For those of you who haven’t paid attention, the crunch time on your automobile and homeowners’ insurance rates is about to hit.
A newly formed consortium of insurance companies, assembled for the sole purpose of running a sleazy, misleading advertising campaign, is all over the radio telling consumers that if Senate Bill 31 passes next week, your insurance rates won’t go down.
Well, yes, they probably won’t go down for the average car or homeowner. But they certainly will go up — if they haven’t already — for those who don’t have the best of credit scores. And if you do have an excellent credit score today but run into a personal problem and miss a mortgage payment or two, you’ll end up paying higher insurance premiums.
That’s because there currently is no law in Delaware that prohibits insurance companies from using individual credit bureau scores to set insurance premiums.
Senate Bill 31, sponsored by Sen. Margaret Rose Henry on behalf of state Insurance Commissioner Matt Denn, would change that and the insurance companies are running scared.
By some cockeyed reasoning, insurance companies believe that people who don’t pay all their bills precisely on time, every month, are more apt to file claims against their auto and home insurance policies. The brokers don’t particularly care if you’ve never filed a claim for car damage or there’s never been a fire in your house; they only care if you’ve paid your Sears bill on time. Miss a month of paying Sears, make it up the next month and pay a late fee, and there’s a good chance your next annual insurance contract will jump.
Insurance has nothing to do with credit
United Bank puts IPO plan on hold
KOLKATA: United Bank of India (UBI) has shelved plans to tap the market with an initial public offering at least for a year. This follows the union government’s lack of support to the bank’s Rs 1,200-crore capital recast plan.
If approved, the recast would have enabled the bank to have attractive ratios once it hit the stock market.
“We will not look into a fresh capital restructuring plan this year and hence going public will not happen now. Anyway, with good profitability expected and enough capital, we are in a comfortable situation,” P K Gupta, chairman and managing director, UBI, said.
The bank has posted a 31% increase in net profit for the year ending March 31, 2007, at Rs 267.28 crore. Operating profit rose 11.7% to Rs 719.10 crore. The total business grew by 32.3% to Rs 59,808 crore. While deposits increased by 27.1% during the year, advances grew by 41.8% to Rs 22,641 crore. Net NPAs of the bank have decreased to 1.5%.
UBI expects a growth of at least 25% in the current year.
“We expect to grow by at least 25% in the current year. Advances grew by over 41% last fiscal. Although we may moderate growth, it would be higher than average as the bank has ample liquidity and scope to leverage growth,” Gupta said.
Banking industry sources hinted that the government is not too comfortable treating UBI as a special case when it comes to restructuring its capital and allowing a relaxation on preference capital.
The RBI guidelines place a 40% cap on preference capital. In UBI’s case, the amount put forward for conversion happens to be over 75% of equity capital. If the government goes ahead, this may set precedence for other banks too.
Fund managers welcome higher foreign investment cap
MUMBAI (Reuters) - India’s asset managers said on Tuesday the central bank’s decision to increase overseas investment limit for mutual funds to $4 billion would improve the appeal of funds investing abroad.
India now has two funds with a mandate to invest abroad and a third fund house this month opened its own offer. Half a dozen more such funds are in the offing.
In January, India allowed mutual funds to invest in American depositary receipts, global depositary receipts and foreign securities within an overall limit of $3 billion. The Reserve Bank of India now plans to raise that limit by a third.
“It is now a meaningful opportunity for fund houses,” Rajan Krishnan, business head of Principal Pnb Asset Management Co. Pvt. Ltd., told Reuters.
“It improves the scale and attractiveness of the product,” Krishnan, whose fund house launched country’s first overseas investment fund said. “More players will look forward to getting into this space now.”
Sanjay Santhanam, vice president, BNP Paribas Asset Management Co. Ltd., called the central bank decision “a great thing.”
“It’s good enough for the time being,” Santhanam, whose fund house is planning to launch a fund to invest in overseas funds, said. He pointed out Indian funds were yet to exhaust even the existing limit.
At present, individual mutual fund houses can invest in these securities up to 10 percent of their assets under management as on March 31 of the relevant year, subject to a maximum of $150 million.
“The RBI would probably have a plan to progressively keep reviewing this limit based on how it is being exhausted,” Santhanam added.
MLB Team IPO’s: Winning Is Everything
Winning is Everything.
In order to make money buying MLB Team stocks, you need to buy teams with the best chance to win the most games. The best way statistic it predict wins is how many runs teams score and how many runs they allow. In order to remove the element of luck, baseball writer, historian and statistician Bill James invented a formula to estimate how many games a baseball team “should” have won based on the number of runs they scored and allowed. This formula could be an excellent tool in determining who to purchase when PT puts MLB Team stocks on the market. PT’s scoring system is set as follows:
$1 for each regular season win
$10 for qualifying for the playoffs
$4 for each playoff win
$10 for winning the league DS
$20 for winning the league CS
$30 for winning the league WS
If you think that the standings right now are the way they’ll end up at the end of the year then the Dodgers and Tigers would be playing for the World Series. Cubs fans might be concerned by the way the NL Central looks today. The Cubs are 5-9 after dropping their most recent game to the Braves and are located at the bottom of the NL central. If you look at the Cubs runs scored vs runs allowed, you can see that they have been unlucky. The Cubs have actually outscored their opponents, but still have a terrible record. On the other hand, MLB’s best teams record-wise, the Dodgers have outscored their opponents by 20 and the Tigers have out scored opponents by 10 runs.
Europe ‘being left behind’ in clean energy investment
Europe ‘being left behind’ in clean energy investment
London, 19 April: Europe’s share of venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) investment in clean energy is falling, as investors favour opportunities in the US and Asia instead, according to New Energy Finance (NEF).
The London-based analysts say that VC and PE investment in clean energy companies was up 68% to $8.6 billion in 2006, from $5.1bn in 2005. However, while investment in the Americas was up 138% to $5.3 billion, and Asia saw growth of 45% to $1.3bn, investment in Europe dropped 2% to $1.9 billion.
In a white paper published this week, NEF describes Europe’s poor performance in clean energy VC and PE investing as “baffling”, particularly given how successful Europe’s public markets have been in attracting investors to the sector.
It also notes that what investment there has been in Europe has generated good returns, and says that “the figures will make depressing reading for European policy-makers, who have set great store by achieving leadership in clean energy, as well as in innovation.”
NEF suggests a number of reasons why Europe may be falling behind, including: the traditional weakness of Europe’s venture capital industry, compared with that of the US; ‘Balkanised’ national markets, each with their own regulations supporting clean energy; and bureaucratic processes for technology support.
The company makes eight recommendations for policy-makers:
1. Improve general macro-economics for innovation and entrepreneurship;
2. Identify and break down regulatory barriers to markets for new clean energy providers;
3. Reduce investment risk by improving stability and longevity of clean energy support mechanisms;
4. Use the public sector to create markets through preferential procurement of clean solutions;
5. Introduce pan-European standards for clean energy, fuels and technologies;
6. Promote the development of supporting services such as testing and certification, training, information provision and insurance;
7. Avoid the temptation to pick winners, whether through green funds or any other mechanism; and
8. Decouple technology support programmes from social and political goals.
“Europe has led the world in developing modern renewable energy technologies and introducing carbon trading. But its leadership position is threatened because the venture capital and private equity money is now flowing into the US and Asia, and bypassing Europe,” said Michael Liebreich, NEF chairman and CEO. “Europe needs to take urgent action or it will fall behind in one of its flagship emerging industries.”
Outsourcing, a challenge for ASEAN bank unions in integrated regional economy
Banking and insurance companies in ASEAN countries are increasingly venturing out to invest in emerging markets in the region. Under the ASEAN framework agreement on services [AFAS] – a regional version of GATS- service industries are now free to move their investment across the region. ASEAN bank union leaders are concerned about the increasing practices for banks to offshore and outsource jobs, which is detrimental for many bank employees in this region. Furthermore, in order to capitalise on the opportunities available in the emerging markets with a view to de-regulate the labor market, labour authorities in some countries are violating the labour laws to the advantage of regional and global multinational corporations. Trade unions are spending their scarce resources to set right the irregularities through legal actions. Job migration and outsourcing, particularly in financial service industry, was subjected to extensive discussion at the annual meeting of the ASEAN Bank union leaders.
ASEAN bank unions leaders exchanged experiences about the trends and practices in the banking industry during the 6th ASEAN Bank Union Council [ABUC] meeting held in Melbourne, Australia. The meeting was organised by UNI Asia and Pacific regional organization [UNI APRO] in conjunction with the UNI APRO Finance sector steering group meeting held at the same venue on 4t April 2007.
In order to share information, exchange experiences and to facilitate networking, ABUC agreed to set up trade union alliances amongst those regional banks operating in the ASEAN region with the support and initiative of the home country unions and the UNI APRO secretariat.
