Tag: reading

Has the market risen too fast too soon? It feels like only yesterday that all the “green shoots” talk from the US drove Nifty to overbought conditions. And then nothing happened. Europe took center stage and the drama there still continues. Are we talking about “brown shoots” now?

We had the same sort of bullishness in early 2010 and 2011 as well. And we are yet to reach those levels again.

I think its time to be nervous.

There comes a time in every Government run business where tough choices can no longer be avoided. Has time come to bury Air India?

Why does a piss poor country like India need a publicly financed airline when there are plenty of private players who are more than capable of filling in?

We spend more on keeping Air India alive than we spend on Rural Infrastructure. Where are our priorities?

We seem to think that Rs. 22 a day is enough for a person to live in rural India. But nobody questions as to why every Indian is expected to take on Rs. 577 of AI’s debt?

Given the succession of scams, it appears that we have developed a high tolerance to our government flushing our tax dollars down the drain. To paraphrase the French: The Maharaja is Dead, Long Live the Maharaja. Shut down Air India.

We are getting into the Valentine Day’s mood here at StockViz. We did a quick lookup up of the market over the last few years and guess what we found? On an average, the Nifty is up 1.3% on Valentine’s day! The biggest V-day was on Feb 14, 2008: +5.1%

Good luck for tomorrow!

The Wall Street Journal has a thought provoking article by Mr. Kagan – a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The key take away are:

• International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition
• Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and can be reversed and undone.
• The better idea doesn’t have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.
• In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies.
• The move from American-dominated oceans to collective policing by several great powers could be a recipe for competition and conflict rather than for a liberal economic order.
• Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of uncertainty that leads to miscalculation. Conflicts erupt as a result of fluctuations in the delicate power equation.

Read the whole thing here. It would be time well spent.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Kim Asger Olsen, an investment manager, has a succinct way of looking at the timeframes in which different people live. People active in the financial markets – traders, investment managers – live in the Real Market Time (RMT). It is rather different from Economist’s Hypothetical Time (EHT) or even Newspaper Headline Time (NHT).

The ability to figure out what matters and what doesn’t is key to living in the RMT. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to work in EHT (they dwell for too long on what already belongs in the past in RMT). And by the time it hits the Hindu (NHT) it doesn’t matter any more.

In RMT, if the can can be kicked down the road, it will be, and its good enough. People like Nouriel Roubini, David Rosenberg, etc live in the EHT – EHTers look at Greece, Portugal, Italy, China and think it spells the end of the world. The fact of the matter is that you will never have all the data you need to make decisions in real-time. Leave it to EHTers and the Hindu to be the Monday morning quarterback.

Read more here: http://economicsacloserlook.blogspot.in/2012/01/quotes-and-time-zones.html