Ajay Shah writing for the mass media (2000)
- Time for sovereign borrowing?, 27 December 2000. kw - better to engage in explicit sovereign borrowing instead of India Millennium Deposit; it is cheaper, and will reveal a daily time-series of India's credit spread.
- Book review of When genius failed: The rise and fall of long-term capital management by Roger Lowenstein, appeared in Intelligent Investor on 13 December 2000.
- ICICI Bank + Bank of Madura = ?, 13 December 2000. Apply option pricing theory to think about the ICICI Bank, BoM merger; we find that BoM is basically bankrupt and should be closed down; a better regulator would force BoM's shareholders to gift the shares to ICICI Bank.
- How bad are things in Indian banking?, 29 Nov 2000. Apply option pricing theory to think about banks with liquid shares; we find most are bankrupt; guess that the cost of recapitalising the banking system will be around 8-10% of GDP.
- Close elections, 15 November 2000. Close elections is like an efficient markets outcome where all candidates have done a good job of researching what voters want.
- Cost of capital: What can a firm do?, 1 November 2000. What can a firm do to cut it's own cost of capital? Disclosure, product design for liquidity, build an investor base amongst foreign shareholders, avoid clever accountants.
- The soul of the debt market, 18 October 2000. Lessons from the success of the equity market for the debt market; anonymous order matching; nationwide access; the regulator avoids IT functions; capturing eyeballs.
- NSE vs. SGX vs. BSE, 4 October 2000. Progress report on the war between NSE, SGX and BSE for the Indian index futures market.
- Are options different?, 20 September 2000. Long futures versus short futures versus long option versus short options; fear of shorting options is entirely misplaced; principles for margining.
- Counting the rich, 6 September 2000. Measure the progress of the Indian development project by counting the rich; Count cellular phones, Internet usage, share ownership; Roughly 1.5% of India is rich; The growth rates are very high.
- The future of digital piracy, 23 August 2000. Open science; open software; music copying at 0 cost; napster, gnutella, freenet; DVD piracy; Books; Skepticism about the global copyright,patent regime.
- Is Internet retailing a sick industry?, 12 July 2000. There are aspects of the B2C backwaters which are highly exciting; Amazon learning about me; activebuyersguide.com.
- Are pensions a part of Insurance?, 28 June 2000. There are five functions in the pension system: collection of contributions, recordkeeping, fund management, disbursal of benefits, education and awareness; Insurance is really only about benefits, so IRDA is as ill-suited for pension regulation as SEBI.
- The failures of markets, 31 May 2000. kw - What can B2B Internet-based markets learn from our experiences with trying to make liquid financial markets?
- Credit risk: At what price?, 17 May 2000. kw - portfolio reasoning implies very different credit risk premia as compared with looking at failure probabilities of one bond at a time.
- Credit constraints, 22 March 2000. Individuals and small firms have always been credit constrained; now we have two innovations; equities @ NSDL are the first decent collateral in the country - can be marked to market daily and liquidated anytime; credit cards.
- May a thousand radio stations bloom, 8 March 2000. kw - restrictions on broadcasting, AM and FM radio, Internet radio.
- Two pivotal trials, 9 February 2000. kw - Microsoft trial, DVD trial.
Back up to Ajay Shah's media page