The recession has clearly set in. Even terrorists are feeling it and like good corporate citizens they too are cutting costs

They brought along sack full of grenades, Kalashnikovs and other ammunition

Terrorist: “Auto, Liberty Chawk chalega?”

Autowalla: “Haan, saab. Par saab itna saman bhi hai kya? Toh Sir one-and-a-half times meter padega saab”

The Pakistan Police couldn’t shoot, maim or even injure a single terrorist

Obviously the Al-Qaida or the Taliban has better HR practices so sharp shooters see a much better career path in those orgaizations than they do with the government forces

M.S. Dhoni is happy that he is in New Zealand

Of course! Anyone who has seen “A Braveheart” and “Lord of the Rings” would know which of the two locales are better to tour

Jayawardene, the Sri Lankan skipper said that his team’s terror background helped.

WHAT?

I would rather had the Billu’s of the world doing the protesting. I mean, ace Investment Banker Bilwant “Billu” Aluwaliah could have easily led this protest on grounds that the film sandboxed him with people who shaped hair and massaged scalps and backs (as against his profession that shaped M&A disaters and massaged financials in pitch-books).

My fellow bongs are significantly more docile in these matters. A few years back a Mithun Chakrabarti starrer named “Hanumanprasad Bandwalla” did roaring business without the musicians (or the monkeys) complaining.

In the land of the Mahatma, has tolerance left the building?

Y.Rajeev Reddy

Chairman and Managing Director, Country Club India Limited.

Mr. Rajeev Reddy, an entrepreneur in spirit is the Founding Chairman & Managing Director of Country Club (I) Ltd (CCIL) – a multicrore Entertainment and leisure Infrastructure conglomerate.

His is the story of vision and hard work, a story typical of an entrepreneur, a graduate in commerce he decided to endeavor into Real Estate and Construction when he was 21 years old. With minimum capital, Mr. Reddy started a real estate company with name of Amrutha Estates named after his mother in the year 1981. The first ambitious project he undertook was Ashiana, a residential complex consisting of 20 deluxe flats, in the capital city of Andhra Pradesh. Since then he has completed 38 prestigious projects in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Eventually, with the idea of establishing an executive club and spreading the club culture to various sections of society. Mr. Reddy made his move when he was on the heels of construction of residential and commercial complexes.

Indeed, there was an experience that made the genesis of the idea of establishing a club that could reach the laymen. Realizing that many clubs make it difficult for common people to obtain membership, Mr. Reddy started the club in 1989 which now stands as a landmark in the city of Hyderabad.

Mr. Reddy’s motive to create the club is to be accessible and affordable for all sections of society. A staunch believer in validating his products, he has been the face of the company since its inception.

Mr. Reddy is a fitness enthusiast who loves to swim. A tennis champ who represented his state then, He now enjoys Adventure sports like Para gliding, River Rafting & Scuba Diving. Mr. Reddy has two sons and a daughter who are also the board members of the Country Club (India) Ltd.

Y.Siddharth Reddy

Joint Managing Director, Country Club India Ltd.

Enterprise is a dream he lived by.

At 22, acknowledge as being the youngest CEO of a public limited company in the Corporate India Circuit, Y Siddharth Reddy is a natural leader and a thorough bred entrepreneur who stepped into a dream to achieve new levels of corporatism. He was only the 3rd person in his high schools 75 year old history to be appointed to four leadership positions simultaneously including the Deputy Head Boy.

The ideal descriptions are a cliché on him. A Self starter, assertive and goal driven, he set a trial of positives to the organization to lead the team to a new phase of growth and development. Building communication platform, creating strategic alliances, developing opportunities beyond promised deliverables and expanding the sheer network strength, via franchisee route in the Country Club belongs to him.

A hard core finance professional, he accumulated knowledge from Pennsylvania State University – University Park for a year and a half and transferred to the University of Texas at Austin with a short stint at Harvard in-between.,. He worked with Merrill Lynch just before his senior year and refused 5 employment offers with companies like IBM, Intel, etc before he decided to move to India to work with his father. Sid joined CCIL in 2005 to transform the then CCIL of $5 million dollars in size along withhis father initially and later on with brother to a whopping 60 times higher into a $300 million dollar company in just 3 years.

Active in the ongoing acquisitions and restructuring process, Siddharth wears his mantle lightly as he rides the recent successful completion of two major capital raising exercises, a $25 million foreign currency convertible bond offering listed on the Singapore Stock exchange and another a $125 million dollar Global Depository Receipt/Qualified Institutional Placement listed in Luxemburg and subscribed by over 18 investors across the UK, USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. The investor list also included leading global players like Goldman Sacs, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Wellington and Citigroup.

Along with this, since 2005 he built new divisions from scratch. He set up a franchise division with offices across the country and signed up over 125 franchises in over 40 national and international destinations. To enhance corporate communiqué and client participation he started a magazine called the Update which now has a readership of over 250,000 and is one of the largest in house magazines in the country in a short time span of 2 years.

He also takes a special interest in finance and is credited with setting up and executing the first phase of a web based Enterprise Resource Management system across 55 divisions throughout the country simultaneously.

Known to be an intelligent, humorous and passionate speaker, He was also an avid tennis player and was ranked in the top 100 of the Indian national tennis circuit. It’s his sportsmanship that has helped him dabble in experiments, In a lighter vein, Sid sported a goatee early in his career to look “older” since all his colleagues and business associates were a lot more advanced in the age bracket; what with he being invited to speak at various institutions including most recently at the University of Texas at Austin.

Varun Reddy

Chief Operating Officer, Country Club India Ltd.

All things powerful come in small packages. Now the youngest COO on the Corporate India Circuit, Varun Reddy stepped into the corporate zone in his teens. He is 23 now.

Dynamic, Aggressive and Focused, he joined the Country Club part time way back in 2002, and worked part time ever since to don the mantle as Chief Operating Officer in 2006. A Graduated from Rutgers University with a double major in Economics and Communication, he has been responsible for many live projects at Country Club India Ltd since then – that to this day continue to grow from strength to strength.

Presently Varun Reddy as Chief Operating Officer has been responsible for infusing far sweeping changes in the field of technology applications, Operations and Communications within the organization.

For an organization that has over 60% of its employees in their twenties, he is a role model instilling passion and aggression in great measure. The new generation lifestyle needs is imbibed into the clubbing culture with him at the helm. The Country Club Mysore road, a club he was responsible in setting it up from scratch earlier (2002), is also the first to have a dance floor in the network of CCIL owned properties.

With a training ground that breeds Intrapreneurs, he enjoys working with radical thinking individuals driving them with innovation and speed. The current rapid expansion spree in establishing marketing offices across India has caught fire under him. A keen marketer with a pulse on the market he is all set to set new milestones for the organization.

Varun indulges with work as a Globe trotter with an eye for adventure; he has traveled extensively including backpacking across continents like Europe, Australia New Zealand and South America. Varun Reddy has a passion for flying and is also a qualified Private Pilot from Princeton Flying School.

Amen.

• Spokesman: We refute the evidence. It is certainly not enough for taking punitive action against a CEO
• Spokesman: The fraud was perpetrated by non-company actors. Satyam is deeply commited to fighting and eradicating frauds
• Spokesman: We have arrested the criminals. They are all agents of Infosys (or Wipro, or TCS – take your pick) who were planted in the company to bring about bad reputation for us
• Diversionary measures: Start a proxy war on another front. Offer 90-day-no-charge consultants to all customers (especially clients with Infosys, TCS, Wipro et al as incumbent vendors). Threaten to extend this for 180 days if the focus doesn’t shift away from the CEO

Unfortunately the financial markets, even in their current state of shambles, is much less forgiving than the precarious political market place is.

We even saw what they looked like. Dark turtle necks with chest-prints, cargo trousers and electric blue back-packs. Clean shaven, fair complexioned and almost bordering on being handsome. Put them in a group at a mall and they would be fun loving youngsters, bullish about a zest for life despite the economic recession. Give them an AK-47 and they would be very different – the zest for life replaced with a disdain for death. This is the new face of terrorism in India.

Twenty four hours later there is no S.W.A.T. team storming the hotels like Israeli forces stormed the Uganda airport in 1976 and finished things off in 35 mins. It is understandable. A nation always strives to protect resources that are scarce and with 1.2 billion homo sapiens walking our nation’s soil, human life can hardly be labeled as scarce. A few hundred dead will be just a blip. Politicians responded to this crisis with what they are best at – empty rehtoric. The leader of the ruling party (and you thought that was the Prime Minister, eh, stupid?) delivered a speech with a distinctly audible prompter nudging her through the italian accented hindi (Jesus Christ, even such a thing exists in phonetics).

The indominatable spirit of Mumbai will not be tested this time. It is not the Kambles, Bholes, Narvekars and Jambodekars travelling on the 6:47 Churchgate Slow who have been attacked this time. The nameless vote bank is not the affected party this time. Absolved with the responsibility of clearing human debris, the common man in India for the first time has the opportunity to sit back and, to use a macabre phrase under current circumstanced – savour – the seige that Mumbai has been put under. And audaciously ask themselves and hopefully later the person who kocks to beg for the ballot a simple question. How can you guarantee that I will return home today? Alive?.

Tom & Jerry engages me in an unique way. Because it contains no dialogue. Every frame behooves me to provide the dialogues in my mind – fill the gaps in my own way to complete the viewing experience. To test my theory I observed a group of kids watching the cartoon. There were several instances where two or more kids blurted out a different point of view during a sequence. It was the same pictures on the screen but the kids filled the gaps in their own way.

This is also why we like cartoons and caricatures that have very little to say along with the pictures. Fill-in-the-blanks become a very personalized experience.

Total funds pledged by the Fed in current crisis = $ 1.014 billion trillion
Size of India’s 2008 GDP in Dollar terms = $ 1 trillion

A lot has been made of the Federal Reserve’s bail out of American Insurance Group (AIG), Freddie and Fannie and the announcement last week of the “several hundreds of billion dollar” fund to purchase illiquid securities. The markets worldwide heaved a sigh of relief after a week that shook the very foundation of the US Financial system. The champions of capitalism went huddling in a corner to digest if a state bail-out was indeed written in the handbook while the Socialists went around with a smugness that screamed “I told you so. This is the high-noon of socialism in the heartland of Ann Rynd”. Many commentators have argued that free-enterprise and state sponsored rescues cannot coexist in the same jungle and that the Mecca of Capitalism should have allowed the precarious Institutions to fail. Lost in this din of the battle of governance model is the simple matter of governance – that what rises above every other consideration. The government is in the business of delivering governance and it was important for the Fed and the US government to bail out the troubled institutions as the alternative was to plunge the world into financial anarchy.

There is one argument that can be conceded – that is of the Fed selectively bailing out Bear Sterns (albeit in a package with J P Morgan) while allowing Lehman to crumble. Probably the Fed misread the enormity of the situation and hence rescued the first institution to display trouble, little realizing that the trickle will soon become a flood.

It is naïve to compare the effects of Lehman’s demise with the probable tectonic shivers that a collapse of Fannie, Freddie and AIG would have had on the US (and hence, the world) economy. The first two collectively owned or guaranteed more than half of the $12 trillion mortgage market in the United States. In addition, they are the largest participants in the secondary market of mortgage and securities that derive their values from underlying mortgages. The second aspect of Freddie and Fannie’s role, the secondary market presence, is important because their collapse would have rendered almost every mortgage backed instrument completely illiquid (hence close to zero value for mark-to-market purposes). Had that happened, Lehman would have had the company of many marquee Wall Street names on their way down.

The central bank in any country is a lender of the last resort. The principles of central banking are the same irrespective of the color of the government. By creating the $700 billion fund, the Fed was just carrying out that responsibility. It is impossible in the economics rule-book to inject such a vast amount of liquidity directly in the market so creation of the RTC type fund was the best the world could have had from the Fed under the current circumstances. It is unknown how much of illiquid asset backed paper is lying in Wall Street but $720 billion should go a long way to re-establish the semblance of a market in these assets.

Michael Lewis starts his book “The Liar’s Poker” stating that Wall Street is actually a narrow ally in downtown Manhattan that has a graveyard at one end and a river at the other. Diabolic as it may sound, the Federal Reserve has indeed behaved like the Lemming that decided to run the other way from the river. The dying days of the Bush administration has given the most enduring policy of the past eight years coming out of the White House.

Technorati Tags: Lehman, Goldman, Freddie, Fannie, AIG, Bailout, Credit Crisis, Bear Sterns, Wall Steet

Ever since Michael Douglas, as the effervescent Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, took the microphone in the Telda Papers Annual Meeting and espoused the “Greed is Good. Greed clears the mind…” principle, Wall Street CEOs have subscribed to that with all heart. Lehman Brothers is not an isolated case of infliction of this virus. However, it was one that along with Bear Sterns went down to the bowels of history.

But so did Merrill Lynch even though people are not smearing that house with the same black paint that Lehman is attracting. Is it because Thain managed to find a buyer in the nick of time? Does that absolve Merrill of all sins? It is interesting that Lehman’s CEO Richard Fuld went as far East as Korean Development Bank to seek a bailer for his bank. It is said that Fuld did not agree to the price KDB was willing to pay. It is further alleged – rather professed – that Fuld’s reluctance stemmed from what they teach a rookie trader to avoid – “never fall in love with your position” they say. Fuld, the longest running CEO on Wall Street, fell in love with his bank, his mortgage backed and realty assets that he could not accept were close to being worthless. Contrast this with Thain, who became Merrill’s boss in December 2007. It is said he sold off generous tranches of his MBS and related holdings at 22 cents a dollar. He did not shirk in selling his Bloomberg stake to shore up capital. Thain’s obsession was not his Bank, unlike Fuld’s.

To give credit where due, Lehman made its way to the banking elite on Wall Street (actually they are headquarted in mid-town NYC) because of Dick Fuld, who transformed a loss making bond-only house to a full-fledged investment bank. Perhaps it was this pride that prevented him from folding up early and with dignity.

The lack of transparency debate will continue for a while but I guess some of the arguments don’t hold water because we are talking of a public firm, squarely in the analyst spotlight. However, I think it is beyond the capability of a Banking Analyst to evaluate a firm that is investing in instruments that the most astute minds within the firm cannot fathom. Wall Street has this herd mentality of chasing a price, not for once stopping to evaluate whether the price is fair. It is all a pie-in-the-sky style of investing where any price for an asset is good as long as you can have another fellow buy it from you at the same or higher price. Unfortunately for Fuld there were not many chairs going around when the music stopped.

There is one fraternity that is getting away scot free in all this. The Credit Rating agencies. These were the people who were fuelling the mindless financial engineering that had taken over the asset backed securities structuring last year. For people who were entrusted to look under to hood of the esoteric CDO, CDO-squared and CDO-cubed, these agencies did a massive disserve to their professional ethics by assigning glorious ratings to papers that were rendered worthless in less than an year. Spare a stone for these institutions as we throw others at the Lehmans and the AIGs.

Like all storms, this too shall pass. Like all bad memories, this too shall be forgotten. Like all juicy stories, the next one will also emerge. Unfortunately, like all Gordon Gekkos, the next Banker will also raise to the “greed is good” philosophy like a Phoenix from the smoldering embers that are currently Wall Street.

The Tata’s stole the name (from Apple) and if the farmers of the region are to be believed, they also stole the peasant’s land. Tatas argue that they paid fairly to the land owners. Without challenging the veracity of that claim, the question emerges around what is fair compensation. In a world today where food-grain production is shrinking and prices are defying gravity and the grasp of the common man, the fair price of a piece of land that gave four crops a year is not the transactional value. The fair price is the present value of the cash streams the crops would generate over the ages – that is the true replacement value, if the concept of replacement ever exists in the agriculture-industry divide. The Tatas definitely did not pay that.

The role of the state – a Communist state at that – is equally questionable in allowing the transaction (actually facilitating the transaction). Again the question is not that of fair compensation. The question is the larger one of sacrificing prime agricultural land in favor of consumer industry. Nowhere in the world is this practiced. The Bangalore International Airport is built on land, the vast majority of which is infertile – and that is the trade-off the state is expected to make. In fact, the Ramakrishna Hedge government refused the same Tata’s to build their car factory when the industrial house had identified arable land that the state refused to part with (the Maharashtra government allocated waste-land in Pune where the factory stands today). West Bengal’s impatience in reversing the industry-averse face of its economic policies is understandable but equally confounding is its abject abandon showed towards the farmers of Singur.

The benefits of having a huge automotive factory and all the ancillary units it spawns is undeniable. As is welcome the employment generation such ecosystems brings about. However, like all economic analysis, the answer lies at the margin – the margin of costs and benefits. It may not align with the Tata’s way of reasoning, but in the case of Singur, the answer skews against the benefits.

No matter how derided the democratic system is, it remains the only one that provides the common man with an unseen weapon. And the farmers did brandish that when in the recent local body elections, the Communist parties were voted out of power in areas that were their bastions for the past three decades. It has been argued that the peasants are naïve – they can learn new trades and find employment at the same factory that they are opposing. That sounds terribly like what Marie Antoinette said to the French uprising of 1889. When reminded that the protestors have no bread to eat, she had wondered – “why don’t they have cake”?