Public sector oil companies are losing about Rs. 180 crores per day thanks to the high oil prices – or to be more accurate – because they are forced to have price caps by the petroleum ministry. The Hon. Petroleum Minister, Mr. Murli Deora has put his creative thinking cap on and come out with a brilliant solution – issue a Rs. 19000 crores oil bond to fund the PSUs!
Per Ad Ex India analysis, there is an explosion in advertising in India. The breakout is interesting - Internet Service Providers and related categories have moved from 46th rank to 5th. As a sector, "office automation" is one of the top growing sectors i.e. the growth in ad spend is very high. The average number of ads that a consumer is exposed to has gone up by a whopping 30%. I guess, we are almost at a stage where infomercials will be interrupted for commercials....
Here are some interesting data points from China. Almost all the data has been obtained from the news letters of John Mauldin (www.johnmauldin.com) and Gave Kal Capital (www.gavekal.com)
The reported total amount of funds that the Chinese state agency plans to invest varies between $200 billion and $400 billion. If we assume that they will invest about $300 billion, combined with a 1:1 leverage, they would have a whopping $600 billion at their disposal for investment. Some of the other instances of sovereign wealth funds (SWF) -
Chinese state investment agency will be taking a 10%, non-voting stake of Blackstone Group for $3 billion.Per Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone Group, this could simply be a part of a trend. Other newspaper articles mention that the total investment that Chinese will be making could be of the order of $200 billion.
There are a number of questions about the investment:
Why did they choose to invest – especially choose a Private Equity fund as the medium?
Why now?
What are the implications for the US and global equity markets?
