Smart Money Episode 7

Segment 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNNXcc94YU0

Segment 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUPb2P1uQhA

Segment 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54SEtkU5gJA

Blue, yellow and brown. Mutual funds get a colour code

Expense Account, Mint

Sixteen years ago, when I switched jobs from the leader in daily business news to join a start-up magazine that aimed to help average middle-class people manage their money, there was more than one comment on the foolhardiness of doing this. Business journalism was corporate-facing and personal finance as a genre did not exist. We had tip sheets that further confirmed the belief that the stock market was a casino. Home loans, credit cards, mutual funds (MFs), life and medical insurance products either did not exist for the average Mr Gupta or was very basic in the offering. But the magazine hit the stands around the time that these products were just about coming to the market and the consumers were keen to understand them better. The genre has been a success, but over the years my struggle has been not just with getting reporters to “get” personal finance reporting but also with regulators and policy makers who did not think that the final retail customer deserved much attention. Regulators were more concerned with systemic risk and the risk of failure of banks and financial sector companies, making them work somewhat like industry associations rather than regulators. The corporate-first attitude shows up in the nomenclature of policy and regulations. Insurance and mutual funds are all about “penetration”. The pecking order for the industry is decided by assets under management and not the financial well-being of consumers of financial products. Life insurance is measured by number of policies and premium income and not the sum assured per policy.

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Smart Money Episode 6

Segment 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkRDk2E_Ac

Segment 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj8QEIvUkeY

Segment 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4NLqEJhc0g

In which the trappers get entrapped

Expense Account, Mint

Until recently, bank branches were known anecdotally for trapping people into toxic insurance products. In a strange twist, employees at some bank outlets have themselves got trapped in the process of doing more than selling such products. If the expose by online magazine Cobrapost.com, which showed people it claimed were officials in Axis Bank Ltd, HDFC Bank Ltd and ICICI Bank Ltd across 20 cities offering to launder money, is correct, the crime moves up several notches—from mere mis-selling products to middle-class Indians to using the banks and insurance companies to turn black money into white.

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Smart Money Episode 5

Segment 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDdY9Oyzw8

Segment 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doOdtplPKeU

Segment 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA6o0SxAgfM

Jairam’s ‘maneaters’ need a strong consumer movement

Expense Account, Mint

Growing up in the 70s and 80s in urban middle India was to know what shortages are. The state strangled enterprise and everything from a scooter to a phone to butter, milk and grain was scarce. The civics and history textbooks stank of double standards as they spoke about an India that was far away from the life of the person for whom that English textbook was written. I call it the Manoj (Bharat) Kumar movies phase of India—we were losers but were brainwashed into looking back at a glorious past. A past that was distant enough in its historical dividend not to matter to people struggling to find an average “service class” livelihood. Of course, “business class” then meant not an airline seat but something totally different.

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Smart Money Episode 4

Segment 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym_lpQGh4q4

Segment 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC7vrd_-pqQ

Segment 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcQVLSK_mPg