Let’s start with Bemoneyaware’s post on mis-selling and mis-buying which is a comprehensive article with takes from many people on the subject. It has links to a lot of articles and viewpoints about the topic and the one thing that I’d like to say about this issue is that usually not enough responsibility is placed on buyers. I was thinking about this recently when people were making indignant remarks about the Reliance buyback, but the very same folks will be happy to buy shares from the market and flip it to Reliance for a small profit. Your greed is someone else’s opportunity.

Hemant has an excellent article on LIC Jeevan Ankur.

He is associated with the Financial Planners Guild and they are organizing a financial planning clinic in Gurgaon on the 5th February. This is an event where you can meet with some of the financial planners and ask questions and get inputs on financial planning. Here is the link with registration details.

An interesting look on North Korea as an investment destination. I had no idea that so many companies from different parts of the world were interested in investing in North Korea and was really surprised to hear that they have casinos for tourists.

Ajay Shah writes about his personal experience with an unusual way of charging his debit card at the petrol pump in consumer protection issues with payments.

HBR has a useful post on networking for introverts.

Finally, an interesting take on why are people friendly. 

Enjoy your weekend!

To start with, Jitendra Solanki writes about Apollo Munich Optima Restore which is a health insurance plan that has got some features which make it attractive relative to other plans.

Ranjan writes about a new IDBI portal to buy government securities from. This is the first of its kind and I will look at it in detail at some point in the future.

Prof. Jayanth Varma writes about the many different kinds of fixed exchange rate regimes. A crisp post with 4 examples of small countries that have fixed exchange rate regimes and have managed them successfully.

The Psy-Fi blog on how government debt is different from personal debt and what governments have done in the past when faced with a huge debt burden.

Paris rolls out the red carpet for Chinese tourists. A great piece on how the French are wooing Chinese tourists.

Bemoneyaware has a great article on the documents that are needed as part of a will. 

Finally, the most incredible thing I read and discovered this week was this piece about Sweden extending its democracy to Twittersphere.

The government of Sweden has the official Twitter account – @sweden and they’re allowing a citizen to tweet through that account for a week and this week the tweets are from Anna.

I’ve followed that account for three or four days and from what I can see there is no censorship at all. She’s tweeting out her mind and next week another Swede will get an opportunity to do that.

There are free countries, and then there are free countries.

Enjoy your weekend!

Yesterday I wrote about how things were getting quite in Europe, and today S&P downgraded a bunch of European countries!

The big name there is France, which is Europe’s second largest economy, but no longer a AAA country. They have downgraded 9 countries and affirmed the ratings of 7.

In Asia, the Japanese are using the Tsunami disaster to try out new things and one of the more incredible ideas is a 600 acre farm that will be wholly run by robots!

It was only a matter of time when this happened – Samsung, LG and Lenovo are launching TVs that can recognize hand gestures, faces and voice like Kinect – so very soon we will have TVs with no remotes!

Spiegel Online has a great piece on the Iran oil sanctions with a  great history on how oil sanctions have played out in the past, and this was a very insightful piece that I read this week.

Seth Godin talks about the first thing you do when you wake up and I must admit that I waste time in all of the ways he mentions.

At 7.7 millimeters – this is the smallest frog in the world – smaller than a tiny coin and the size of a house fly!

Finally, Rajeev Malik in Beyondbrics on saving India from its politicians.

Enjoy your weekend!

Update: There was an error in the post where I said S&P has downgraded 16 countries in all. They have downgraded 9 countries and affirmed the rating of 7.

The Economist has an interesting article on crowd wisdom which talks about how people decide which direction to move to when they see someone coming from the opposite direction, and they say that in France people step to the right to avoid a collision, while in most parts of Asia – people step to the left to avoid a collision. This has nothing to do with which side you drive because people drive on the left in London but step on the right to avoid a collision when walking.

The answer has to do with behavior which is also the topic of the second link in another interesting article on the behavioral economics of gift giving. It turns out that cash is the best gift, but you may not want to give such an impersonal gift – so try something expensive and useless if picking a gift for a girl and a gadget if looking for a gift for a guy!

Facebook is expected to come up with an IPO next year, and this WSJ story has some interesting details about how they are preparing for the IPO and things they want to watch out for like bowing to the short term expectations of shareholders.

I was surprised to read this article that said one political party in Iceland is suggesting that they adopt the Canadian dollar. It doesn’t look like this will happen and while it sounds very odd at first, when you think about it some more – if you are going to adopt something like the Euro why not adopt something more stable instead, right?

News of downgrades have become very common these days, so it was refreshing to see Moody’s praise Poland for managing inflation and maintaining a flexible exchange rate which combined with other things leads Moody’s to believe that Poland will grow rather than contract in 2012.

Something a bit less dramatic – Ranjan writes about Metlife’s Met Smart Child.

Finally, in a bit of relief India’s food inflation dips to 4 year lows.

Enjoy your Christmas weekend!

Update: Corrected the error pointed out by Ashok in his comment.

The best piece I’ve read on the Indian economic malaise is Shekhar Gupta’s editorial in the Indian Express where he talks about the various policy failures and self inflicted problems that are worsening the Indian economy.

I can’t think of even a single economic metric that has improved in the last two years, and if things continue to be this way then we’re in for some bad times ahead.

It is no surprise then that Morgan Stanley’s 2012 Indian outlook predicts a pre – crisis level growth. They forecast a 6.9% GDP growth rate in 2012, and while these estimates tend to go wrong and have to be revised several times – they do accurately reflect the gloomy scenario that we see today.

Beyondbrics reports on a dispute between Reliance Industries and the government which is in turn delaying BP’s participation in Reliance’s deepwater exploration.

China has had problems of its own this year, and their stock market has done quite badly (not as bad as Indian ones though), and that’s one reason why a hedge fund that shorted the credit of companies that will do badly in a Chinese slowdown has returned over 52% this year.

The problems of the BRIC countries are getting quite a lot of attention these days, and I see quite a few references of BRIC as Beyond Ridiculous Investment Concept on my Twitter feed these days.

Over at the US, they are fighting a bill that allows censorship of the internet, and several prominent American businessmen and investors have been writing about it for quite some time. Sergey Brin joined them yesterday.

Prof. Jayanth Varma gives a few examples of currency breakups.

Finally, a new theory on why we lost our fur.

Enjoy your weekend!

This has been a rather depressing week with bad news flowing in from all directions and that started with Kapil Sibal asking Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo! to screen user content and stop objectionable content from appearing on their websites.

This is ridiculous of course and will never see the light of day, but unfortunately, FDI in multi – brand retail has been killed and I guess we will have to wait for a crisis till this issue is raised again. The best thing I read about this was Bloomberg’s article titled Wal-Mart battles with Marx’s ghost in India. 

This week also saw the UID project getting derailed, but cheer up it’s just 550 crores or so down the drain! Nothing compared to the 30,000 crore or so that will go down the drain in Air India’s bailout.

The third thing that got derailed this week was allowing 49% FDI in Insurance.

This coupled with a weak rupee, widening trade deficit, high fiscal deficit and slowing growth makes beyondbrics ask if India is in crisis yet.

Yet is probably the operative word there, and the way things are going you get a feeling that it’s only a question of when and not if.

Jim O’Neill – the Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRIC said this week that India has been the most disappointing of the 4 countries, and here is what he had to say.

All four countries have become bigger (economies) than I said they were going to be, even Russia. However there are important structural issues about all four and as we go into the 10-year anniversary, in some ways India is the most disappointing

That’s it for this week!

The Smithsonian blog talks about the amazing possibilities that Microsoft’s Kinect presents. I was amazed when I first saw Kinect in action, and if they really come up with one that can recognize facial expressions, and read your lips – that will be quite incredible!

The ideas discussed in that post are quite exciting and I quite like the thought of not having to fiddle with a TV remote control and just wave my hands and control the TV from a distance.

The way technology is evolving – it doesn’t sound like a far fetched idea at all.

Ajay Shah has a great post on the frequently asked questions on the rupee, very relevant and informative, especially given the massive action in the Rupee exchange rate these days. This is a good post for anyone interested in the topic and also lays out in good detail why the government can’t just wave a wand and bring the exchange rate down.

Another excellent post – this one on explaining the European debt crisis with 8 simple graphs. This one does the best job of explaining the crisis in a way that’s easy to understand and holistic.

More on Europe, the NYT has a great article titled European Crisis in Plain English that explains a lot of the complex things going on there in simple words.

Together, these two articles go a long way in building an understanding of the European situation.

The markets have been bad this year, and I think most people have seen much worse returns than the indices, and that’s true for hedge funds also. Economist reports that while S&P fell 3.8% year to date – the average hedge fund has fallen about 9%.

Business Standard reports on the huge cash mountain that India Inc is sitting on.

Finally, Hemant on how mutual funds are taxed.

Enjoy your weekend!

Warren Buffett’s interview is easily the highlight of this week. There were several wow moments there, but let me just talk about a couple of them here.

First is when Buffett talks about owning 5.5% of IBM and says that he has never spoken to the leadership at IBM – and that IBM will come to know of his ownership through this interview!

That’s pretty amazing and is consistent with his investments in the past. It emphasizes that you don’t need access to the management or have any knowledge of a company’s affairs outside of what’s available in the public domain to make successful investments.

Secondly, he said something very insightful when asked about how he processes all the uncertainty that exists today. Here is what he said.

BUFFETT: The world’s always uncertain. The world was uncertain on December 6th, 1941, we just didn’t know it. The world was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you know, we just didn’t know it. The world was uncertain on September 10th, 2001, we just didn’t know it. The world—there’s always uncertainty. Now the question is, what do you do with your money? And if you—the one thing is if you leave it in your pocket, it’ll become worth less—not worthless—worth less over time. That’s certain—that’s almost certain. You can put it in bonds and then you can get a certain 2 percent for 10 years and that’s almost certain to be less than the decline and the purchasing power. You can put it in farms and the farms will probably keep growing corn and soybeans and they’ll grow it whether, you know, whether Italy has trouble tomorrow or not. It’s very interesting to me, if you own a farm and somebody said, you know, Italy’s got problems. Do you sell your farm tomorrow?

The way most people talk about the economic situation is exactly opposite of this but when you think about things in this light – that makes it a lot easier for you to process information without getting into panics and hold on to your stocks a lot longer than you otherwise would have.

On to other things – MoneySights declared that they were removing all charges and becoming free for the users. I know there were a couple of questions about this in the Suggest a Topic section so there has certainly been interest in their platform among readers here.

The finance ministry has given the nod to FDI in multi brand retail. Allowing big foreign players like Walmart in the Indian retail space will be a great thing. It will lower costs for the consumers, farmers should get better prices because big retailers will be able to cut middle men and better infrastructure should lead to significantly reduced wastage of food. I think this is great news and a step in the positive direction.

Not all news is good though – Macquarie has cut its India growth forecast to under 7% for the next fiscal.

Beyondbrics has a chart that shows the ratio of internet users and total population in the BRIC nations. India has the lowest penetration.

There has been a lot of noise about the heated Chinese real estate market and according to government statistics house prices fell 0.15% month on month in the 70 cities that they monitor.

Finally, the whole story of Ramayana in this incredible infographic.

Enjoy your weekend!

First up, Hemant has started a relatively low cost mutual fund advisory service where he will examine your mutual fund portfolio and also give you suggestions on new funds. Quite a few people write to me with a list of their mutual funds and ask what I think of them, and while I don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to evaluate your funds, this service might be of interest to you.

Next, is this amazing video about a 3D printed car - they printed out the frame of the car and it looks pretty impressive. I’m truly in awe with what 3D printing can do, and this is surely going to be a big wave in the future.

Another interesting video I saw this week was of the improved Sony robot – Asimo – pretty slick what this cute fellow can do.

On to something totally different now – WSJ had this fascinating story about these two Russian tycoons embroiled in a court case.

Equally fascinating was this story on the largest venture capital firm in the world  – I had never heard of this firm, and it was quite good education for me.

Europe is of course the big news these days and this story titled Italy’s turn to spook the world does a good job as a primer to what the Italian debt problem is all about, and why it is such a big deal.

Closer home – this fascinating article from Pakistan’s perspective on trade with India.

At home, BS writes about the government’s problem with revenues this year in this article titled about the other fiscal half.

India’s Chief Economic Adviser is interviewed about 5 books he likes.

Finally, some light humor: ultimate rejection rejection letter.

Enjoy your weekend!

Pakistan has spoken about giving India Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, and Ajay Shah has written a post with a fairly optimistic assessment of the situation.

While I don’t share his optimism there were a few new things I learned there and the post throws good light on the role that Dubai plays in India – Pakistan trade.

You know that RBI has deregulated the savings account rate, and banks have already started offering higher rates on savings account – China has observed this move and has a list of things that they can learn from this move. However, these are all things that they should learn to avoid!

Transparency International has released their new Bribe Payers Index for 2011. Netherlands is perceived to be the least corrupt, US is at number 10, India is 19, China is 27 and Russia is 28.

I don’t think there is a single developed country which has a corruption problem, and yet economists sometimes talk of corruption and bribes greasing the economy.

Singapore is number 8 on that list, and they were happy to see their unemployment rate fall unexpectedly this week.

Finally, Scott Adams writes about how stressful it is to be the least successful person in your reference group, and how changing his reference group and doing something that he was the best in within his reference group helped him .

That’s it for this week – enjoy your weekend!