Business Pivot Point

Crude oil prices are seen stabilizing at the fifty dollars level in the last few weeks, with no clear signs of economic revival coming from US and Europe. The US banks have been indicating that there could be some stability in their performance in the coming months, after the billions of dollars of write off last year.

With China also focusing on piling of crude oil stocks, we can expect the crude oil prices to remain relatively stable in 2009.

Japan was the largest foreign investor in US till 2008 with nearly 1 trillion dollar investments into US treasuries. In 2008 China overtook Japan, and became the largest investor for US, with over 1.3 trillion dollars of investments into treasuries. But both these countries have been seeing their trade surplus vanishing in the last few months.

China has been reducing its investment into US treasuries right from 2008 beginning, and it has been slowly and steadily building up the gold reserves. And that has forced the gold prices to rule at record high in 2008 while all other commodities including crude oil touched multi year lows.

Given the current US turmoil, while China can be expected to invest more money into Gold, even Japan is expected to buy more gold in 2009. So expect Gold to reach record high in 2009.

As on date, India is the largest consumer of Gold with tons and tons of gold imported every year. Indians have the tradition of wearing newly designed gold jewelry on a daily basis, apart from showing it as their status symbol. With the acceleration of economic growth in the last five years, the gold consumption in India has also been growing.

China used to be always dictated by US till few years back, but things have changed drastically in the last five years.

First of all, in the last five years while China has grown rapidly at 10% plus every year, US has been stagnating at less than 2% growth. And China has grown into being the largest investor for US, which it can now use to arm twist US.

Also in the last five years, US has not been able to gain control in Afghanistan and Iraq, from where the new US President is planning to withdraw the US troops as quickly as possible.

All these things have given more courage to China now, which is using North Korea as a tool to upset US further. Already China has voiced its concern for creating another global currency , because it fears that the US dollar may continue to weaken in the coming years.

By making North Korea conduct nuclear tests and also long range missile tests, China has been successfully making US to seek the help of China.

The twenty overs format of Cricket was brought in by the Indian cricket control board, BCCI, last year. The first version of the Indian Premier League, conducted in 2008 was a great success and the BCCI raked in over 100 million dollars of profits from the six weeks event conducted in India.

This year IPL2 matches are scheduled to happen in South Africa, and if you go by the advertisement bookings done in the Sony Max channel, we can expect the IPL2 to be a great success.

There are eight teams vying for the trophy, and each team has a maximum of four foreign players, and seven Indian players. Each team will play for twenty overs and the entire game will be over in three hours time.

The viewers will have interesting moments almost every minute , and especially the last one hour of the game is always nail biting. Compared to the twenty overs format, the current one day game format is relatively boring, which runs through for over six hours.

And a decade back, one day format of cricket was not popular, and only the five days format was ruling the roost. The Indian cricket board has now become the source of funding for the International Cricket Council.

For companies it is very important that you keep track of your employees. If you want to get the best output of your employees, you need to understand their training needs and help them improve their shortcomings through suitable training programs.

Similarly it is important for companies to track the internet log of their employees so that you know whether they are losing too much of office time in non-official issues. It is the responsibility of the company to depute somebody on this job on a full time basis, so that every employee’s internet log is verified. The exercise should not be misused against the employees, of course.

The US FED has brought down the bank rate to near zero level and has also assured the banks that the rates will remain at these levels for some more time to come. The US FED is also planning to directly buy long dated illiquid securities from the banks and other lenders over the coming months, with a view to improve their finances.

The provisioning norms for illiquid securities have also been relaxed with a view to give more leeway to the banks which are already sinking due to huge write offs in the last one year.

The housing rates are continuing to sink in US with nearly 15% decline recorded in the first two months of 2009, over the rates a year ago.

The US FED has also taken the decision to print new currency to fund the purchase of illiquid securities from banks and lending institutions.