Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s Blog

Indonesia is launching a Commodities Exchange (ICDX)  to trade crude palm oil and other raw materials, in a fresh sign of Asian emerging countries following the path of Independent projects in Singapore and Hong Kong.  In spite of being the world’s largest producer, Indonesia has been unable to set a palm oil benchmark price, with [...]

Gillian Tett, a reporter with FT  mentioned the following incident in a recent column.. ” A decade ago, I was working as a reporter in Tokyo when I was asked to investigate the impact of Japanese-style quantitative easing. Back then, the Bank of Japan was pouring gazillions of yen into the money markets and politicians [...]

Misaligned exchange rates are more often than not a prelude to trade friction. Yet so far, in spite of sporadic outbreaks of warlike political rhetoric between the US and China, currency misalignments between the world’s surplus savings countries and the world’s borrowers and spenders have not ended in disaster. Buy America provisions and bail-outs for [...]

As a recent World Bank report makes clear, hard times accentuate the importance of kith and kin. Nowhere is this more true than in developing countries, where automatic stabilisers are weak and vulnerability is high. Support from friends and family abroad is more constant than fragile states and footloose businesses.  In the boom years, development [...]

In Pablo Triana’s recent  book “Lecturing Birds on Flying” he suggests that probably Nobel Prize for economics should be abolished.  His assertion is that financial models such as value at risk (VaR), Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) model have done more harm than good.  He goes on to say that “quantitative – finance” had a very large hand [...]