What is Financial Terrorism ?

Financial Terrorism is nothing but new found wave of the influence of money to propagate terrorism activities. Financial terrorism is nothing but terrorist funds coming into the country in the form of hawala transfers, foreign contributions and religious donations. Financial terrorism has become a major concern for the intelligence agencies and the police. The Financial Intelligence Bureau had pointed out the large number of funds that were entering into the country from terrorist outfits in order to carry out terror attacks. Goverment of India has a dedicated cell to track such money inflows and outflows named as Financial Intelligence Bureau(FIU). According to the latest data from FIU the number of suspicious and malicious money transactions for the year 2007 has already surpassed the 2006 data. So it is alarming. Hence when the whole of India is euphoric with each passing record breaking stock market performance their is a cause for some skepticism on the genuinity of the money that is being supplied around. It also involves all other known money flow methods like fake notes etc. where the usage of technology are being improved upon a lot which is very diffciult to judge for a common man as to which is the original and which one is the duplicate.

Ajit

Piggybacking on a ninja with exploding arms - US subprime rate views.

The Indian Housing Finance and Real Estate market has a lot to learn from the US Sub prime crisis. I happen to read a very interesting point of view put by Mr. Deepak Parekh (Chairman HDFC and one of the pioneering financial thinkers that India has ever produced). Here are some of the excerpts -

The US sub prime mortgage crisis is likened to Piggybacking on a 'Ninja' with 'exploding arms'. A piggyback loan is a second mortagage enabling a borrower to buy a house with little or no equity. 'NINJA' is an acronyn for borrowers with no income, no job, or assets while 'exploding ARMS' are mortgages with initial low, fixed interest rates which escalate to a high floating rate after a period of 2 or 3 years.

The US sub prime rate crisis is a result of a vicious circle where all involved have to take the blame and responsibility, be it the borrower, lender, investor, advertiser, people who rate the quality of the mortagages and even the regulator and market (both US/global - as they purposely failed to see this crisis coming).

Actually Indian market unlike the other big global financial markets have been fairly insulated from this crisis as we do not have any sub prime rates as such and our central bank - RBI(Reserve Bank of India) was quite proactive in seeing a prospective housing loan bubble or over heat happening in the near term and quickly took steps to correct them.

Thanks

Ajit