Hemindra Hazari 4 March 2017
Axis Bank has had a tough year. Just as it was slowly recovering from the demonetisation fiasco, wherein some of its officials were arrested for money laundering, its non-watch list corporate loans slipped into the non-performing category in the third quarter of FY’2017. In the last month, news...
Hemindra Hazari 17 February 2017
Historically, India’s net oil subsidy was nothing but a myth after factoring in taxes on petroleum products. But in the last two years, as oil prices declined internationally, the government went further and shifted to an oppressive regime of punitive oil taxes. In earlier years,...
Hemindra Hazari
The Economic Survey is the flagship document of the Ministry of Finance, presented by the finance minister to parliament on a day prior to the release of the Union Budget. This prestigious economic document is the responsibility of the chief economic adviser to the Indian government and is widely...
Hemindra Hazari
In the run-up to the upcoming Budget, shares on the stock market have rallied, raising hopes of the long delayed revival in private sector capital expenditure and corporate earnings. But against the backdrop of an already slowing economy followed by the ill-conceived, disastrously executed demonetisation, might this be...
Hemindra Hazari
In the ongoing demonetisation saga, the credibility of India’s central bank keeps plunging to new depths.
Repeated contradictory notifications, restrictions on cash withdrawal of deposits, inadequacy of new notes to replace the withdrawn high denomination notes, and a complete lack of transparency are just a handful of examples....
Hemindra Hazari
Money laundering is not alien to Axis Bank. On July 26, 2011, an investigation by the online media firm, Cobrapost, showed officials of both private and government banks soliciting clients for laundering black money. The sting videos revealed these practices to be widespread at Axis Bank . In June...
Customers of HDFC Bank, India’s most valuable and one of the most expensive banks in the world have been hard hit in the ongoing demonetisation saga in India. Depositors of HDFC Bank have been complaining about their inability to withdraw the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) stipulated cash withdrawal...
Hemindra Hazari
In India’s darkest economic hour, with the economy starved of cash, the prime minister extolling the people on the virtues of sacrifice and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor finally emerging from his 14-day absence and silence to reassure citizens, one critical individual has gone “missing”. A...
Contrary to the expectations of life insurance deregulation, some of the large private companies have established their business model on ULIPs, a mutual fund product and in doing so sacrificed the objective of raising genuine life insurance and long-term savings for the economy. In retrospect, the liberalisation of the life insurance sector provided a license to open a casino.
Hemindra Hazari
Risk management is the control and nerve centre of a bank. The independence of control and vigilance functions like risk management and audit has to be fiercely protected by the board of directors and the banking regulator. So when a major bank starts downgrading its chief risk officer...
