Quest India invites you to participate in program “International Tax & Transfer Pricing” scheduled on January 22, 2009 at Hotel Intercontinental The Grand, Mumbai

Preamble

International Taxation and Transfer Pricing are high on the agenda of the industry. The field of International Taxation has gained tremendous importance in today???s globalised environment. Issues range from Withholding Tax cross-border Transactions/ Permanent Establishment / structuring to transfer pricing. Pursuing new opportunities also means confronting a wide array of new tax planning and compliance challenges.

In line …

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The Manmohan Singh government is readying a New Year booster for the Indian economy in the form of an economic stimulus part-II and is signalling that while major industry concerns are being addressed, the forthcoming financial fillip will not be followed by another for a while. The Indian industries have, on number of instances, urged the government to deliver a “message of hope’’ in this time of doom and gloom, which have been enforced by news of falling revenues, operational losses …

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There are funds which, while having the potential to give higher returns in the long term, also carry the baggage of high volatility. These particular schemes tend to remain in losses in the short- and even medium-term – that’s longer than some of the other funds – because of aggressive investment strategies. As a result, such schemes are good only if you have the ability to see off the negative returns in your portfolio for a fairly long time. In …

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… Continued from PART 1 & PART 2 of the series …

@ Banking

The credit growth as on November 28 has jumped up to 29.8% yoy, the highest in the past one year. The credit demand has grown mainly on account of the drying up of the alternative sources of funds due to which corporates are turning to banks for meeting their working capital requirements. The deployment rate (i.e. the credit-deposit ratio) declined to 73.2% while the incremental credit-deposit ratio …

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… Continued from PART 1 of this series …

@ Equity markets

During November, the benchmark indices (BSE Sensex) corrected by ~7.0%, followed by an increase of ~8% during the month-to-date period (December 01–15), negating the decline in the previous month. However, the volatility in the equity markets has taken its toll on the volumes, which continued to decline in the same period. The volumes in the F & O continued to decline while that in the cash market remained largely stable …

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@ Overall Economy

India’s trade deficit stood at USD10.5 billion in October 2008 compared with USD10.6 billion in the previous month. Though the trade deficit is up by 61.2% yoy, the same remains largely flat on a m-o-m basis. With this, the year-till-date trade deficit has now widened to USD75.8 billion from USD45.5 billion in the comparable period of the previous fiscal.

In October, the country’s industrial production declined by 0.4%, the lowest in the past 15 years. This was well below …

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Despite several banks cutting their prime lending rates (PLR) recently, existing customers have not been benefited from this. Even after a month of the rate cut, a majority of home loan borrowers under floating rate schemes found out that banks including SBI, PNB, and IDBI Bank, have not passed on the rate cut to their existing customers. This benefit remains applicable to new borrowers only!

When interest rates were increased, all banks promtly increased the rates for both, existing and new …

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