A Call to Honour...

But his recent ‘A Call to Honour...’ is what perhaps India would remember him by. For records, the book refers to an official in P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Prime Ministerial Office who leaked secret information about India’s nuclear plans to USA. It’s a serious charge & amounts to treason. PM Manmohan Singh struck back, asking for the name of the mole and evidence to substantiate the allegation. Jaswant had none, neither the name nor the evidence. The meek evidence – a letter also met a similar fate. Both its alleged author Thomas Graham (then a programme officer at Rockfeller Foundation) and recipient Harry Barnes (former US envoy), denied the existence of such a letter, leaving Jaswant red-faced. The development has been a major embarrassment to the BJP with many party leaders demanding his head. “It was an avoidable controversy,” said his Rajya Sabha colleague, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. Congress leader Jayanti Natrajan went a step further accusing Singh of kicking off the row to sell his book.

So does this controversy portend the demise of this soldier’s future? If such controversies had the power to do that, then perhaps half of India’s parliamentarians might not have existed as on date, eh! The soldier surely continues to plod, and rise with the power of the pen!

CHINKS IN ARMOUR? OR CHUNKS?

Though Raju might be quite content with the current state of affairs, the most urgent fact is that Satyam suffers an issue, that can cripple it in no time at all. Manpower costs of Satyam for the year ending March 2006 were a mammoth 58.27% of net sales, which is higher than the Big Three. A report by Enkay Research cautions that with salary hikes effective in July 2006, “operating margins are expected to decline further during the second quarter.” Srinivas Vadlamani, CFO, Satyam, counter-claims, “Given that manpower related costs form a major expense portion, our endeavour has been to constantly improve productivity & search for innovative ways to trim overheads to sustain margins.”

Google enchanted by MTV’s sweet music!

If Shakespeare was to describe the meaning of his statement, ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ he would perhaps cite Google’s attraction to MTV’s music as an illustration, albeit in the corporate sense. The two giants have entered into an advertisement revenue sharing deal that allows MTV to share its videos with Google and in return share the revenues that come from advertisements. Also, the website owners and bloggers would be allowed to post the MTV videos and will get a share of the revenue every time a person clicks to watch the videos. Through this deal, MTV would be able to expand its online audience and Google, on the other hand would benefit through increase in flow of traffic to its website.

This move is largely appropriate as this would provide a clear edge to the search engine giant as its competition with many other search engines (like Yahoo, MSN and AOL) gets more intense by the day, and will position it better to fight competition in the online video market. But Google still withholds the information regarding the number of websites that will be allowed to host the MTV videos. Taking a broader perspective, the revenue sharing model between Google and MTV is poised to become popular because apart from benefiting the two entities, the new model also provides revenues to small website owners who will post the MTV videos. So if you are a Google maniac, its time to check out some video compilations as well. And if the doctor has prescribed a strict adherence to MTV music, and if you cannot carry your TV set around, don’t you worry – just walk into an internet cafe and watch the videos on Google!

A...Hutchooooo! Essar stays away...

The wedding season seems long over with the bells ringing for none – and this strictly includes Hutchison Telecom International Ltd. (the Hong-Kong based parent of Hutchison) and Essar Group, both of whom have finalised their divorce agreement. The Essar Group has terminated the BPL Mobile Mumbai circle share purchase agreement and the subsequent merger of BPL Mobile with Hutchison Essar. Hurt by the behaviour shown by its partner Essar, Hutch has knocked the doors of the Bombay High Court seeking for justice. According to Hutchison, the BPL Mumbai vendors are certainly under a legal obligation to complete the share purchase contract and can in no way mull over terminating the contract, legally speaking.

Fed’s relentless printing of paper money sans asset-backing has landed the dollar in a precarious situation

How about a sneak peak from Pirates of the Caribbean part III? It features Federal Reserve officials as the protagonist pirates, sailing on a battered ship, led by a one-eyed captain, who embark on a serious treasure hunt... a hunt for gold! It may sound like a bad gag, but this could well be what the Feds might be forced to undertake very soon in the near future.

Times, if not changing, are definitely going against the dollar. An increasing number of countries are now cleaning up the greenback from their forex vaults and stuffing it with alternative currencies and assets. Syria recently ended its dollar peg and shift ed its reserves to euro. Similarly, the United Arab Emirates also decided to reallocate its reserves from dollar to euro by as much as 10% of its total reserves. In fact, a summary B&E survey ending July 27th, 2006, considering the share of dollar in the total allocated foreign exchange reserves of all countries, shows that the greenback is now being hastily replaced predominantly by the euro. Since the first quarter of 1999, the total share of dollar has de-escalated from 71.09% to 66.32% by the end of the first quarter of 2006 (preliminary figures). During the same time, the share of euro has increased from 18.13% to 24.79%. Even a comparison of exchange rates (2000 to 2006) shows that the euro has appreciated by a staggering 24% against the dollar.