merrill lynch, lehman brothers, AIG gone…is it a turn of tables??

merrill lynch sold, AIG nationalised, lehman scouting for a buyer. is this an inflexion point? may be and may be not. its often said that everything goes a full circle. the head quarters of the capitalist economy is under recession. ohh did i say recession?? i should have said depression. its only the greed of the investment bankers that has created this mess.looking from the outset one can figure out that this is the creation of the sub prime mortgage crisis but how exactly is it linked to bankruptcy of these investment banks which don’t offer retail loans or loans offered to small customers. the link is not direct but indirect. all these investment banks were buyers of mortgage backed securities. these securities offered high returns as they fed money coming from the sub prime loans into dividends. since the number of defaulters increased, this led to increase in banks writing off bad debts and their balance sheets going awry.

many would agree that there are chances that there may be a change is power centers now. since there is severe credit crunch in the US, India can be its savior. it can influx cash in the form of 100 billion dollars for buying nuclear energy equipment but even that is spread over a period of ten years.  what will happen is any ones guess but one thing is for sure. the decline of the US has started and US surely needs a prudent president at the helm of affairs to resurrect its sagging economy.

hyderabad bloggers meet:1-3-2008

well, the bloggers meet is over now and so is my trip to Microsoft. since  i am a serious, no nonsense blogger, i was there as a silent observer, watching people and seeing how different they were from each other. each one had a story of his own to tell. it was a live example to see how people with diverse backgrounds and different perspectives are interested in different things and how well they justify their interests. the best thing of the meet was that people of all ages and backgrounds were treated on the same footing and everyone was  interested till the end. not to forget everyones ability to laugh on themselves. now that takes quite a bit of doing. the blogs talked about were a eclectic mixture of everything. from funny blogs like that on mosquitoes, to some serious issues like breast cancer…..the bloggers meet brought all of them together. it was good to see that even the busiest of guys, from a ERP consultant to a senior level hiring manager,all took time off for the meet.  to end, i wasn’t very impressed with the windows live writer just because of the fact that its not really a necessity.

nexus between US subprime mortgage crisis and IT slowdown in india

 words like “benching” have become household terms in india noww.so, what is this benching???some say it is because of error in a company s back calculation, getting much lesser business than expected. some say it is ploy used by companies to win more contracts. companies brandish the fact that they have so many engineers on bench and they will be able to deliver product on time.well, i say it is a mixture of both.

well keeping these things aside, i would like to establish a relationship between the US economy and IT slowdown. very few i guess really know that globalization has entwined together the economies of many countries.

lets me start by explaining to u wat exactly is subprime loans. subprime loans are nothing but low credit quality loans against which banks dont seek collaterals. as a result the chances of default happening increases exponentially. but these loans are a huge profit making model for banks since the rate of interest charged are much more than ordinary loans.

some time back a column in the times of india read as  “why mr vikram pandit should lose sleep at citi”.the answer is very obvious.citi bank lost billions of dollars in this mess.  

so, if the worlds largest bank got mired in such a mess wat can u expect of others. coming to the tremors which are being felt in india, plz do not the fact that the united states of america is the largest spender on IT services. so if any slow down hits these american banks, it leads to cancellation of contracts to lessen margin strains.

what is making things worse is the fact that to increase liquidity, every now and then the federal bank keeps lessening interest  rates-the interest rates at which the central bank gives loan to other banks. the implications of this is that more and more dollars come to india which leads to appreciation of rupee. the dollar-rupee equation is based on simple demand and supply. this complicates the situation more for the indian IT exporters. this is when concepts like hedging come into play.

so, dont u agree noww that fortunes of both are entwined together??  

linux vs windows

all my life i have grown up using windows and appreciating windows but when i switched to Linux i realized how wrong i was. try installing Microsoft Vista on your PC and then Fedora core 8 and u will get to know the difference. the former need a 512 ram but the latter needs only 256 ram. the greatness of any operating system lies in the minimum configuration required to run it.try copying or installing nething in Linux and u will note the difference. i wont deny the fact that vista has a much better interface than the fedora 8. but if u are really looking for a great user interface u can always go in for Ubuntu. installation of Ubuntu requires only one CD and takes just 20 mins. also note that newer versions of linux mount pendrives and windows partitions automatically. everything is linux is a folder.u delete the folder to uninstall ne software. switch to linux and you will then realize it is so much of fun.