08.05.2007

• Today I have described a list of interesting internet frauds for your ready reference from an article that appeared in ET. I posted it in our Discover It blog today. Take a look at it.
• Differential pricing in advertising makes its debut
• We all know that cricket attracts lot of eyeballs and hence the ad rates for the cricket matches are very high. Having been mauled by the recent poor performance of our cricket team in the World Cup, advertisers have kicked off the practice of differential ad pricing.
• Two variants of this include:
• In bilateral series, the pricing will depend on India’s performance in the first few matches
• In multi-nation tournaments the rates will be based on India’s presence in key matches.
• You can expect more fine-tuning to evolve in future contracts.
• Just to get a hang of the crude oil consumption in India
• India spent $48.1 bn in 2006-07 on crude imports. That is about Rs. 2,19,990 crores.
• We imported about 110.85 mn tonnes in that year.
• CII plans kitty for political funding
• Many of our problems of governance can be attributed to the way our political parties fund their election campaigns. So CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) has come up with a very good idea to form a trust into which industry can credit its contributions. All political parties can be given contributions from this trust.
• I think it is a very good initiative. Though my suspicion is that the bigger industry players will nevertheless keep contributing individually to their own choice of political parties.
• About round tripping or “Lazy Susans”
• In financial world, it refers to an action that inflates transaction volumes through continuous and frequent purchase an sale of a particular security, commodity or asset.
• Round tripping is believed to be behind the inflating market capitalization of energy firms like Enron, Reliant Energy and CMS Energy. It is also supposed to be behind the FDI in China. Some believe that even India’s FDI figures (at least a majority of them) are round tripped figures.
• Warehouse receipts (WRs)
• Sometime back, I think we discussed these as having a bearing on the financial inclusion aspect of agriculturists.
• These are papers that are issued to a trader who keeps stocks of commodities in warehouses. (Remember the Warehouse Corporation of India and FCI?)
• These papers can then be pledged with banks to borrow. Banks appear to have lent about Rs. 800 crores against WRs issued by the NBHC (National Bulk Handling Corporation).
• If you are ever asked to give an example of a measure that helped financial inclusion of agriculturists, you can cite this as an example.
• Tennis
• Sampras is still good
• Having retired from competitive tennis in 2002, Pete Sampras decided to play a limited schedule of exhibitions and Champion’s Cup events.
• He beat Todd Martin in the Champions Cup final at Boston, US.
• Golf
• Tiger Woods recorded his 57^th career victory on the PGA tour by clinching the Wachovia Championship.