This has been one of the more difficult environments for investors to operate in for quite some time. Macro risks have been all-pervasive and one just cannot get away from having a view on Europe and sovereign debt. Even at a micro level there has been an extreme sense of sectoral dispersion, with huge disparity in performance. Investors have to juggle various scenarios in their minds and come up with an actionable investment plan.

Akash Prakash: The investor's dilemma

Business Standard

Even as member countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) struggle to move the overall agenda of the Doha Round forward, one element &ndash; government procurement &ndash; is reportedly close to a possible completion. Reports said Nicholas Niggli, a senior Swiss negotiator who chairs the committee, has said members should aim to complete the negotiations by the ministerial meeting in December this year in Geneva.

T S Vishwanath: Talking government procurement

Much the same way financial crisis spreads through countries owing to the inter-linkages between asset markets across geographical regions established by coordinated or uncoordinated interactions between various banks, hedge funds and so on, the realisation of and response to the crisis by the governments and regulators across the globe is also spreading in both a coordinated and uncoordinated manner. There seem to be a consensus among governments and regulators across countries that financial markets require much more effective regulation than has been done in the last two decades. However, there is much less clarity, let alone agreement, on how exactly one should go about doing so.

Gangadhar Darbha: Partnerships in regulation

In national accounting, it is normal practice to adjust for inflation. However, the same convention is rarely followed in corporate accounting. Balance sheet and profit and loss (P&amp;L) entries are usually reported without inflation adjustment.

Earnings downgrades, price corrections likely

Catastrophic flooding and crop losses in Thailand &ndash; the world&rsquo;s leading rice exporter &ndash; are raising concerns that another food crisis may be in the offing. Further disquieting is the possibility that the world may have already entered a new era in which persistently high food prices are the &ldquo;New Normal.

Iwan Azis: Better get used to high-priced food

Once upon a time, people following the books trade in India didn&rsquo;t have to pay very much attention to what the books trade in the West was doing. If in New York one big publisher gobbled up two small ones, what did it matter to us? If the head of one big company quit and joined another, who here bothered? If a media conglomerate offered a retired politician (is there such a thing?) or current football star millions of dollars as a book advance, well, amusing, but so what? The West was a different world.

Cash and mouse

Like every other year, this time, too, we had planted our summer vegetables with great care. And now, we are getting the soil ready to plant vegetables for the winter season. However, a corner of the garden in which we grew ridge gourd refuses to yield to the new. The creeper is still luscious and green and continues to give us more than a kilo of the vegetable every day even in late October. But the number of recipes I know with ridge gourd is seriously limited and we were rather tired of gourd delicacies this season. So I took it upon myself to share our harvest with our neighbours.

Keya Sarkar: Supply-side woes 

Now that Diwali and its parties are behind us, I have it on my wife&rsquo;s authority that the festivities weren&rsquo;t a patch on those of previous years. &ldquo;I rather enjoyed myself,&rdquo; I said to her &ndash; and not just because the cook&rsquo;s inconveniently timed annual vacation meant I looked forward to feeding at the party trough &ndash; even though I&rsquo;d noticed that some of the regulars hadn&rsquo;t hosted their bashes, or perhaps for reasons of austerity we&rsquo;d been downgraded from the A-list parties and had to settle for the B- and C-lists.

Kishore Singh: The spark out of Diwali

Rajat Gupta, a former McKinsey director, is the latest high profile casualty after being arrested on insider trading charges in the Galleon hedge fund fraud earlier this week. The clampdown has lessons for India&rsquo;s market regulator, Securities and Exchanges Board of India, which has hardly any notable victories when it comes to nailing insider trading. In a stock market where share prices demonstrate a high level of irregular trading, the biggest securities fraud investigation in US history offers simple lessons.

It's never too late

When reminiscing about the distant past, promoters or families of artists sometimes say, &ldquo;And that show was a sellout.&rdquo; Compare that with the present when an exhibition recovers its price if it sells 20 per cent of the exhibited works, and is considered good if 30 per cent of it moves before the curtains ring down on it, and you can imagine how prices for art have risen. But for the third year running, the Indian art market has remained stubbornly sluggish. Stagnancy continues to blight retail, and despite the promise held out after the success of the India Art Summit in January, 2011 has been slow with few exhibitions and fewer auctions worth recalling.

Testing times

What kind of existence does a government have after a mid-life crisis? Virtually every government of the last 40 years has been hit by crisis before the half-way mark. Of 13 governments since 1971, seven collapsed in a heap fairly early, the longest survivor being Morarji Desai&rsquo;s of 1977 (two years and four months).

T N Ninan: Beyond the mid-life crisis

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has complained to the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) about the recent roaming agreement among Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular. The latter are competitors of BSNL in all circles that they operate in.The agreement among the three competitors of BSNL allows them to offer 3G services in areas where they have not been provided any 3G spectrum.

Shubhashis Gangopadhyay: Private gain, public loss?

Almost every ruler in history sooner or later begins to harbour an edifice complex. Despotic monarch, proletarian dictator, military overlord or elected democrat, architectural exhibitionism is akin to all. What would the sights of the world be without the Red Fort and Red Square, Versailles and Tiananmen &mdash; each a commemorative monument to their rule and Taj Mahal-sized egos.

Sunil Sethi: In Mayawati's 'Green Garden'

Earlier in the month I was in Dubai. I enquired about Begum Nusrat Bhutto&rsquo;s health from a Pakistani friend. He and his wife knew the Bhuttos intimately. I was, to my dismay, told that Begum Sahiba was gravely ill and unlikely to get well. In reality death was knocking at her door.

K Natwar Singh: The passing of an era

In 2005, the Congress swept to power in Haryana with a tally so impressive that it has never really been able to replicate. The Congress won 67 seats in the 90-member Assembly, the opposition was leaderless and decimated and it was clear that Jat or non-Jat, everyone in Haryana had voted for the Congress.

Aditi Phadnis: Haryana's comeback kid

Many months ago when the cloud of doubt first settled on Rajat Gupta&rsquo;s handsome head I wrote a meditation on Greed in this column: &ldquo;[W]hereas the words hubris, a sense of reckless entitlement, insecurity and unaccountability come to mind, we can&rsquo;t escape rubbing up against that wonderfully biblical concept of Greed.

The elephant in the room

The political transition in Libya, even if messy, offers a wonderful opportunity for Libya to leverage its tremendous oil reserves for the benefit of its people after over four decades of mismanagement. Libya, Africa&rsquo;s biggest holder of oil reserves (and the world&rsquo;s eighth largest), has very little to show for this endowment. An irony, given that Colonel Qaddafi seized power in the name of the proletariat, only to arbitrarily demolish the very institutions needed to sustain a progressive society.

Dawn over Libya

The process of recovery from the recession originating in the financial sector has been long and painful, and G20 leaders may have to coordinate another rescue at their upcoming Cannes Summit.

Alok Sheel: It's a long road from Keynes to Cannes

Climate change negotiations are with us again, this time in Durban following the high-level meetings in Cancun (2010) and Copenhagen (2009). The aim is to agree on a regime to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (particularly CO2) post-2012, when the present commitments under the Kyoto Protocol run out.

Uday Abhyankar: Climate change talks - Dilemma in Durban

Look for less volatile and tax-efficient investments.

Seeking an inflation proof portfolio

Today, we are meeting at a crucial period in our history. Despite global economic meltdown and domestic inflationary pressures, the fundamentals of our economy continue to remain strong. During my interactions with various heads of state and government, I found our economic and technological prowess is universally recognised.

'Empower citizens in rural India socially and economically'

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