Business News

The bulls say enough is enough, value has emerged again; the bears say not yet, the Sensex could lose another 10-15 per cent effortlessly from here, short covering pullbacks notwithstanding.

The Dow Jones index closed below 12,000 on Friday. The S and P broke below 1,300 as well as another set of weak jobs data tumbled out in the United States. These could be ominous signs. Every emerging market investor is trying to gauge the extent of downside for the US markets. Neither the economic newsflow, nor the stock market action there is signalling that we are near the end of the pain.

Equities rock, but bonds are reliable. Investors waking up to falling markets are a worried lot, but data on mutual fund performance underlines a basic maxim of the markets: In troubled times, fixed-income bonds provide much-needed stability. Those who had put their funds in funds that mixed equities with bonds are finding a welcome cushion in the volatile market.

The stock market now looks like a game of snakes and ladders, with small ladders and giant, monstrous snakes. The ladders, defined by short doses of short covering or profit booking by bears, are getting shorter with every passing week. The snakes are many and diverse and they seem to be all over the checker board with just no way of avoiding them.

It was a combination of global and domestic factors that spooked the markets on Friday. A spike in US jobless data, deepening of the credit market crisis, oil prices close to $106 a barrel and Indian inflation figures climbing over 5 per cent pushed the Sensex down to a low of 15,689.92, intra-day.

The days of bounty hunting are back. In a real-life reprise of the 1969 Hollywood movie Mackenna's Gold, a Canadian mining company has declared a cash prize of $10 million (Rs 40 crore) to anyone who finds a way to raise silver from a mine in Argentina. The mine has silver deposits worth $3.6 billion.

The proposed commodities transaction tax (CTT) in the budget is expected to have a detrimental effect on the country's commodity market, which is just four year's old and yet to mature. The CTT at the rate of Rs 17 per lakh could be the harbinger of reduced volumes in commodity exchanges since commodity markets work on very thin margins.

I like the look of the new SEBI chairman. He has a Mahendra Singh Dhoni quality about him. Quiet, composed, focussed and understated. None of the overarticulate, cocky, more-bark-than-bite bluster of his predecessor. In his first media interaction, the new chief made all the right noises and chose to focus on issues which need to be dealt with on a priority basis.

Purse strings are tightening across the world. It is a strange situation: money is cheap, yet just not available. It is ironic to talk about tight liquidity at such low global interest rates, yet if you talk to hedge funds or private equity players they will tell you that money is very tight. Deals are getting pulled out.

Over British 15,000 workers at three Ford plants producing the Jaguar and the Land Rover and their management were delighted to hear Ratan Tata's assurance that there was no intention to outsource production nor tinker with the technology.

The market is threatening to break down again and even retest the lows of January. In hindsight, the pullback to 5,300 for the Nifty looks like a short covering rally that flattered to deceive. Oversold markets can have pullbacks, but nothing that the screen has flashed over the last 48 hours smacks of strength.

INDIAN MARKETS have gone glocal. And investors are paying the price. The twin impact of widening trade deficit and budget write-offs, and fresh fears of a US recession, resulted in the second-biggest fall in Sensex history on Monday.

If you use recently upgraded software, you may have noticed that the world's favourite word processing application, the Microsoft Office, now saves your document in .docx format.

UTILITY HEAVYWEIGHT Mahindra and Mahindra (M and M) is setting up a factory to assemble its vehicles in the US. The Scorpio, the new Ingenio, other sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and its pick-up trucks and multi-utility vehicles (MUV) would be assembled there.

In a move that will make housing and auto loans cheaper, four public sector banks, led by State Bank of India, today announced slashing their prime lending rates by 0.25-0.50 percentage points.

Hopes that the impact of the housing loan crisis in the US would be limited have now faded. The crisis has spread to other countries and potential losses of up to half a trillion dollars are estimated. This is big by any standards and has the potential to generate serious negative impact on the global economy.

The recent tension between the Malays and ethnic Indian and Chinese minorities in Malaysia notwithstanding, Indian IT companies are eying the South-East Asian country as a cost-effective and skilled destination for outsourcing.

Have the recent cuts in home loan rates by leading financial institutions in the country spurred you on to apply for a home loan? Go ahead, but before you finalise a deal, here are some points you should take into consideration.

QUATRRO BPO, promoted by Raman Roy, has lined up its strategy to tap into the Asian markets. The company, which started its China operations in Shanghai a month ago, now expected increased outsourcing work from China with the Olympics due later this year. Roy estimates deals worth around $80 million. The company is planning 1,500-seat unit that would act as a subsidiary.

It is like a Valentine's Day duel by rival knights in shining armour to woo a high-class damsel. Media baron Rupert Murdoch's News Corp emerged on Thursday as a likely suitor for Yahoo to rescue the Internet media giant from the clutches of software titan Microsoft Corp, whose $42.1 billion takeover offer it spurned.