Reading the two stories of Nutan Lugani, who is counselling for ICICI Bank through Disha, transposed me to nearly a quarter century ago. The head of this very organisation – ICICI, then a development bank and providing finance only to industry – told me that 90% of top management time had to be spent on ‘credit counselling’. The legendary HT Parekh (then chairman of ICICI and later the...

Gold was down 2.2% so far this year but has suddenly moved up 9% in five trading sessions at the time of writing this piece. What is driving gold? Speculation that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates is impacting the dollar and boosting the appeal of gold as an alternative investment. Gold always goes up when one of the two things goes down: dollar and/or real interest (nominal...

A Rally Looks Likely, If…

In the last issue, I had said that stocks would be buffeted by a daily conflict between negative news and positive market action and vice-versa. If the US and Asian markets are down, the Indian market too would go down. This is what happened last fortnight; the Indian market went down, then up in tune with global markets.

Meanwhile, bad news continued to pour in...