Expense Account, Mint As a rookie reporter I was petrified that I would not be able to provide enough detail in a story under the editing keyboard of my editor. After looking stupid several times, I would set out to interview with a list of questions that included the name of the CEO’s dog, the...
Expense Account, Mint Sometimes a committee leaks a proposal it is considering to test reaction in stories and comments. Or sometimes it is a dissenter to what is being discussed who will leak a proposal or a decision to get public opinion against what is being proposed. Either of the two must have happened last...
Expense Account, Mint The ant and the grasshopper story is the ultimate tale of the fight between today and tomorrow. The ant works diligently and saves for a rainy day while the grasshopper fools around. When it rains, the ant is snug as a bug and the grasshopper is wet and hungry. The ant innocently...
Expense Account, Mint I’ve long thought about how to handle the barrage of mail and calls from readers, viewers, friends and family asking for help to deal with a financial problem. The most worrisome are those that complain about a case of mis-selling, that is, the sale of a financial product by a banker, agent...
Expense Account, Mint Last week just as my Twitter feeds got active with links to the British Lloyds Banking Group blinking in its fight with the regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), and agreeing to a £3.2 billion (Rs 23,427 crore) provision to meet insurance mis-selling claims, we at Mint were following the PricewaterhouseCoopers story.Mint reported that while...
Expense Account, Mint You and I are really important to the country. Did you know that we are the human shields that protect the nation? Against bank failures, against financial exclusion, against insurance exclusion, and against starvation of insurance agents. While working on the Swarup Committee Report a couple of years back, I had reason to go...
Expense Account, Mint It was a particularly dense afternoon. Not only was the August humidity making the lecture theatre of the Delhi School of Economics seem like it was hanging in limbo, but the long strings of equations with tiny symbols alpha, beta, gamma and the sponge-like creature epsilon, made the lemonade stall just 50...
Expense Account, Mint he least that Anna Hazare would have accomplished would be to get the average citizen up and shouting. Shouting without a trigger—negative or positive. The attack on Mumbai lit candles. The World Cup win triggered a mass beer party. But to get the Punjabi Bagh auntie in a georgette salwar kameez to...
Expense Account, Mint There is a hilarious mail exchange a friend forwarded me between him and his portfolio management scheme (PMS) “relationship manager”. Friend invests money five years ago and forgets about it. 2011 tax time approaches and he pulls out the PMS to see how it did. Where did my Rs 8 lakh reach...
Expense Account, Mint Though I knew the extent of angst against banks as serial mis-sellers of financial products, I was a little surprised at the huge reach-out from readers after the column last week where I wrote about systematic cheating by banks (http://bit.ly/iffYbq) to collect fees and commissions on retail financial products. Apart from sharing...