The Hindu Hegemony

Its been almost a month since I moved to Hindu from Times of India.After putting a sincere and diligent effort in reading its articles,its sports section,movie reviews,sometimes even the business page and my current fetish the editorials,I realized that the only good thing that has happened so far is that I have got used to such insipid but equally relevant articles and it has helped me in developing some opinion on pertinent matters.
Gone are the days when I used to begin my day with Delhi Times and HT City,scrutinizing every picture of my favorite actresses,my most anticipated movies and interviews of my most revered actors.Most importantly I used to be aware that a certain film was to be released this week or the next and accordingly work out my schedules.
Now I have to rely on bookmyshow.com for movie timings,undergo the tribulation of reading interviews of nearly extinct actors like Kader Khan and suffer the tormenting chronicles and tributes of classical artists.It doesn't even have star ratings for movies and entertains us on Sundays with its unconvincing and lackadaisical reviews.
But in hindsight I think the move to Hindu was a prudent effort on my part.Its emphasis on brevity in its articles makes me feel like I have made an effort to understand the context.Its prolific editorials are abundant with facts which for a layman like me are of immense help and still they try to balance them with their opinions and viewpoints.Their corrections and clarifications section clearly shows their modest approach which I found to be truly remarkable.
So I see no reason why coaching institutions shouldn't advise their students to opt for it.Hindu,by all yardsticks is way ahead of TOI or HT although they aren't that pathetic and are beneficial to a certain extent.It was the first newspaper in India to introduce color and again the first to go on net.But with passage of time its has rarely seen any major changes with the majority of its reporters still South Indian.
Its boring,its excruciating,was annoying initially but it's enlightening,has an impressive panache and it is here to stay.

Mortgage stakes

With mid-semester over and nothing to do on Sunday I decided to watch V for Vendetta again for the 3rd time not because I didn't get the plot but solely because its an amazing and thought provoking movie.Soon I got bored and unexpectedly opted to peruse some articles on mortgage crisis on the net.
For matters related to finance I classify myself as a total layman and assumed it to be downright insipid and excruciatingly dull.But once I started I kept on reading for like 3 to 4 hours on a stretch.Quite contradictory to my expectations this mortgage crisis turned out to be quite an interesting topic and the more I read the more I came to realize that this disaster was quite likely to happen and that the effected people clearly saw it coming and made naive judgments for excessive inflow of money which indeed had made them billionaires.


The whole process begins with a broker selling a mortgage to a client.The broker then sells to an some small bank which then sells it to an investment firm on Wall Street where shares of monthly income received from it are invested.For some time this status quo prevailed because of a sense of conviction that property prices could never fall.Since home loans were easy to get,so more people started buying houses and the demand subsequently increased.Homes became an investment where people after 1 year of purchase would sell it at a much higher price.Even if some one defaults the bank would own it on foreclosure and its worth even more than before.

But what was most shocking was the lax guidelines for mortgages which eventually led to the scourge of NINA(No income and No asset loan) loan requiring least verifications.Competition among various banks led to more mitigating guidelines.The fact that the major stalwarts in this field had let this happen merely for lucrative profits was quite staggering because it made people buy unaffordable home loans.
And then the property prices plummeted and in came an inexorable regression.As more people defaulted more houses came into the market and with no buyers the prices further declined.The ones who felt the blight of this crisis most severely were the small banks who had borrowed heavily from big banks like Citibank for buying such mortgages and had intended to repay them once they sold them to firms on Wall Street.Since these banks had very little of their own money and when they couldn't sell off those loans they defaulted.The aftermath would be a latent warning"WE MIGHT GO OUT OF BUSINESS" which would eventually be followed quite bluntly by "WE COULDN'T WORK ANYTHING OUT AND WOULD BE CLOSING DOORS."

My favorite character who ultimately kind of survived out of this ordeal is the cunning broker who deceived clients by stating intangible incomes making them liable to get loans and end up with hefty commissions.

Overture

This may come as a surprise to many but I have finally been drawn towards blogging.Its been in my mind for quite sometime,especially the title.As I shift my interest from programming and involve myself in some voracious reading of editorials and novels from different genres,hopefully my posts will come out of the confused,meaningless,irrational opinions they are initially going to be,merely because of my lack of enough insight on pertinent issues.
As the title suggests there will be an unnecessary inception of complexity on any issue moving from absurd to formative and cogent conclusions with passage of time.Considering my volatile and capricious nature it is likely to be either humongous to pathetic to downright annoying.But this is my blog and I am at total liberty to say crap or put forward rational ideas.So I end this lame overture of my blog,Mumbo-Jumbo most likely to imbibe some of the worst or shrewd outlooks.