HUL has outperformed the market by rising almost 10% since its fourth quarter earnings on April 30, 2012, as compared to a 2.4% drop in the Sensex.

HUL joins the Rs 1-lakh-cr market cap club

Business Standard

Greece is on track to get a new coalition government consisting of the two parties that broadly back its bailout from European partners and the International Monetary Fund. The conservative New Democracy and the expected minority partner, the Socialist Pasok, have said they want to renegotiate the bailout deal to soften its impact on the country's severe recession.

Change of guard

This refers to the edit &ldquo;Inadequate response&rdquo; (June 19). It may not be fair to criticise the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for keeping policy rates steady. It would have been very difficult for it to affect reductions purely on the basis of core inflation figures when the headline inflation, which affects the common man more, is refusing to come down from double-digit numbers.

Letters: RBI warns the government

The international credit rating agency Fitch has lowered the outlook for India&rsquo;s sovereign rating to &ldquo;negative&rdquo; from &ldquo;stable&rdquo;, saying that high inflation, the lack of progress in fixing the fiscal deficit, and stalled reform required that action. While there are many reasons why credit rating agencies have lost credibility since the crisis of 2008 &ndash; not least their seeming inability to accurately judge the risk of default, which is rationally still negligible with India &ndash; they can at least still serve as a marker of investors&rsquo; lack of confidence in the India story. Fitch has followed Standard &amp; Poor&rsquo;s in suggesting that high inflation and a weak global economy mean that there is &ldquo;an even greater onus on effective government policies and reforms&rdquo;. In any case, that the country&rsquo;s macroeconomy has taken a turn for the worse over the past year is hardly possible to deny.

Work for an upgrade

Though the share of entry-level bikes (100-110cc) in India has come down to 50 per cent from the historical highs of 80 per cent a few years ago, it still sees sales of 6-6.5 million units every year. Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), the country&rsquo;s third-biggest two-wheeler seller, is trying to penetrate this segment with the new Dream Yuga, a 110-cc bike aimed mostly at the rural market.

If petrol costs go up 10%, so should our mileage: Keita Muramatsu

It is hard to understand why European leaders collectively expressed so much relief at the prospect of Greece forming a coalition government. It is not obvious how a coalition between two old rivals &ndash; the centre-right New Democracy, which won 29.7 per cent of the vote, and the Socialist Pasok alliance, which came third with 13 per cent of the vote &ndash; will alter the Greeks&rsquo; economic predicament.

No answers from Greece

Ever since Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee&rsquo;s name was announced as the UPA&rsquo;s candidate for president, almost every car that stops in front of Gate No 2 of North Block these days catches the attention of onlookers. That&rsquo;s because the number of visits from high-profile people &ndash; leading politicians and prominent businessmen &ndash; has increased. What transpires in the meeting only Mukherjee and the visitor can tell, but that doesn&rsquo;t stop ministry officials from speculating that they all want their &ldquo;files to be closed&rdquo; before a new finance minister takes charge.

Filing the blanks

As the countdown to the presidential elections begins, preparations for Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee&rsquo;s exit from North Block have also gained momentum. Some officials who are hopeful of accompanying Mukherjee up Raisina Hill or are not sure of staying in the finance ministry once he moves to Rashtrapati Bhawan have also started sifting important document from their rooms. So much so that even computer hard disks are being cleared to ensure that no personal data is left in the system.

Follow the leader

At a round table held in Mumbai, the Dean of a US B-School talked about how an online MBA programme may not be able to match certain experiences that an offline programme offers. For example, he said, the IIMs are, in fact, Indian Institutes of Matrimony, where boy meets girl and they get married. This was the insight, he said he&rsquo;d gained from reading &ldquo;popular&rdquo; novels about the IIMs.

Indian Institutes of 'Matrimony'

I read your edit &ldquo;After Rajat&rdquo; (July 19) with interest. Forget imprisonment, there is no action being taken against insiders. I have personally reported about two dozen cases. I have also written to the Securities and Exchange Board of India that in takeover cases, it is mandatory to give share prices for the last two weeks or 60 days. If prices move up significantly during this period, then there should be a system of carrying out an immediate investigation of insider trading.

Letters: The rot within

I was bowled over by Nilanjana S Roy&rsquo;s piece &ldquo;The happiest Bloomsday ever&rdquo; (Speaking Volumes, June 19). Much has been written about Bloomsday but I have never read a piece that does not gratuitously stress on what a tough read Ulysses is. Roy&rsquo;s love for the book shines through in her piece. Her writing, as always, is a delight; for example: &ldquo;The first school spawned a rash of writers who turned out passages of the &lsquo;Thrash, kick, bite. Thrash, kick, slap&rsquo; sort under the impression that they were being Joycean. Which is a little dangerous, like assuming you bought madeleines at the bakery and can now write like Proust.&rdquo; I think it&rsquo;s time I shed my ill-founded fears of the book and dipped myself in the ne plus ultra of one of modernism&rsquo;s finest practitioners.

Letters: Reading Ulysses

Critics of the Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s (RBI&rsquo;s) stance to retain the status quo on policy rates will do well to read its governor&rsquo;s speech at the Indian Merchants&rsquo; Chamber (June 20). He has provided an excellent and comprehensive analysis of the current economic situation and the rationale for the RBI policy. He has pointed out how interest accounts for only three per cent of the total cost of production. I would like to add that its proportion to profits is, however, substantial. Hence corporations clamour for a reduction in interest rates instead of taking steps through research and development to reduce the cost of production. The impact on the banking sector is different from that on corporations. A change in the rate of interest means a lot to the borrower and to the spread in the banking sector. Banks want to preserve the average margin of three per cent. It is high compared to their counterparts in the West.

Letters: Policy points

Andy Mukherjee&rsquo;s article &ldquo;Time for bonds to &lsquo;Reawaken India&rsquo;&rdquo; (June 19) is thought provoking. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) should have adopted innovative measures to manage the rupee&rsquo;s volatility. But it is stuck in a time warp and uses the same old blunt policy instruments. It is clear now that the drastic increase in interest rates to check inflation has not yielded the desired results; instead, it ended up hurting growth. Now even if policy rates are reduced dramatically, growth will need considerable time and fiscal support to pick up. Inflation has become almost insensitive to interest rates since it is impacted more by supply side constraints. There is a need for reform in RBI and more professionals who can think out of the box and be more innovative and quick decision-makers.

Letters: In search of fresh thinking

The poor quality of official data may be attracting considerable comment now but it is not a new issue. During the construction of Commonwealth Games facilities, an official of the Central Public Works Department approached a bureaucrat in the industry ministry with a puzzling issue. Payments to contractors, he said, were linked to WPI-based prices, but he had a problem.

Payment puzzles

At the Annual General Meeting of Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC), the new president of the association, Niranjan Hiranandani, said a post was going to fall vacant in the finance ministry and it could well be filled by the current Reserve Bank of India Governor D Subbarao. He said people at IMC would be pleased to see a knowledgeable person like him in North Block.

Subbarao for FM?

Whenever the prime minister travels overseas on official business, he is accompanied by a phalanx of senior bureaucrats and officials to keep him advised and updated on various policy issues. Most of these are the usual suspects like the finance secretary or foreign secretary, national security advisor and principal secretary in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and so on.

Outside in

Cyclical ups and downs are no basis for an investment downgrade but it is time to address the deterioration in domestic macros
Chandrajit Banerjee 
Director General, Confederation of Indian Industry
&ldquo;The reports do not dwell on the extent to which India's slowdown is due to negative external conditions and wrongly suggest it is largely self-inflicted by policy makers&rdquo;
It is widely known that political roadblocks have held back economic reforms and the Indian economy is slowing

Are S&P and Fitch overreacting?

The world was a different place in early 2008. The mood was bullish in India &mdash; over 2005-08, private equity (PE) investments in India had grown 10 times. Nearly $50 billion was raised during this period for investment in India, of which $20 billion was yet to be invested at the end of 2009, as the global recession took hold and investment activity froze.

Will Indian PE deliver better returns in future?

Annuity refers to a specified income, payable at stated intervals for a fixed or a contingent period. The word is used more in the pension parlance. To receive a specified income for a fixed or contingent period (say till the time you live), one needs to have a corpus to begin with. Based on the amount of the corpus and type of annuity you are choosing, that is, guaranteed for a certain period or till the period you survive, your insurance company will decide the amount of pension you will receive. Hence, it is said one needs to buy an annuity. However, the amount of pension one would receive will depend on the type of pension chosen, the age at the time of buying the pension policy and the interest rate at that point of time.

Life Insurance: V Philip

There will be some high-profile absentees, but 120 heads of government are still turning up at&nbsp;Rio&nbsp;de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20. Their task is so daunting that they are practically set up to fail: to chalk out a strategy for earth-friendly economic development, focused at eradicating poverty and hunger and meeting basic needs while simultaneously conserving the planet&rsquo;s natural assets. This is even harder than it sounds; a UN report put out ahead of the&nbsp;conference says that of the 90-odd objectives agreed to in the original Earth Summit at Rio in 1992, barely four have seen adequate progress. However, that summit did serve as a progenitor for a series of crucial and unprecedented global accords.

Business Standard

Business Standard

Page 875 - Business Standard

HUL joins the Rs 1-lakh-cr market cap club

Change of guard

Letters: RBI warns the government

Work for an upgrade

If petrol costs go up 10%, so should our mileage: Keita Muramatsu

No answers from Greece

Filing the blanks

Follow the leader

Indian Institutes of 'Matrimony'

Letters: The rot within

Letters: Reading Ulysses

Letters: Policy points

Letters: In search of fresh thinking

Payment puzzles

Subbarao for FM?

Outside in

Are S&P and Fitch overreacting?

Will Indian PE deliver better returns in future?

Life Insurance: V Philip

Not just another summit