Why Belgian and Dutch organ donation data are so different

Expense Account, Mint

The past month has seen an escalation in insurance pitches. Personal calls, emails and SMSes have gone up as have questions received from readers and viewers and on Twitter. The pitch is simple: Life Insurance Corp. of India (LIC) will stop selling its best selling products from 1 October, so invest now, before 30 September to lock in the policy now. Part two of the pitch is that LIC will begin to levy service tax on its products from October 1, so buy now. Mint’s Deepti Bhaskaran reported on 17 September (read the story here: http://bit.ly/15ziMCe ) that the pitches have nuggets of truth on which a false façade of a cynical sales pitch has been constructed. The truth is that an 18 February circular by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) directed life insurance companies to re-haul traditional plans (unit linked plans, or Ulips, have investments going into stocks and give market-linked returns; traditional plans give a basic guaranteed return. Um, yes, there is a little kernel of insurance in both products) so that they are less unfair for investors. Ulips were re-hauled in September 2010 causing the industry to manufacture and sell traditional policies that still carry very heavy costs of commission that go all the way to 40% of the first premium.

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What slowing growth has to do with why we’re feeling so low

Expense Account, Mint

Have you been feeling low lately? Generally pessimistic and grumpy? I met a colleague in the lift bay and swapped stories. A fund manager drops by to meet me and we discuss how everybody feels much older than before. That the last 10 years feel like 20. Many conversations over the past few months lead me to think that the urban mass affluent Indian is not feeling too happy. It’s a big come down since the go-go days of 9% growth. No wonder that the Misery Index for India is the highest since 1991. Nomura Research has tweaked the classic Arthur Okun method of adding the unemployment and inflation rate (higher levels of both, the argument goes, would cause higher economic and social distress) to take the difference of the Index of Industrial Production growth and the Consumer Price Index to construct the Indian Misery Index. The swap was made necessary by poor employment data in India. The greater this difference, the higher is the misery index. With inflation persistently high and industrial production and jobs falling, no wonder the lines of worry are settling in. Add to this the sheer persistent deluge of bad news across all fronts—economic, political, social, moral—and the picture looks even worse.

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4.5% growth can’t sustain 9% growth pegged lifestyles

Expense Account, Mint

The looming clouds of disaster are now overhead as economic data quarter after quarter show how serious the downturn is and expose the government lies, doublespeak and market talk-up over the last three years. As veteran employees, we learn to decode the signals of a slowdown fairly quickly. At the beginning of an economic slowdown, the first few cost cuts are around training, offsite events, office parties and travel budgets. You know the slowdown is deepening when fresh hiring is frozen and then travel. You know that things are getting really bad when even replacement hiring gets hit. Other signals that the company you work for is struggling are delayed salaries, restrictions on tiny expenses such as beverages and publications. And then when the news is all about shutting down of a business unit and of mass firings to reduce employee costs—you know that the economy is in a hole that will take a long time to dig out of. The macro problem of a slowdown comes home into individual households when jobs are lost. The job losses for the urban Indian mass affluent are hurting even more because our lifestyle costs have got pegged to an economy that was growing at 9%.

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