Deepavali 2007 to Deepavali 2008

One year gone by.

I have been remembering and being reminded of the myself and thw world then and now. This blog is a retrospect of things then and now.

I'd jus joined WIPRO and off to NY on an assignment for 3 months. Before the travel; the whole episode of my wedding being fixed and Kusuma traveling to Califonia jus a couple of weeks before me.

There I was in NY learning the basics of Asset Management and Custody Services and writing (as Vignesh used to call it) NASA Code (nothing great! C++ code using some complex datastructures of nested maps and vectors of STL). Making some friends for life and enjoying the time of my life visiting Niagara, Atlantic City etc.

Then, the new world tat I was introduced to by Srivatsan was flourishing; making marks over marks. One milestone after another within no time! SENSEX barely touched 20000 and there was a lot of hue and cry that the Indian Market is flourishing.

Then came the quarterly results of the big Investment Banks in US. One behind the other; each of them started reporting losses because of the Mortgage crisis.

Just then I left to India from US by mid December.

Then from India.. off to Brussles by end of Jan. Had seen the greatdown fall of the Indian SENSEX by then. The SENSEX doesn seem to know the +ve side since then. Its just been the FALL.

Ofcourse there as one commodity that rose. That was CRUDE OIL; from $80 a barrel all the way upto $145 a barrel.

The 10 months into the year 2008 have not jus been anything but extraordinary in terms of the world financial status. How many banks that saw the end. How many of them eventually gave in to buy. How many of them changed to Bank status.

Now, towards the end of the 2nd quarter, OIL started coming down. USD started appreciating. OIL is kind of an undisputed Queen in the World Market. Ofcourse, no points for guessing which country hosts the queen's throne. It is US.

Literally, US is able to buy in OIL just by merely PRINTING PAPER. Nothing more or nothing less. If there is any other currency that was standing tall against the USD and was finding place in the OIL Market, it was EURO. But OPEC and US Supportive countries doesn seem to buy in the argument.

What actually it translates to? Every country needs to buy USD and keep it in its treasuries to exchange for OIL. Imagine what will happen if all the countries all over the world open their treasuries and start exchanging USD for the "other" currency to buy OIL. There is no place in US to store that much of "PAPER" if the whole world starts returning it.

Ok. Now back to the current status. The world markets are all in a bear phase and US is "supposed" to have already entered recession mode and UK "probably" on the brink of one. Asian Markets have seen nothing but just ground for a long time now.

Some analysts predict that the recession might last a couple of quarters or may extent to a couple of years. No one knows tha Answer. Ofcourse; only when history will be updated a decade down the line will it be evident with facts and figures when recession started and ended. No one living in the current time can predict it.

But one thing is for sure. Be Happy that you are witnessing something very great in the history of WORLD economy that two or three decades down the line the next generations will talk off the great recession that lasted from end of 2007 to ...........