Pertinent Observations

Archive for the 'economics' Category

13 Apr

Sponsorship Cannibalism

Back in 2004 Shamanth, Bofi, Anshumani and I started the IIT Madras Open Quiz. In some ways it was a response to critics of IITM quizzing, who blamed our quizzes for being too long, too esoteric, too disorganized and the likes. It was also an effort to take IITM quizzing to a wider audience, for [...]

12 Apr

What the hell was Vettori thinking?

I’m writing this post in anger. In disgust. At the sheer lack of strategic vision shown by Royal Challengers Bangalore captain Daniel Vettori. What the hell was he thinking when he threw the ball to Virat Kohli for the 19th over, with 43 required off two overs? Yes, there had been a miscalculation earlier which [...]

01 Jan

Signaling

this post was written yesterday when blog was down, so posting it now.  Bob: Damn, I’ve to go to Eve’s party tonight Alice: Oh, but I thought you actually wanted to go? Bob: Nope, I have other things to do and it’s inconvenient to go. But if I don’t go, Eve will get hurt. Alice: [...]

30 Dec

Home food culture

We Indians have a “home food” culture. Most people consider it immoral and “bad” to eat out, and more so to eat out on a regular basis. People who don’t cook food at home are termed as being lazy. I remember this story I’d read in Tinkle back when I was a kid. It was [...]

09 Dec

The problem with real estate taxation

I spent a year working in an India-focused high frequency trading hedge fund. I used to trade stocks and equity derivatives there. We were primarily an arbitrage hedge fund, and our aim was to make money by trading on assets that were mispriced, in order to make riskless profits. For example, if the price of [...]

06 Dec

Free float and rupee volatility

Following a brief discussion on twitter with @deepakshenoy I’m wondering what’s preventing the RBI from making the rupee fully convertible. The usual argument for full convertibility is that it will make the exchange rates volatile. My argument is that exchange rates are already so volatile that the additional volatility that could stem out of a free [...]

29 Nov

Retail and FDI and Channels and Food Wastage and …

About five years back, I spent a brief period of time working for a management consulting company. Back then, we had been told that “retail” was “big” – if not in anything else, because it was potentially going to bring a great deal of consulting business to my firm. There was a partner or two [...]

12 Nov

Ranji Trophy and the Ultimatum Game

The Ultimatum Game is a commonly used research tool in behavioural economics. It is a “game” played between two players (say A and B) where A is given a sum of money which he has to split among himself and B. If B “accepts” the split,  both of them get the money as per A’s [...]

21 Oct

Travel agents and investment bankers

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that travel agents perform a very similar role to investment bankers. In the olden days, not everyone had access to financial markets. In order to buy or sell stocks, one had to go through a brokerage company, who would be paid a hefty commission for [...]

19 Oct

The Global Financial Crisis Revisited

When we talk about the global financial crisis, one question that pops up in lots of people’s heads is about where the money went. Since every trade involves two parties, it is argued that every loser has a corresponding winner, and that most commentary about the global financial crisis (of 2008) doesn’t talk about these [...]

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