May 2009 - Posts - Initial Private Opinion

May 2009 - Posts

Stock exchange - market halt: sensible

Posted by Sandeep Parekh at 
Mint carried an opinion piece on the use of market halts every time the stock market moves up by a large percentage as is common in India, US and many other jurisdictions. The argument is that such market halts shift liquidity and trades to offshore markets like Singapore. The piece concludes: "This raises questions for Indian regulators about...

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Bureaucracy and judicial revenge

Posted by Sandeep Parekh at 
The Wall Street Journal has an interview with T.S.R. Subramanian, former cabinet secretary - which seeks to discuss his new book on the state of India. He seeks to demean politicians and glorify bureaucrats in a predictably self serving manner: "Politicians, unleashed by the knowledge that they are very unlikely ever to be called to account for...

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Competition Commission - finally takes off

Posted by Sandeep Parekh at 
Finally today, the Competition Commission of India will take off . The lack of this key regulator was a result of bargaining trade offs between different rent seekers - for over 7 years. Much of it has been written about, so I will not discuss the past. However, the composition of the board, like that of most regulators is filled with people with limited...

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Some realism in OTC derivative regulations

Posted by Sandeep Parekh at 
The US Treasury has come out with some proposed changes to the world of OTC derivatives. This world of OTC derivatives is a world where two seemingly very sophisticated institutions exchange packages of risks in a customised manner. Over the past year there has been an increasingly loud call to shift these contracts to the exchange space so that there...

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Stock market boom

Posted by Sandeep Parekh at 
While I wholly avoid making predictions on the levels of the stock market, the current bull run should be tempered with the fact that some of the most aggressive increases in stock prices in the US occurred between 1930 and 1933. With almost certain political uncertainty, the faint hearted should avoid the markets like a plage (or H1N1). We still have...

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