ScienceGuy

Click here to read my summary of an article by Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate

Click here to read the summarized BIS paper titled " Dollar Debt in FX Swaps and forwards: huge, missing and growing ". FX swaps, forwards and currency swaps create forward dollar payment obligations that do not appear on balance sheets and are missing in standard debt statistics. Non-banks outside the United States owe as much as $25 trillion in such missing debt, up from $17 trillion in 2016. Non [1] US banks owe upwards of $35 trillion. Much of this debt is very short-term and the resulting rollover needs make for dollar funding squeezes. Policy responses to such squeezes include central bank swap lines that are set in a fog, with little information about the geographic distribution of the missing debt.

The historical world was of authoritarian nature - ruled by monarchs. I won't say that this philosophy was a failure, given it stayed for several hundred years if not a thousand. Indeed there had been dynasties that lasted merely a decade but at the same time, some dynasties lasted several generations. I believe it is worth pondering as to what was the reason behind such long survival of such authoritarian regimes. Their secret, I believe, is the rule of law.  In any society, I believe, the expectations from any subject would be to get heard and justice be served. Any subject would only reach the leader when things cannot be resolved at their levels and they trust that the leader would provide the correct resolution. Hence, regimes where the rule of law dominated enjoyed success. Over time we transformed towards democracies. This is because the rule of law had started to become subjective to the monarchs. Hence, subjects decided to jot down the rule of law and re-organize society.

Recently, my windows updated; however, somehow the update led to a windows sign-on initialization blue screen error and I could not boot my device. It was possible because the update had corrupted the windows file. The previous time a similar error had occurred, the service centre had conveyed that it was a windows crash and I had to get it re-installed and lighten my pockets down. This time though, I have found a quick temporary fix, at least that would allow runs and enable users to take a backup of the data. So, the way is, for my hp pavilion, 1. Reboot the device and keep pressing Esc while the device is booting 2. This opens up the boot options 3. Select Boot Device Manager 4. Next select Boot through SSD (I had Kingston SSD installed...) Done! Next, uninstall the recently downloaded updates that might have created the failure. For this, refer to the following link ,

FED chair Powell spoke at the Brookings Institute on economic output on 30 Nov 22'. Here are some crucial points from his speech for us, the emerging economists, to understand and improve our economic comprehension:      >>>  MOM inflation data are quite volatile and not heavily reliable. Dips in MOM inflation are usually seen with higher inflation numbers in the consequent months, as MOM numbers provide a delusional outlook of improvement while the reality remains anchored      >>>  Though FED is concerned with overall inflation, core inflation is a more accurate indicator of where inflation might be heading      >>>  Forecasting core inflation is very difficult and uncertainty persists going ahead      >>>  FED wants interest rates to be sufficiently restrictive. JP believes significant progress has been made. However, the pivot rate is still unclear      >>>  Interest rates are rising to slow aggregate demand. Slowing demand would aid

Chaikin Money Flow Principle: The closer the closing price is to the high, the more accumulation has taken place. On the other hand, the closer the closing price is to the low, the more distribution occurs So, if the price action consistently closes above the bar's midpoint on increasing volume, the CMF would be positive. If the price action closes below the bar's midpoint on increasing volume, the CMF would be negative The trend in price, along with CMF>0 indicates the strength of the trend; Also, c heck for price-action vs CMF divergence/convergences for confirming the strength of the trends Money Flow Index Principle: It's a momentum indicator that measures the flow of money into and out of the security over time. It is related to RSI but while RSI only takes price into account, it also takes volume into account It is somewhat similar to CMF. In this, the price (avg of high, low, and close) is calculated. Next, money flow is calculated by multiplying this avg price by

There has been a lot of politics behind the recent rupee depreciation, although not surprisingly! As expected, the opposition targets the party in power, trying to defend their superior performance under their purview. Likewise, the ruling party has been trying to defend its own performance. Though the economic policies don't trickle down quickly (sometimes never) to the ground levels in India but interestingly, such political arguments & targeting trickle very rapidly to individual conversations. So, let's try to decouple the politics and witness the actual economics in play. Firstly, it is important to understand that in this globalized world, performances must be judged on a relative basis. Owing to deep macroeconomic integration amongst economies, the ripples in one of them have repercussions on the other, with the magnitude depending on the size of the source economy. Therefore, to evaluate the performance of the rupee, we must first analyze the performance of other cu

This is a very crisp, composed but very informative, designed and depicted course. Several intricacies of the electricity industry and economics have accurately and clearly corresponded. Another great course by Duke University on Coursera! Click here to read notes. I.  Introduction     A . Electric Industry Technology           - Overview          - What electricity is          - Charge, Current, Voltage and Resistance          - Electric Power, Energy and Ohms law          - A circuit model of the electric system     B.  Electricity Generation          - Electromagnestism          - Power plants          - Capacity factor     C. Transmission and Distribution          - How a transformer works          - Transmitting and distributing electricity          - Power line loss     D. Load          - Electric system basics in buildings          - Lamp to plant          - Daily and seasonal variations in electric load II. Markets     A. Electric System Management          - Managing supply t

In mid 2022s, the central banks around the world started raising rates in order to combat inflation, including the RBI. What I witnessed myself is that when the rates were revised, banks like SBI raised the rates (i.e., EMIs) even on their ongoing fixed-rate loans. Weird! Upon enquiring the bank, their response was the upward revision in MCLRs, leading to higher rates. Even, going into the contract note, the rates were mentioned in terms of MCLR. This, at first glance, gives an impression of validating the bank's response. However, further scrutiny of the note revealed that it was just a way the contract had been written that a false impression was projected. In reality, the rates on fixed-rate loans should have been fixed. Unlawfully, the banks had started charging higher EMIs and, the innocent citizens with low financial literacy fell into their trap. It's not the fault of customers that they are financially less literate but it's the banks who are to blame for exploiting

This course offered by Macquire University on Coursera teaches the basics of excel for data analysis. It discusses data preparations and cleaning using various ways. It helps us form strong fundamentals that are built upon in further courses of the specialization. Click here to read. I.  Introduction     - Functions for combining text values     - Functions to split text data     - Combining text functions     - Cleaning data and changing case     - Removing and replacing text characters II. Working with numbers and dates     - Converting data with value and text     - Understanding dates and basic date functions     - Calculations with dates and using days, network days and workday     - More sophisticated date calculations with EOMonth and EDate III. Defined names for working more effectively with data     - Cell referencing and naming     - Defined names and create from selection     - Managing names     - Calculations with named ranges     - Automating data validation with named r

This is a very crisp, composed but very informative, designed and depicted course. Several intricacies of the oil and gas industry and economics have been accurately and clearly corresponded. Another great course by Duke University on Coursera! Click here to read the notes. Click here to read my final peer-graded assignment. I.  Introduction     A . Exploration          - Oil and gas sources          - Hydrocarbon system          - What makes a good reservoir rock          - Exploration tools and methods          - Acquiring mineral rights          - The drilling process     B.  Production          - Prospects to play          - Production over time          - Enhanced oil and gas recovery     C. Process and refining          - Processing Natural Gas          - Crude Oil Distillation          - Additional refining process     D. Transport          - Oil Midstream          - Natural Gas Midstream          - Liquefied Natural Gas II. Oil and Gas Markets     A. Cost of Oil and Gas     

In 2012, Jason Sharman presented a paper on "Financial Secrecy, society and vested interest" in Norway. The paper discussed whether the FATF laws to counter the anonymity issue of the shell companies effective?  As per the FATF recommendation 24, he pointed out, corporate service providers should maintain relevant information about the ownership of the shell corporations that they aid in setting up. This includes, for example, asking for notarized copies of individuals involved in the setting up of the shell company and other relevant authorisation documents.  To test the hypothesis the researchers created around 21 fictitious identities. Each identity was assigned citizenship of a different country e.g Pakistani, Arab (Saudi), Mexican etc. The role of assigning different citizenships was to provide some signal to the corporate service providers about the potential areas that the shell firm might be involved in. For e.g. enquiry for setting up of a shell company in Pakistan o

Correctly installing GraphViz for python is a painstaking task. The reason is installation and PATH related issues while using pip. The problem intensifies if you are working on your work-related device that has restrictions with respect to installation and file/folder access. Thus, despite several resources on the internet, many of them do not stand applicable for your case. I had to spend a significant amount of time searching for a solution that works. Most of the solutions I found over the internet were either not applicable to my case (owing to restricted access on my work device) or they were written in a complex way to shroud the approach to be adopted or they did not work. In a nutshell, I did not find any lucid explanation, at least at could directly be followed until resolution by someone who is not a computer scientist or very code-savvy. Hence, to save time and the frustration coupled with it, I am sharing a simple method that resolved the issue in my case.  For your refere

This is one of the most interesting courses I have had on Coursera. The reason, apart from the quality of content and exhaustive content, is actually the interest and excitement with which the prof teaches it. His lectures by far are the most fun to listen to. Given its an introductory course on MATLAB, with relatively long duration videos, the content could have been easy to doze on. However, the prof keeps the students (us) alive and riveting with frequently embedded "witty fun elements" in the lectures - cracking jokes and interesting dialogues (I did find them hilarious :D ) . Having said that, I am very thankful to Vanderbilt university for the amazing content as well, as it starts from very basics and builds on eventually! I.  Introduction     - Introduction II. MATLAB environment     - Running MATLAB      - Syntax and semantics III. Matrices and Operators     - Introduction     - Colon Operator     - Accessing parts of the matrix     - Combining and Transforming Matric

This coursera course provides a way to utilize H2O for applying Machine Learning Purposes. Note, this course has more focus on application and that on H2O. However, having said that, anyone doesn't require an in-depth pre-req of H2O. I think it is good to have a glance and to understand the basics of ML in H2O but if one is looking in theory, then this ain't the course. I. Week-1     -  Fundamentals          - Pre-req and basics II. Week-2     - Trees and Overfitting          - Tree algorithms          - Importing, generating and Over-fitting III. Week-3     - Linear Models and More          - Loading and Saving          - Linear Models and Naive Bayes          - Data Manipulation         - Grids IV. Week-4     - Deep Learning          - Early stopping          - Binning and Merging          - Deep learning V. Week-5     - Unsupervised learning          - Autoencoders

Agriculture: The agricultural sector in India operates at extremely low productivity and the need for reforms in this sector is imperative. Observe that despite a large fraction of the population involved in agriculture, the agricultural value addition to the economy has declined significantly and has stagnated at lower levels. What it needs now is a big push by the government.  India also has excessively high usage of fertilizers, even diverging within its own local group of lower-middle-income countries. Even with increasing fertilizer usage, its cereal yields have not diverged. Thus, reckless consumption of fertilizer could have detrimental effects on soil productivity in the long run. Large fertilizer consumption has many determinants but one clearly visible here is a major fraction of un-irrigated land. Climate Change: This issue would be affecting individuals across borde