'The recession, itself, is likely to be neither short nor shallow'

The financial crisis will hit our aging agenda hard

Financial fire-fighting has become a daily occurrence at almost every level. While at the household point awry budgets seem to find solution in shrunken menus on the dinner table, the macro scene has the central bankers manning every conceivable checkpoint of the economy, be it in the form of interest rates or liquidity gates.
Alas, the worst to suffer may be the aging. "No financial crisis is benign or comes cheap. The global financial crisis of 2008, and what promises to be the worst global recession since the 1930s, are particularly dangerous and unpleasant," observes Mr George Magnus, author of The Age of Aging: How demographics are changing the global economy and our world (www.wiley.com).

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'Transparency helps in building long-term relationships and reduces transaction cost'

Accounting is like gymnastics

Can the present disclosure practices take credit for bringing to surface runaway credit crisis we currently witness? Or, were there gaps in reporting that allowed the problems to fester far too long? Would we therefore need better reporting practices, going forward? Pose these questions to Mr Shankar Jaganathan, and he comes up with an interesting analogy, by comparing the current financial crisis to a heart-attack, and the adequacy of disclosures to the effectiveness of health check-ups.
"Did the heart-attack occur after the patient was admitted during the quarterly health check-up or did it occur when the patient was going about his routine life?" asks Mr Jaganathan, the author of the recently-published book Corporate Disclosures 1553-2007: The Origin of Financial and Business Reporting (Routledge).
A chartered accountant and a law graduate, with two decades of experience in corporate, academic and social sectors, he was the Corporate Treasurer of Wipro from 1995 to 2003, and from 2003 he is a guest faculty in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

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