Wall Street prepares for a new leash

Expense Account, Mint

It is finally done. The US has now moved to the next stage of the financial crisis—this is where the brooms, antiseptic and hot water come out to clean out the goop left behind by the unadulterated greed of a handful of suits on Wall Street. Even as the news of the US Senate passing the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 comes in, I am at that part in the two-brick-sized tome, Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, where the obnoxious Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is screaming about shareholder value, even as he scrabbles to hoodwink other sharp Wall Street types with his good-bank-bad-bank plan. The plan was to take the toxic real estate assets of Lehman and shove them into another company while keeping the “good assets” in one company. Of course, it was totally irrelevant to the bonus-grabbing Lehman top team that there weren’t that many “good assets” left in the firm and that they were not in the money any more.

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Reaching for the sky: How tall is my country

Expense Account, Mint

Almost at the time I was risking my neck, pushing it to the limit, trying to get the entire 508m of Taipei 101, the world’s second tallest building, into the camera frame, my home city (New Delhi) got its tallest building. The 112m, 28-storey Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Civic Centre, headquarters of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, is now the tallest building that the 73m Qutub Minar-benchmarked Delhiites can now look up to. Built at a cost of Rs650 crore, the centre was inaugurated on 22 April. Of course, Mumbai has the 249m Imperial Towers I and II, near completion, and with scores of buildings that top out well over 112m, this is nothing to write columns about.

Tall buildings, as I discovered in Taipei, are just as important for nations and cities as the next cellphone model or the sports utility vehicle is for their upwardly mobile citizens. And having the tallest building or a tall building in the top 10 is another way that a nation makes a statement. Taking over where victory towers left off and in a world that was awed by the American statement of conquering nature with its skyscrapers, to construct the world’s tallest building has become a way of declaring “I am” for a nation—the most perceptible way of showcasing the domestic growth story. Much better than what the dull per capita income number will ever mean to somebody who lives across the world.

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What kind of insurance regulation do we need?

Expense Account, Mint

This week, fresh guidelines from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) attempted to deal with some of the issues that the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has raised in its notice to 14 insurance companies earlier this year ordering them to stop selling mutual funds that masquerade as insurance policies. The guidelines give the controversial unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips) a five-year lock-in instead of the current three-year lock-in. They also tweak the pension plans manufactured by life insurance companies. From 1 July, pension plans will have to carry a crust of life cover and at the time of vesting, will have to annuitize a part of the corpus, making it similar in structure to the investor-friendly New Pension System (NPS) product.

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