K V Kamath, managing director and CEO, ICICU Bank stated:

We have to look at India in the context of the existing investment pipeline of $500 million over the next three years. We would see doubling of the infrastructure and manufacturing capacity and we have to prepare ourselves for the future.

The money collected would be used for supporting credit growth for the next three years and this is for the third time that bank will be raising money. Lat time it was in October 2005 when the bank had raised 8,000 crores through a combination of domestic and ADR issues.

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Via: business standard

The young aspiring management graduates still about five months of coursework to complete before they can apply for a job, on the campus placement day. But companies are not willing to wait, they want to sign on bright young men and women at the earliest. The class of 2008 has received over 79 job offers including nine students who were given associate offers.

In a bid to extend the benefits of placement, the IIM-A board has decided to make the offers open to international students who are here on various exchange programmes.

Companies which have given pre-placement offers include McKinsey and Co, Bain and Co, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank among others.

International students are obviously happy with the decision. ‘Of course I intend to sit for placement at IIM-A because it offers great professional opportunities worldwide. The companies that come to the campus are among the world’s best and the roles that they offer are as diverse and challenging as they come,’ says Diane Gabriel, an exchange student from France.

But there are others who would rather be employers than employees. According to
Kunal Upadhyay, head, Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM-A the trend among students is to incubate their own entrepreneurial ventures. ‘In recent years, the focus of students has risen above PPOs, job offers etc to start their own ventures,’ says Upadhyay.

To encourage entreprise among students, IIM-A is offering them the choice of taking up a job within two years of passing out.

The chairman of German industrial giant Siemens, who is embroiled in a major corruption scandal, has finally decided to resign. Heinrich von Pierer has announced that he will step down next week after a board meeting. Siemens is currently engulfed in a huge slush-fund scandal, in which prosecutors have alleged that company managers drained off hundreds of millions of euros (dollars) in company money to get hold of foreign contracts. For several days Pierer, chairman of the board at Siemens, had been resisting possibility of stepping down over the seemingly never-ending series of corruption scandals that have been gripping the firm. However, on Thursday he finally succumbed to the growing pressure from within the company itself.

The departure marks an ignominious end to the career of one of Germany’s leading businessmen, who not only rose to the top of the German industrial giant but acted as an adviser to two successive chancellors. The scandals have ruthlessly smashed Siemens’ impression and status as most of the alleged corruption took place during his tenure as chief executive from 1993 to 2005. These involve alleged bribery and the alleged financing of a rival to its main union.

Prosecutors have charged that the employees concerned are suspected of collaborating to open slush fund accounts abroad and of operating a system to misappropriate firm’s money. Though the exact sum lost is fraud can not be ascertain as of now but prosecutors put the sum held in the accounts at €200 million and some of that money may have been used as bribes to acquire contracts abroad. The firm itself stated that it had discovered as much as €420 million in doubtful payments and its current chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld is spear-heading a determined anti-corruption drive within the company.

Von Pierer had been long refused to step down as supervisory board chief, even when the current corruption scandal snowballed. He has refused his involvement in any personal wrongdoing. He conveyed the group’s annual meeting in January of his ‘deep distress’ that his efforts to make certain full compliance with corporate government codes had visibly failed.

Sitting on the number two position on Siemens’ supervisory board, Deutsche Bank chief Josef Ackermann, has insisted that von Pierer’s ‘personal integrity is beyond any doubt. And this integrity is once again being proven by the step he has now taken.’

In the meanwhile, Pierer lashed out at prosecutors’ investigations into twin scandals at the German engineering group, saying he failed to understand the ‘disproportionate’ decision to arrest a senior executive last month. While highlighting that he was not under suspicion or charged of anything, he also criticized some media and unnamed people for damage the presumption of innocence of other people.

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Encrypted files stolen by sophisticated computer hackers exposed credit and debit cards details of 44.7 million people to illegal transactions, most of which may never be detected.

The actual defrauded amount may never get tabulated because by the time the fraud was detected, much of the old data was deleted and many of the exposed customers are considered to have acquired new cards, burying the old ones.

The Trans - Atlantic breach took place in July 2005 and went unnoticed till December 2006.

Who is responsible?

The breach took place at TJ Maxx company’s British headquarters in Wat-ford, Hertfordshire; Marshalls and HomeGoods shops in the US; Puerto Rico, Bob’s Stores in the US, and Winners and HomeSense shops in Canada.

A Visa Europe spokesman was quoted by Times Online, ‘All the major card brands accepted by the retailer are affected and Visa USA is working with law enforcement and TJX to investigate.’

TJX is a leading American company with a market cap of $ 12 billion and owns over 2,500 apparel and home fashion stores globally.

The computer hackers are on the loose and investigative agencies will have to break many dead ends to get at them.

However, the responsibility of accounting for any fraudulent payments made wrests with banks and the visa card agencies but the police is only approached if the banks are able to detect any illegal transactions.

In such a crazy maze, the credit card holder is not only duped but is bogged in getting to the right agency to register a complaint about the financial breach of trust.

Shareholder confidence is shaken and some brave hearts have sued the company for the data breach.

Are Credit Cards / E-transactions Safe?

Thefts of secured data have once again shown the vulnerability of the financial systems wired on the World Wide Web.

Credit cards are considered highly vulnerable to fraud opportunities and there is a huge black market dealing in stolen credit cards.

Investigative agencies do not try and track all reported frauds. The Federal Bureau of Investigation only prosecutes cases involving an amount exceeding $ 5,000 only.

Internet frauds are usually done through stolen credit card information, which mostly is acquired by copying information from retailers.

Employees of companies who handle millions of credit card accounts are security prone to selling the sensitive information.

There have been efforts to improve security of remote purchasing by credit cards but computer hackers and data stealing often leaves millions of customers vulnerable.

This can be labeled as a competitive deal and one can avail loan amount up till seventy five percent. One can even avail a further two year fixed rate mortgage carrying an interest rate of 4.99%.

Darrell Evans, Commercial and product director, RBS mortgages stated:

We’ve provided a great choice of competitive deals to match the needs of either first time buyers, switchers or those remortgaging.

This deal would surely be picked up by first time home borrowers who will find it easy to repay since it carries an attractive rate of interest. In order to know more about this deal click here.

Via firstrungnow

Anthony Sanders, Professor of finance, Ohio State University stated:

Bringing back 20 percent down payments would ‘cure all these defaults’. Anything that teases someone into getting into a house on the cheap is inherently dangerous.

With regards to putting the blame on the debacle of nonprime mortgage the market looks really crowded on moral high ground. It is being said that if down payments are brought down by twenty percent and this can help in taking care of all the defaults.

Via naplesnews

Sandy Botkin, Chief executive, Tax Reduction Institute stated:

There’s a reason why the rich are rich. In real estate, people are missing things they shouldn’t be missing, and it’s costing them a fortune.

I agree with Sandy on this and one needs to have a sharp eye for prediction of future housing and neighborhood value for buying fixer uppers. Most of the times real estate tax planning is quite simple and payoffs can be good if one is quite wealthy. While going for a real estate transaction one can end up paying hundreds and thousands of dollars in fees and expenses and everything is taxable. One of the tactics would be to challenge a valuation which is a deciding factor in case of property taxes. There are a host of tax tricks which are deployed by people to escape the tax net and the list is surely endless.

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The galloping increase in the level of shorting in the shares is taking London Stock Exchange (LSE) towards a record haul. Index Explorer, the stock lending whiz reports that about 5.6 % of the LSE’s shares are in the dispensed by shorters. Since Nasdaq’s £2.7bn bid to acquire it was rejected in mid-February, LSE has witnessed a three-fold rise in the intensity of share shorting.

A buoyant LSE reported through a press release,

The LSE is forecasting an outstanding set of results for the year to March 2007.The shareholder register has remained stable since February and traditional long-only institutions still account for 30pc of the total.

The report came a week before LSE chief executive Clara Furse is due to make public an expected bumper set of economic results, strengthening her pledge to the British bourse’s autonomy. It also appreciates her steering of LSE on the right path in the wake of a number of moves and bids over the preceding three years and the ongoing consolidation in the capital markets all over world.

Its effect saw many major are being swept away in acquisition wars. New York Stock Exchange has got hold of pan-European exchange Euronext, Eurex, the offshoot of Deutsche Börse is going to merge with the International Securities Exchange and a bidding hostility has commenced for the Chicago Board of Trade. The news on level of shorting in the LSE’s shares is sure to keep it away from any stunning alter of its track.

However, analysts look skeptic on the long-term viability of shorting share trading in LSE. One of them points out that the short position has at a maximum count of 13% in the last 12 months. The middling short position in the FTSE250, the index within which the LSE sits is around 4%.

Index Explorer analyst Will Duff Gordon opined that given the LSE’s persistent price support, its shares closed at £12.86 on Thursday which is 43p higher than what Nasdaq had offered. Riding on it a number of longer-term investors are seen disposed to support the price. But in LSE, still Nasdaq remains the chief investor, with a 30% stake following substantial share buy-backs by the exchange.

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Via: Telegraph

Sean Gardner, Chief Executive, MoneyExpert.com stated:

Credit card companies have been badly burnt with bad debts and are putting the shutters up in response by turning down more and more applications. Anyone with debt problems who is hoping for an easy way out by taking out another credit card is liable to find that they’ll be turned down.

So in case you have a bad credit history or you are used to making irregular payments then get your act right because if you don’t then credit card might be a thing of past for you.

Via thriftyscot

The RBI has seen three increases in CRR in the past four months and this can’t be labeled as a good monetary policy since it has caused the long terms rates to move up so drastically. On one hand the government is giving tax exemptions and on the other hand is punishing it with increasing rates.

The central bank could have opted for other means for for cooling the credit growth rather than punishing the middle class which cannot digest such volatile changes. Had a better co-ordination been maintained between the monetary and fiscal policy it would have not pinched the Indian middleclass much.

Via indiatimes