by Bikku Kuruvila and Shubho Roy.On 18th June, the President signed an ordinance that would settle the recent spat between SEBI and IRDA over unit linked insurance plans ("ULIPs"). The ordinance makes it clear that ULIPs cannot be regulated by SEBI and places them within the jurisdiction of IRDA. The ordinance also tries to prevent further disputes by setting up a joint committee to address future conflicts. But this is not all there is to the matter. The ordinance also amends 4 major acts of parliament governing financial markets in the country...
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Raghavendra Kamath has an article in the Business Standard today on experiments by Indian retailers at running stores for 24 hours a day.I have often wondered about the costs and benefits of the 24-hour stores that one sees in the US. Two things come to mind. First, the response of demand to extended hours will only show up with a lag, when people reconfigure their lives to exploit the consistent availability of stores at all times of the day or night. This won't happen immediately.Second, round the clock operation requires recruitment of...
Friday, 18 June 2010
Gal Backerman has this fascinating story about events from 1970 (40 years ago), where Soviet Jews started fighting for the ability to leave the USSR and go to Israel. By the end of 1971, 13,000 Soviet Jews were permitted to leave for Israel -- more than the number in the previous 10 years put together. In 1972, 32,000 people got the right to leave. The article ends with: But the true solution was no less mortal a threat to the Soviets in the late 1980s than it had been in 1970. If they let the Jews leave, what would keep...
Thursday, 17 June 2010
The Budget Speech of February 2010 had announced a `Technical Advisory Group for Unique Projects' (TAGUP). The press release about creation of this group is out. Giles Kepel has a great article in the National Interest on the concept of secularism and assimilation in France and the UK. It makes you think about how we're approaching the puzzle of forging an Indian identity - and the contrast between the damage caused by State policy as opposed to the interesting quiet changes taking place every day on the ground....
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
The rupee/dollar rate has gained in flexibility. In order to visualise what has changed, it's useful to look at a graph of the time-series of weekly percentage changes, expressed in absolute terms. That is, a change of -3% or +3% is shown as a bar of height 3 in this graph:The vertical blue lines show the dates of structural change in the exchange rate regime. These are taken from our recent paper The Exchange Rate Regime in Asia: From Crisis to...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)