At any major sporting event it costs a lot of money to advertise on:- players' sleeves or shirts,
- billboards within the view of the cameras,
- television coverage of the game
Not to mention the high cost of associating the game-itself with your company name! How do you circumvent this costly advertising and get as much publicity? Reliance figured out a way to do just that. They know the age old adage that "sex sells." Reliance hired these cute models to wear a sports bra with Reliance Mobile name on them and wave an Indian flag during the World Twenty20 games. What a brilliant idea!
However, the idea is hardly original. Do you remember the (in)famous incident involving US soccer player Brandi Chastain tearing off her uniform shirt at the 1999 Women's World Cup to celebrate US victory in the finals? It looked spontaneous at that time. Later it was revealed that [no pun intended] she was advertising for the new sports bra line-up by Nike.
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( 3 / 17 )
On September 5th, 2007 an article in the Times of India mentioned about rumors of Chiranjeevi joining politics, or even starting his own party. The article goes like this:------- Begin quote from the article ---------
Mega star Chiranjeevi’s absence at some public functions has raised eyebrows. He even missed his son, Ramcharan Tej's, movie Chirutha’s audio function, and here’s the icing. He skipped his birthday party as well.
And the grapevine is abuzz with rumours of Chiranjeevi joining politics.
Chiranjeevi, we also hear, is having discussions with his well wishers on the same.
Others still, have brushed aside these reports and are defending Chiranjeevi saying that the actor has no intentions of joining politics as of now.
----------------End quote from the article ---------------
Well the question remains, "Will he or won't he?"
A little bird told me that he will in fact enter politics soon.
Very soon.
I wish him well.
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( 3 / 21 )
Are real estate prices in India too high? Or the Indian RE market simply a bubble? Can you spot a bubble when you see one? Questions, questions! I don't know the answers. I was able to spot the RE bubble in US back in 2004. I positioned myself to short a few home builders in July 2005 and made some quick money. The real downturn occurred only after I closed my positions. A study by FICCI and Ernst and Young said that as many as 11 tier II cities in the country are emerging as growth centers that could transform the landscape of India. Included among these 11 cities is Vishakhapatnam (Surat, Chandigarh, Nagpur, and Vadodara are among the rest).
An article in the Economic Times (of India) says that the realty sector in India is growing by more than 30 per cent per annum and this order of growth is shifting the focus of investors and developers to relatively smaller cities and hence there is a likelihood of such emerging cities leading the transformation of the real estate sector, the study says.
I, like most people, may not be able to recognize an economic bubble. However, I can certainly recognize a hot-air balloon when I see one.
What is the one thing you will always hear from a RE agent if you are in the market for buying a property?
"This is the best time to buy."
That's what they said here in US back in 2004 and 2005. I rest my case.
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( 2.9 / 36 )
Rahul Gandhi, 37, was on Monday appointed Congress general secretary and inducted into the Congress Working Committee (CWC) in an indication that the party is preparing for early elections and that the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is being groomed for higher and heavier responsibilities.Get ready for another Gandhi in the dynasty.
A personal note: I read somewhere that he dropped out of Harvard in 1993 because of security concerns. Back in 1994 when I was working in Cambridge, MA, I once rode standing next to a young man who was about my height, very fair and handsome and looked almost like Rajiv Gandhi. I just wondered if it was Rahul himself. And it was he - riding alone! No security and no escort!
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( 3 / 31 )
24 years after India won a World title Down Under, finally, Indian cricket team won World Twenty20 tournament in South Africa. This is for the record books: India 157-5 (20 overs) beat Pakistan 152 (19.3 overs) by five runs on Monday, September 24th, 2007. Congratulations to Indian Team and the fans.
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( 2.9 / 31 )
All set for India-Pak finals in the World20. Thanks to Yuvraj Singh again! 70 runs in 30 balls! Impressive is an understatement. Congratulations, Team India!
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( 2.9 / 27 )
As a student of the financial markets in the last 18 years, I've learned to respect the opinions of many great investors and strategists. At the top of the list is Mr. Warren Buffet. Also in my list of people to listen to is Mr. Barton Biggs, a veteran stock market strategist and now a hedge fund manager at Traxis Partners. He wrote an article in Newsweek about the recent shakiness in the financial markets. Whether you are in India, Europe, Australia or in USA, you will find this article very useful and educational. He specifically taks about the power of "FEAR" in driving the markets, up or down.Excerpts:
First, volatility breeds fear and therefore more volatility. The giant hedge funds and proprietary trading desks are run by people who, like us, are susceptible to fear and greed. Most are not particularly intellectual, analytical or studious. They rely on their intuitions, and their basic instinct is to buy when prices are rising and sell when they are falling. This is called "trend following" or momentum investing. Most computer-driven trading models are similarly programmed. In other words, selling begets more selling and vice versa.
Furthermore, the executives these hyperactive souls work for are very intolerant of losses—drawdowns, in the lingo of the business. The clients of the hedge funds, particularly the funds of hedge funds, will yank their money if a fund has a couple of months of 3 to 4 percent declines in net asset value. The risk managers who run the trading desks at the big investment banks and brokers are even more trigger-happy. If a proprietary trader gets down 10 percent, he is likely to be closed down.
Conversely, when a decline abruptly changes into a rally, traders who sold into the decline are scared to death that they will miss the chance to make back their losses. A buying panic develops. This frenetic activity is rationalized by the participants' murmuring "the market acts well" when it's going up and that "it acts badly" when the beast is falling. Mutual-fund and pension managers are less frenetic but they also are under pressure to outperform their benchmarks. While holding cash is a sure benchmark beater in a down market, it is a millstone heavy burden in a rally.
His take on housing:
History suggests house prices in the United States will gradually fall another 5 to 10 percent and then remain soggy for years. Consumer spending will be seriously affected by the decline in house prices, and the U.S. economy will slow in the quarters to come but not slip into a recession. Any homeowner rescue package will be enormously expensive, quite inflationary and therefore unfriendly to bonds and the dollar.
However, the big capitalization, U.S. multinational companies that earn half of their profits abroad are still as cheap, relative to everything else, as they have been in 80 years. The world economy is healthy. Developing economies are booming, and account for almost 30 percent of world GDP. The economies of China and India are expanding at around 10 percent per year. On the other hand, slower U.S. growth is probably good because it suggests inflation will not be a problem.
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( 3 / 35 )
Parliament Square is a square outside the north-western end of the Palace of Westminster in London. It features a large open green area in the middle, with a group of trees to its west. You will see on the premises the statues of some of the greatest legends of English history. Now, the City of London is considering putting Mahatma Gandhi's statue on this square. London Mayor Ken Livingstone has said he would like to see a statue of Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square. ".. [Mohandas Karmchand Gandhi] perhaps had a bigger significance on the British Empire than anyone else, because two thirds of it got independent overnight."
If Gandhi statue is approved to be on the Square, Mahatma will have an interesting company: Sir Winston Churchill, who couldn't hide the disdain for Gandhi with his (in)famous quote: "half-naked fakir."
Well, Mr. Churchill, I certainly hope that they will put Mahatma's statue right opposite to yours so that you get to see the "half-naked fakir" every day, 24/7! :)
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( 3.1 / 18 )
If your net worth is only $1 billion, you are not rich enough to be in the Forbes 400. If your net worth is a teeny bit less than 2.4 billion, you wouldn't have made the Forbes 400 list and, of course, you wouldn't be reading this blog if your range is that high! India's rich are also marching toward the top of our rankings. Brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani, who split up their family’s conglomerate in 2005, join Lakshmi Mittal, who heads the world's biggest steel company, Arcelor Mittal, among the world’s 20 wealthiest. India now has three in the upper echelons, second only to the U.S.
This year's Forbes top 20 has three Indians, Lakshmi Mittal and the Ambani brothers!
The Top 20:
----------
1. William Gates III
2. Warren Buffett
3. Carlos Slim Helú
4. Ingvar Kamprad
5. Lakshmi Mittal
6. Sheldon Adelson
7. Bernard Arnault
8. Amancio Ortega
9. Li Ka-shing
10. David Thomson
11. Larry Ellison
12. Liliane Bettencourt
13. Prince Alwaleed
14. Mukesh Ambani
15. Karl Albrecht
16. Roman Abramovich
17. Stefan Persson
18. Anil Ambani
19. Paul Allen
20. Theo Albrecht
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( 3.1 / 18 )
In 2004 news anchor Dan Rather was forced to resign because of a CBS News story related to President Bush going AWOL (Absence WithOut Leave) in Texas Air National Guard. The story involved 'forged-documents' which CBS news aired without checking the accuracy of the documents, thereby allegedly damaging the credibility of a sitting President. Prior to resigning from CBS News, Mr. Rather has aired several stories that were critical of Bush administration's policies. That made him an adversary of Bush administration - especially to Karl Rove. Many a times Rove's enemies bit dust with adversity coming from unexpected angles. Nobody could really pin any evidence on Rove himself. However, as the thinking goes, the fake-documents about Bush's National Guard record were peddled to a person described as Bush's critique. That person then approached CBS news with this story and CBS news aired the story. Several corroborative witnesses confirmed the story to be true. However, the fact that 'fake-documents' were involved not-only muddied the waters enough to cast doubt on the allegation itself, but also took one of the great journalists, down with it
Now Mr. Rather is alleging that he was made a scapegoat in this matter and he is suing his former employer CBS News for $70 million for breach of contract. Reuters news agency quoted Rather's lawsuit, filed at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, as saying: "Central to defendants' plan to pacify the White House was to offer Rather as the public face of the story, and as a scapegoat for CBS management's bungling of the entire episode."
Mr. Rather, I believe you. Stand-up for yourself and clear your name once and for all. This may be the only opportunity to bring the whole truth and nothing but the truth out.
[The story via MSNBC.com]
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( 3.1 / 34 )
"Getting a good start was never a worry - we got a good start in the last game. But you don't expect six sixes in an over - what Yuvraj did was great for the team."Here is how it happened (via BBC.com)
19th over - Ind 207-3 SMASH! BANG! BOSH! SPANK! BIFF! Erm, DOINK! Oh dear, Freddie appears to have made Yuvraj a rather angry young man and it's Broad that is paying the price as the left-hander brutalises six sixes!! The left-hander spanks one for what has to be the biggest six of the competition and repeats the stroke over cow corner next ball. He makes it three in a row with one over long-on and then smashes a fourth over backward point. Broad hasn't a clue what to do and the next two both sail out of the ground, one over midwicket, the next mid-on. Un. Bell. Eevable work from Yuvraj, who brings up his 50 off just 12 balls - the fastest ever half century in international cricket.
"How many times do people need to be told?! Colly is not a Geordie, he's a Mackem as he's a Sunderland lad. I'm from Middlesbrough and therefore I'm a Smoggy. It's that simple, Simon."
Max in the TMS inbox
Yuvraj joins the elite club in which Gary Sobers and Ravi Sastry are members. Congratulations.
[More from BBC]
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( 3 / 33 )
Amitji, you shouldn't have acted in that '(f)remake' of Sholay as RGV ki Aag.
What do you think?
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( 3.1 / 29 )
Question: Who is the most powerful person in the economic circles around the world? Answer: The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He/she is almost as powerful as the President of the United States.
As expected, the Fed cut the interest rate by 50 basis points to 4.75% [a basis point is one percentage point, or 0.01%]. The purpose of this rate cut is ensure that money is cheap to borrow. The expectation is that this will ease the credit crunch. Specifically, some home-owners who borrowed money on adjustable rate mortgages are expected to be able to refinance their loans and lower their payments. Will this have the intended result [i.e. ease the credit crunch] or make things worse? We have to wait and see the long term effect of this. But for now, the markets like it. DOW up 335 (2.5%) and NASDAQ surged 70 (2.7%).
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( 3 / 29 )
The 81-year old former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Alan Greenspan is back in the news again. He wrote a book! I was never a big fan of Mr. Greenspan's irresponsible easy-money policies that created the biggest stock-market bubble in the history of this country. Recently two new articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal about the myth of Greenspan. One by Mr. Donald Luskin and the other by my favorite economist/stock market strategist, Mr. James Grant. Here are some excerpts from these articles:
Excerpts from the article: The Banker Looks Back (registration required)
By JAMES GRANT
WSJ, September 18, 2007
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sooner or later, the dollar will lose its luster and finally its value, as paper currencies always do. Striving to understand why people trusted it in the first place, historians will naturally reach for the memoirs of the foremost central banker of his day. But Mr. Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence" will leave them just as confused as they ever were.
[Alan Greenspan]
The first reports of the book's contents trumpeted Mr. Greenspan's criticism of the current administration's spending habits and his (approving) sense that the Iraq war had something to do with crude oil. But the real news in "The Age of Turbulence" is what it reveals about the greenbacks to which Mr. Greenspan affixed his celebrity signature and the ways in which the currency has been managed and, especially, mismanaged.
A more self-knowing memoirist might have titled this book "The Age of Credulity." The great public drama of Mr. Greenspan's life is, of course, the work he performed as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. That work, in all but name, was price fixing. It consisted (and, under his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, still consists) of setting an interest rate and shoving it down the throat of the world's largest economy. It is a mighty strange work for a "libertarian Republican," as the Maestro styles himself here, let alone a former worshipful member of the inner circle of the radical individualist Ayn Rand. "It did not go without notice," the author writes of his swearing-in as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, "that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office."
The fantastic irony of Mr. Greenspan's career path -- from gold-standard libertarian to federal interest-rate fixer -- seems hardly to have registered on Mr. Greenspan himself. The closest he comes to acknowledging it is his description of how the Fed looked to him from the outside. It was, he writes, a "black box." Having watched his mentor, Arthur Burns, struggle with the chairmanship, Mr. Greenspan notes, "it did not seem like a job I felt equipped to do; setting interest rates for an entire economy seemed to involve so much more than I knew." A deeper kind of libertarian might have added: "Maybe nobody can know enough to set interest rates for an entire economy."
So Mr. Greenspan, a consulting economist of no special attainments (on the eve of the 1974 stock-market collapse, he was quoted in the New York Times saying "it is rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now"), agreed to perform the impossible. Succeeding Paul A. Volcker, he became America's monetary central-planner-in-all-but-name. Mr. Greenspan ruled the roost in 74 fiscal quarters, of which recession darkened only five.
Under his direction, the Fed became a kind of first responder to the scene of financial and economic distress. It soothed taut nerves following the 1987 stock-market break, nourished a crisis-ridden banking system with cheap money in 1990-92, helped to lead the Clinton administration's rescue of the Mexican economy in 1994-95 and engineered the so-called soft landing of the U.S. economy, also in 1995. It famously trimmed its interest rate three times during the Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 1998, succeeding so well in one artfully timed intervention that the stock market, in the final hour of a single session, leapt by 7%. And the market kept right on leaping, all the way to the Nasdaq's own Mount Everest in March 2000. One of those rare recessions followed, after which came the campaign to scotch what Mr. Greenspan was pleased to call "deflation." To fend off the peril of low and lower everyday prices, the Fed pressed its interest rate all the way down to 1% in 2003 and kept it there until mid-2004. Now it was house prices that went into orbit. They were just beginning to return to Earth when Mr. Greenspan retired from public life.
Readers who got one of the fancy new teaser-rate mortgages in 2003 or 2004, and who have lived to rue the day, are unlikely to find much nourishment in Mr. Greenspan's discussion of the theory of financial bubbles or in his self-exculpating account of the Fed's role in financing them with artificially low interest rates. Nobody can identify a bubble as it is inflating, Mr. Greenspan has long insisted -- though, as you will not read in these pages, Mr. Greenspan was so certain that he detected a stock-market bubble in 1994 that he tried to prick it by pushing interest rates up. Strangely, the author's bubble-sensor failed him later in the decade. He did, in 1997, utter the innocuous phrase "irrational exuberance," but that was as far as he went in attacking sky-high equity valuations.
Mr. Greenspan now writes that the enlightened central banker will let speculation take its course. Following the inevitable blow-up, he will clean up the mess with low interest rates and lots of freshly printed dollar bills -- thereby gassing up a new bubble.
Only one of the troubles with this prescription is that it requires an enlightened central banker to carry it out. Nowhere in this book does Mr. Greenspan own up to his role of underestimating the severity of the credit troubles of 1990, or of cheering on the tech-stock frenzy in 1998-2000, or of dangling the most beguiling teaser rate of all during the mortgage frolics of 2004 -- i.e., that 1% federal-funds rate. In February 2004, only months before the Fed started to raise its rate, in a speech titled "Understanding Household Debt Obligations," Mr. Greenspan demonstrated next to no understanding. His advice to American homeowners was not that they lock in a fixed-rate mortgage while the locking was good, but rather that they consider an adjustable-rate model. He who set the rates got it backward.
=============================================================
Excerpts from the article: The Greenspan Myth (registration required)
By DONALD L. LUSKIN
WSJ, September 13, 2007; Page A17
---------------------------------------
Mr. Greenspan is fondly remembered for his role in stewarding markets through the stock crash of 1987, the Long Term Capital Management crisis of 1998, the collapse of the tech bubble in early 2001, and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Today he enjoys a reputation for having moved swiftly and decisively -- "pre-emptively" it is often said now -- to help the markets out of those crises.
But the truth is quite different. Mr. Greenspan is fortunate indeed to be remembered as such a decisive leader, because in fact his reactions to some of those crises were quite tardy, and were seen by most market participants at the time as being too little, too late.
Let's look at the Long Term Capital Management crisis of 1998, an event in many ways analogous to today's situation. Then the markets were thrown into turmoil by emerging market currency devaluations and Russia's default on its sovereign debt, much as markets have recently been rocked by defaults in subprime mortgages. As a consequence, then as now, the solvency of hedge funds and the investment banks that sponsored them were threatened.
By the time LTCM had collapsed -- and had to be bailed out by a private consortium of banks brought together by the New York Fed's William McDonough, not Mr. Greenspan -- the S&P 500 had already fallen by almost 20%, and staged a modest recovery from there. Mr. Greenspan had done precisely nothing with interest rates.
The Federal Open Market Committee made a 25 basis-point rate cut the day after the LTCM bailout was announced in late September. Markets were not impressed. Credit markets remained frozen much as they have been in the current crisis, and stocks fell to new lows over the first 10 days of October.
Laurence Meyer, a Federal Reserve Board governor at the time, recalls in his 2004 book, "A Term at the Fed," that "Rather than calming the markets, the small size of the rate cut raised doubts that the Fed appreciated the severity of the problem . . . Greenspan was now under attack."
In mid-October, Mr. Greenspan cut rates another 25 basis points in a surprise inter-meeting move. According to Bob Woodward in his Greenspan biography "Maestro," Mr. Greenspan was reluctant to make that move but was pressured by Mr. McDonough and then Fed Vice Chairman Alice Rivlin.
By the end of 1998 there was another 25 basis-point cut at a regular FOMC meeting, the market turmoil passed and Mr. Greenspan ended up on the cover of Time as chairman of the "Committee to Save the World." That's how he's remembered today.
------------------------------------------
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( 2.9 / 14 )
The biggest social problem facing America is the broken down system of health care. Health care in America is very expensive and costs a lot. The primary means of getting health care coverage is through employment. It is not far-fetched to say that there are a lot of Americans who otherwise don't need to work are employed for one and only one reason: to get health care coverage. What about those millions without jobs and with jobs that don't cover health care? Well, they suffer in silence as the profit driven health insurance companies drive premiums high and keep insurance out of reach for an average American family which isn't covered by employment-based insurance. 13 years ago, Mrs. Clinton - then first lady was put in-charge of a committee whose mission was to come up with a plan for universal health care for all Americans. The insurance companies and the Republican backed right-wing extremists came out in force to discredit the idea of universal health care. In the last 13 years things got worse, much worse. It is high time this so-called "only super-power" starts taking care of its own citizens' health. Now, Sen Hillary Clinton is proposing a universal health care plan as a part of her presidential campaign. [More from MSNBC.com]
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( 3 / 12 )
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