Preliminary Economic comparison of US, China and India

All figures are in Billions of USD

For the Space Investors!!

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, are set to lift off together aboard an Atlas V rocket on Thursday, June 18.

NASA managers postponed Endeavour's planned June 13 liftoff because of a leak associated with the gaseous hydrogen venting system outside the shuttle's external fuel tank. The system is used to carry excess hydrogen safely away from the launch pad.

LRO is scheduled for a one-year exploration mission at a polar orbit of about 31 miles, or 50 kilometers, the closest any spacecraft has orbited the moon. The primary objective of LRO is to conduct investigations to prepare for future explorations of the moon.

Launching with LRO is LCROSS, a partner mission that will search for water ice on the moon by sending the spent upper-stage Centaur rocket, about the size of a sports utility vehicle, to impact part of a polar crater in permanent shadows. LCROSS will fly into the plume of dust left by the impact and measure the properties before also colliding with the lunar surface.

Thankyou Mr. Bernanke - But we need to raise the bonus

Nations big banks are rushing to pay back government money only to increase the bonuses of their incompetent CEOs and managers.

The push to repay the funds comes a month after "stress tests" of the nation's 19 largest financial firms found that 10 needed to raise $75 billion more to protect against future losses. All of those banks, including Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, had submitted plans by late Monday to bolster their capital

Here are the banks that want to be free from the reins...

-- JPMorgan: $25 billion

-- Morgan Stanley: $10 billion

-- Goldman Sachs: $10 billion

-- U.S. Bancorp: $6.6 billion

-- Capital One: $3.6 billion

-- American Express: $3.4 billion

-- BB&T: $3.1 billion

-- Bank of New York Mellon: $3 billion

-- Northern Trust: $1.6 billion

-- State Street: $2 billion

New sharks in crowded waters - ST+NXP+EMP

ST gets NXP then sells that stake to EMP. Yes we are talking about ST-NXP Wireless which is now called ST Ericsson. Ericsson with its hands fulll with Sony Ericsson now has to deal with a new baby.Ericsson contributed $1.1bn to the joint venture, with around $700m of that going to ST so that it can buy out the remaining 20 per cent it didn't own of the NXP Wireless business.

Created as a fabless company, ST-Ericsson will utilize the wafer-processing capabilities of ST Micro. ST-Ericsson is a supplier to four of the top five handset manufacturers (Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and LG), had combined pro-forma revenues of about $3.6 billion in 2008, and has a solid cash position of $400 million.


Almost 85% of ST-Ericsson's 8000 employee workforce is in R&D. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the company also has full access to assembly and test facilities operated by ST.


ST-Ericsson will focus on platforms for GSM, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA, as well as TD-SCDMA and LTE.

The SmartPhone Wars

With Apple taking the coveted top spot in smart phone devices all the other companies are vying for the remaining spots. Some are doing better and others not so good.

Research in Motion with their new blackberry series, is emerging as a clear competitor for a runner up position. Others like Motorola are in a tough spot with no platform of their own.

Nokia has symbian which has been around for almost 10 years now. Their problem is that innovation, that drives this business, dwindled. This resulted in the loss of a huge lead they once commanded.

Samsung and LG are placing bets on Android and WinMobile platforms apart from their own proprietary platforms for low end phones.

Motorola under immense pressure to search for a platform have jumped into the Andrioid wagon which had another advantage of being "free".

Apart from a good platform, the next paradigm is the app store concept. Apple once again is the pioneer in this. The apple app store has been busy with all the iPhone aficionados flocking to get the next cool application downloaded to their phones.

RIM also has come up with Blackberry App World. How many apps will be downloaded here remains to be seen. Nokia has Ovi Store now although still in its infancy.

Here again manufacturers that chose Android might have an excuse for non innovation.
They can rely on Google's innovating minds and the Android store for downloading applications.

LiMo has a tough war to fight on two fronts. The platform and the applications. Succeeding on both may be hard to pull off.

Top University Funds

Here is a list of the top universities with the most grants and funds in billions as of last year.

Harvard University 36B
Yale University 22B
Stanford University 17B
Princeton University 16B
University of Texas System 16B
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10B
University of Michigan 7B
Northwestern University 7B
Columbia University 7B

When will the misery end?

Percentage of Jobs lost (as a percent of the employment at the beginning of the recession) and the recessions years a given below.
1.2% in 1980
1.4% in 1990
2.8% in 1974
5.2% in 1948
4.4% in 1958
3.4% in 1953
2.0% in 2001


3.1% have so far lost since in 2007 which is 4.4 million jobs of the total 142 million jobs at the start of recession in Dec 2007.

At the minimum 1.75 million (or 3 million in worst case) jobs are still to be lost before we can say that things are better.

Assuming .5 million jobs are lost in a month, that is around 6 months of job losses yet to come till Sep 2009.

That is when we will see some uptick in the market

Mr. Market is always right....

Let us say...your friend Joe, gets a paycheck each month and after he pays his mortgage and grocery bills he has some dollars left in the bank. In effect, he is increasing surplus of disposable income to do something with every month. This money can then be used by him to purchase any additional assets.

On the other hand, if Joe is careless his bank account will be running out of money before he is done paying the bills every month. This leaves him in a net deficit and over time could require Joe to start selling some of his other assets in order to keep up with the bills.

The stock market is similar in a way. There is something known as "Liquidity levels", and that is similar to Joe's disposable income.

The more Liquidity that moves into the market(Expansion), the more money there is available for trading up the value of stocks on new purchases. In such cases, excessive "discretionary" money can be used to enhance a process of buying more and more ... and that drives up the stock market.

The downside is that the opposite happens when Liquidity is outflowing, and when Liquidity goes into Contraction. Essentially more money is going out than coming in.


Liquidity levels can thus help you know the market trend. And as is said often the trend is your friend.

Fed up!!!

Bernanke was particularly peeved that AIG "exploited a huge gap in regulatory oversight" to essentially operate a hedge fund on top of its core insurance business. As a result, he said an AIG failure would be a "disaster," affecting both the insurance industry and Wall Street firms that are counterparties on derivatives trades with AIG.

"It's a terrible situation, but we're not doing this to bail out AIG or their shareholders," Bernanke declared. "We're doing this to protect our financial system and to avoid a much more severe crisis in our global economy."

Are we there yet?

In October last year we were expecting the market to correct back to 2002 levels. Well....now we have not only gotten back to 2002 but actually well below that level.

So what we advise our clients right now is to keep an eye on the market and this is a crucial level now.

We are expecting to find a support around 665-670 on S&P towards this and the whole of next month.

Then the report cards season begins and may be we will take off or sink further depending on that.

So sit on the fence and watch the game unfold!!!

What Jack Welch Taught us

* Live well. Find the right Job which arouses your passion
* Denial is Deadly. If you make a mistake admit it and learn from it
* Hire people smarter than your company has.
* 1 in every five is a top performer, 3 are mid tier and 1 is the bottom performer.
* Mentor the first four and fire the last.
* Resources are limited. Engage in high reward activities.
* Have a positive attitude
* Have a plan to win in the corporate world.