Tag: Financial Markets
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Dealing with Duopoly in a Regulated Sector
A recent episode involving determination of fees by commodity exchanges has sparked off an intense debate on the role of a regulator in dealing with a duopoly situation. The regulator here is the Forward Markets Commission (FMC) and the players the two commodities exchanges, NCDEX and MCX. The trigger is a decision by the FMC
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Rating the Raters
Even since the subprime crisis erupted last year, there has been an extensive debate about the role of credit rating agencies in exacerbating the crisis. Questions have been raised whether the rating agencies ought to have raised the red flag much earlier than they actually did, thereby protecting the interests of investors who placed reliance
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FII Participation in Indian Depository Receipts
A recent post on this blog examined changes to the SEBI DIP Guidelines made with a view to promoting qualified institutional placements [“QIPs”], as a measure to address domestic economic concerns, by enabling greater access to funds. While this shortage continues to be a cause for concern for domestic companies, given the interest rate hikes
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Nationalisation of Large Corporations
An interesting column in the Economic Times by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar looks at the biggest government takeovers in history: “Socialists, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Indira Gandhi in India, are famous for nationalising the biggest corporations. But the US government has taken over three of its biggest corporations within two weeks. Has the
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The Feasibility of a Toxic Relief Fund
The new proposal to deal with the financial crisis involves the U.S. Government setting up a special fund to acquire toxic or illiquid financial assets on bank balance sheets. The Times Online has a report: “Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, hopes to nationalise the global risks associated with America’s sub-prime mortgages by setting up
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Sarbanex-Oxley & the Subprime Crisis
One of our readers points to this column Did Sarbanes-Oxley miss a trick during subprime? in the Mint, where the author observes that the subprime crisis occurred despite the existence of stringent legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). However, unlike past corporate governance failures such as Enron & WorldCom (that that triggered the passage
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The Impact of Status Quo on Participatory Notes
Last week, there was expectation that SEBI would make some announcements regarding issuance of participatory notes (P-notes) by foreign institutional investors, particularly that curbs on P-notes will be removed. However, no decision was taken by SEBI and it was decided to defer the matter. In an editorial, the Financial Express comes out very strongly in
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Miscellaneous: Commodities Trading; Venture Capital, etc.
1. Commodities Futures Trading A few papers and columns have recently appeared in this area. In a paper titled Futures Trading in Agricultural Commodities, Sandhya Srinivasan finds that the ban on futures trading on 4 agricultural commodities in May this year has not been effecting in bringing down the price of all these commodities. Here
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Bulk Deals and Order Matching
The availability of income tax exemptions (on long term capital gains) for share transactions that are executed through stock exchanges have caused otherwise negotiated share sale and purchase deals to be implemented through the stock exchange mechanism. This would require parties to bear only the securities transaction tax (STT) at rates which are negligible compared
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Some Lessons from Bear Stearns
The New York Times DealProfessor has a column Burying Bear Stearns that highlights the takeaways from the Bear Stearns saga, which incidentally are matters we often endeavour to stress on this blog. They are: – Moral hazard– Systemic risk– Corporate governance
