recession?

Forex/currency markets trading not allowed in India

I spoke to a couple of top investment bankers in India who said that currency trading is not allowed in India. I had written an earlier post on the Forex markets – http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/foreign-exchange-exposure-of-indian-it-bigwigsforward-exchange-contracts/.

There is some speculation about the Indian rupee’s full convertibility but that might not really change this policy.

I personally find this concept of currency markets quite fascinating. We did an entire course on International Financial management and I have a lot of key takeaways from my experience whilst at IIFT (Indian Institute of Foreign Trade – http://www.iift.edu) – my alma mater during my EMIB stint.

Research reports to come shortly – aka McKinseyQuarterly style

All our research reports would be in PDF format and we are going to do comprehensive consulting analysis for our readers on myriad topics especially on the business sectors.

All research reports would be made available at http://www.acc101.com

Watch that space for more.

The US subprime crisis – increasing chance of a US recession/burst of the US housing bubble

Cross posted in http://www.acc101.com 

First of all, there’s been a lot of talk about this US subprime crisis and it causing a worldwide economic slump.

Lets look at it methodically and analyze it with an analytical perspective before jumping to conclusions about how the entire world economy can sink into a recession.

What is the subprime lending (B-paper, second chance or near prime lending) market - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime ?