Mukesh Ambani’s $2 Billion Home

The 27 storey skyscraper being built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India, could be the world’s largest and costliest home with a price-tag nearing two billion dollar, according to Forbes magazine.

When the Ambani residence is finished in January, completing a four-year process, it will be 550 feet high with 4,00,000 square feet of interior space. Mukesh Ambani was ranked as the fifth richest person in the world with a net worth of 43 billion dollars.  Ambani heads India’s most valuable firm Reliance Industries, an oil and petrochemicals giant.

Atop six stories of parking lots, Antilla’s living quarters begin at a lobby with nine elevators, as well as several storage rooms and lounges. Down dual stairways with silver-covered railings is a large ballroom with 80% of its ceiling covered in crystal chandeliers. The report said that Ambanis plan to use the residence occasionally for corporate entertainment also and they want its interiors to have a “distinctly Indian” look and feel. To get an idea of which floor is for what, click here.

The bruised U.S. economy limped through the first quarter, growing at just a 0.6% pace as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down. The statistic did not meet what economists consider the classic definition of a recession, which is a retraction of the economy. This means that although the economy is stuck in a rut, it is still managing to grow, even if modestly.

Consumers—whose spending is vital to the country’s economic health—turned much more cautious, also restraining overall economic growth in the first quarter. Their spending rose at just a 1% pace. To bolster the economy, the Federal Reserve is expected to lower a key interest rate by one-quarter percentage point to 2%.

Accelerating Price Declines in Most Big Cities

A Washington think tank is warning that housing prices are falling at an accelerating level, destroying wealth at a pace that will cost the average homeowner $85,000 in lost wealth this year alone.

At the same time, the price decline implies an incredibly rapid loss of wealth. In real terms, the rate of price decline in the 20-city index would imply a loss of almost $6 trillion in real housing wealth over the course of the year, an average of $85,000 per homeowner. The only time that many Americans have lost that much wealth in a short period of time would have been during the Great Depression.

Car Buying Is Easy If You Have The Right Resources

With car sales expected to be down this year, many dealerships will be desperate for any sale they can get, says Danny Chan, CEO of AutoBrag.com, a car-shopping comparison Web site that compiles price data from no-haggle dealerships. The slow conditions could prompt many of them to accept better deals as they struggle to keep their doors open, he added. But even though dealers might be hungry to make a deal, don’t expect that they’ll give in to your offers without a fight.

If you’re considering the purchase of a new car, you’ll need to prepare before browsing the show floor. Here are five tips on how to get a good deal on your new set of wheels:

1. Hit The Internet
The Web has a wealth of automobile information that can help consumers know how much they should be paying for a car and what deals they can get. AutoBrag.com tells consumers how much cars are selling for at actual no-haggle dealerships, and shoppers can use those quotes during their negotiation. Deals can also be found by expanding your online search to dealers beyond your immediate area. Even if the best deal is states away and the automobile needs to be transported to you, it may be worth the hassle.

2. Know What You Can Afford and Your Loan Options
Before negotiating, it’s also important to know exactly how much you can afford. But don’t max out your budget. Experts also advise not extending the term beyond the standard five years to bring monthly payments down. More manufacturers and dealers are now offering 7-year car loans; for a $20,000 car, the loan would rack up an additional $5,335 in interest.

And investigate loan options before hitting the showroom. Often, credit unions offer favorable automobile financing, Chan said. If opting for dealer financing, make sure you know what interest rate you should be paying before signing, he said.

3. Consider Older Model Years
When the 2009 models come out and 2008 cars are still on the lot, the older new cars can be bought at a decent discount for good reason — their age will cause them to depreciate faster. Two months before the release of the 2009 Toyota Camry, the 2008 model was being sold to consumers for an average of 5.32% below the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, Chan said. But during February 2008, when the new model was released, the 2008 model was being sold for an average 10.39% below MSRP.

4. Negotiate Before Incentives
Get down to a good price before adding an incentive, even if adding a manufacturer’s rebate pushes the price below invoice. In fact, keep all the transactions separate — negotiating the price before the financing and the trade-in value. You’ll often get the most for your vehicle if you sell it yourself. But if you decide to trade in your old vehicle, use the Internet to learn what it’s worth. You can simply ask AutoBragBlog.com for your used car value.

5. Don’t Cave To Pressure
It’s a buyer’s market, so don’t be intimidated and be aggressive in your negotiating. If the salesmen won’t budge and you can’t get the price you want, be prepared to walk away and try another dealership, Chan said. He also recommends not paying for extras such as paint protection; dealers often put a huge mark-up on this extra, and you may be better off having it done somewhere else.

Commercialization of Sports in China is Unavoidable 

Twenty years ago, before the rise of China’s market economy, the Chinese hockey team didn’t stand to win prize money or sponsorships. Competitions were for the glory of the country, not the kind of fame lavished on athletes in the West. Today, with the Olympic Games in Beijing less than four months away, the team is sponsored by Nike. It has an expert coach from South Korea, expensive protective equipment made by a U.S. firm and access to a professional psychologist through the state sports administration.

Attitudes about sports in China have undergone a dramatic shift from the days when the government focused on collective gain rather than individual accomplishment. Those changes have helped foster the development of a new kind of athlete, one whose sacrifices result in fame and fortune — and, if the athlete has a distinct personality, national celebrity.

The shift spans the panorama of Chinese sport. Tennis players who once barely eked out a living can now earn as much as $100,000 a year. Even the lowliest college team is part of a tiered economic system of sponsorships, incentives and bonuses. In Beijing, the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics track team is sponsored by a tire company. One distance runner said he stands to receive a bonus of more than $14,000 if he wins at the national level.

“Before, our policy killed the personalities of athletes. The government didn’t promote fame or self-interest,” said Jin Shan, director of the Sports Culture Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. “China was so weak in its economy and politics that sports were used to enhance the people’s confidence. Now it’s not necessary to use sports to build a strong image of China overseas. Sports will be commercialized in the future, and more stars will be generated, just like in the U.S.”

If you didn’t have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today

The globe’s worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America’s great grain exchanges. As prices rise, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase.

At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street’s mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.

Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months’ supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide.

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78%. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80%. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men — distributors, processors, even governments.

At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence.The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world’s poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.

People worldwide are coping in different ways. Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40% of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high. In India, the government recently scrapped all import duties on cooking oils and banned exports of non-basmati rice. Even wealthy nations are being forced to adjust to a new normal. In Japan, a country with a distinct cultural aversion to cheaper, genetically modified grains, manufacturers are risking public backlash by importing them for use in processed foods for the first time.

In the United States, experts say consumers are scaling down on quality and scaling up on quantity if it means a better unit price. In the meat aisles of major grocery stores, steaks are giving way to chopped beef and people used to buying fresh blueberries are moving to frozen. Some are even trying to grow their own vegetables.

A big reason for higher wheat prices, for instance, is the multiyear drought in Australia, something that scientists say may become persistent because of global warming. But wheat prices are also rising because U.S. farmers have been planting less of it, or moving wheat to less fertile ground. That is partly because they are planting more corn to capitalize on the biofuel frenzy. If market forces had played a larger role in food trade, some now argue, the world would have had more time to adjust to more gradually rising prices.

Manners Should Be Taught In School, America

According to a British survey on Monday that showed almost three-quarters of people think manners should be taught at school. A third believe bad manners are the catalyst for much of the anti-social behavior in Britain. More than 90% of respondents believe parents are failing to ensure their children learn proper manners and that bad behavior of celebrities and footballers are setting a poor example for impressionable youngsters. Spitting and swearing were the most offensive behaviors, it found, while queue-jumping and not saying “please” or “thank you” were other main gripes.

Almost 75% of the 3,000 people surveyed believed manners should be taught at school. The head of the Campaign for Courtesy, broadcaster Esther Rantzen, said a lack of discipline was also to blame.

The number of California homes lost to foreclosure in the first quarter surged 327% from year-ago levels — reaching an average of more than 500 foreclosures per day.

The Result: 517 foreclosures every day in the first quarter of 2008. The main factor behind this foreclosure surge remains the decline in home values. Additionally, a lot of the ‘loans-gone-wild’ activity happened in late 2005 and 2006 and that’s working its way through the system. The big ‘if’ right now is whether or not the economy is in recession. If it is, the foreclosure problem could spread beyond the current categories of dicey mortgages, and into mainstream home loans.

Greed does terrible things. People going through foreclosure don’t deserve any kind of sympathy. They should’ve read the fine print. Too many people living above their means to impress the guy next door who is also sinking.

The souring job market and rising costs of the usual teenage indulgences (a slice of pizza, a drive to the mall, the hottest new jeans) are causing teens to do something they rarely do: be thrifty. Jobs for teens have been less plentiful, and parents who supply the allowances are feeling the economic pinch themselves.

Secondhand clothing chains have seen business surge this year as teens and their parents buy popular brands like Gap, Banana Republic and Juicy Couture at a fraction of the regular price.

Teen hiring has slumped by 5% since March 2007, with many mom-and-pop stores, which typically hire younger workers, laying off employees. Hiring in the overall job market fell by just 0.1% during the same period. That’s still not as bad as the 13% drop in teen hiring in the early 1990s. Last month, teen retailers suffered an 8% drop in sales at established stores. The good news is that the under-20 crew is still spending on tech gadgets like iPods, cellphones and headsets.

Job scarcity? There’s plenty of farm jobs and food factory jobs available. Teens are just not willing to work for minimum wage or even higher. Actually illegal immigrants are being hired over teenagers. Teens can’t work past a certain time and can’t work as many hours as an adult, so employers do not want to hire them. Here’s how to survive these new times: swap meet, garage sales, 99 cent store, good will, salvation army and Walmart.

The high cost of doing business in India is pushing some smaller technology companies to relocate elsewhere in Asia. Soaring wages and rentals there are having a significant impact on mid-sized companies, many of which blossomed for several years amid a vast pool of well-educated workers and comparatively lower operating costs.

The $52 billion software industry — arguably India’s best known overseas — is now confronted with multiple challenges.
The economic slowdown in the U.S., the single largest market for outsourced orders, has cast a shadow over near-term business prospects.

It’s being exacerbated by local issues such as an appreciating currency, rising fixed and operating costs, a growing shortage of skilled manpower and the prospect of a sharp tax increase. Under so-called sections 10A and 10B of Indian tax laws, software companies are currently granted a tax holiday on income generated out of units at designated software-technology parks — a concession that brings down the effective tax rates to 12% to 15%, compared with the peak effective corporate tax of 33%. That benefit is due to expire in March of next year.

Larger firms will be able to expand in special economic zones spread over 30 acres or more and take advantage of similar tax holidays at those facilities. But small- and mid-sized companies, who don’t have a need for and can’t afford such large facilities, will feel the pinch immediately because of the “uneven playing field.”

On the jobs market, the supply of Indian software professionals is also growing tighter because of the rapid expansion. In the financial year ended March 2005, Indian software and business-process outsourcing companies employed fewer than 1.05 million people directly. At the end of March 2008, the number likely grew to 2 million.

With millions of graduates being churned out every year, “the size of the talent pool isn’t the issue. Our issue is that the employability of that group of people coming out of those colleges.”

Wages, meanwhile, have been shooting up at the rate of about 15% a year in tandem with the demand for experienced software developers. A study of 30 emerging countries conducted by Gartner last year, which showed India was the “most lucrative destination as far as outsourcing was concerned” on a scale of ten parameters, including labor pool, English-speaking skills, cost structure, infrastructure and government policies. However, if wages continue to rise at a rate of 15% and the rupee-dollar exchange appreciates by 5% a year for a few more years, it’ll dent India’s competitive advantage

Chinese intertwine business and personal affairs much more deeply. They do things for their partners even if they are personal affairs.

If you wander into any of China’s five floored bookstores, the first thing you notice right when you enter the store won’t be the newest hardcovered fictions. It’ll be management books written by successful American businessmen. On shelf after shelf, you could see copies of Jim Collins’s “Good to Great,” Jack Welch’s “Straight From the Gut,” Tom Peters’s “Re-Imagine!” and just about everything the late Peter Drucker ever wrote. One section you won’t find in Chinese bookstores is a section for management or human resources.

There’s a good reason for this. In the West (not to mention Japan and South Korea) management skills are a given. Graduate schools of management churn out M.B.A.’s, while instilling the basic processes and systems that virtually all multinational companies rely on. People who rise to the top of companies are the ones who have mastered the art of management. But there are also many first-rate managers who populate the middle ranks of companies. They are the lifeblood of most big companies.

That’s not the case in China. The shortage of managerial talent is huge. There just aren’t very many people here who have the range of skills you need in that position. Xiang Bing, dean of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, said: “We Chinese are so willing to work hard for money. We are intelligent. We have the drive and the passion. But we put too much attention on technology and not enough on institution-building. And our soft skills are a real weakness.”

One issue with management is that most Chinese entrepreneurs hire friends and family because they don’t trust people they don’t know. And if they don’t get help fast, they are going to lose control of their rapidlygrowing businesses. Rapid growth, though, is only one of the issues these entrepreneurs are facing. Every bit as difficult are ingrained mind-sets and attitudes that can make it difficult for Chinese executives to adapt professional management techniques.

Many Chinese entrepreneurs (even those who have graduated from the executive M.B.A. program) don’t want to hire M.B.A.’s because they bridle at having to pay professional management salaries. Another problem is that many Chinese executives believe that because it is a Chinese business, professional managers won’t fit in the system.

When dealing with each other, the Chinese, quite simply, do business differently than Western companies do business. For one thing, there is a lot of petty corruption that is an ingrained part of business, especially among the state-run companies. Purchasing managers favor one vendor over another because they get a kickback. A sales rep buys customer loyalty with under-the-table payments. And so on. People also tend to put their own interests over the interests of their company — not a huge surprise, given that everyone worked for the state just a generation ago.

Finally, there is the gnarliest issue of all: the importance placed on the deep, intertwining set of relationships known as guanxi. Unlike the West, you don’t just have a business relationship in China; you have a relationship that interchangeably mixes the personal with the professional.

529 college-savings plans have a bright future.

Several years ago, many were high-cost messes. Since then, some have been spruced up and others have been shut down. The important thing is that more people using these vehicles to save for college are getting a good deal.

Morningstar has been particularly pleased to see some regulars on their worst-plans list cleaned up their acts. It still isn’t perfect, but North Dakota’s College SAVE Plan, a worst constituent in 2006, changed for the better when it dropped its growth-leaning Morgan Stanley lineup for an assortment of stellar Vanguard index funds. And although it still has a few pricier funds in the mix, one of 2007’s worst, Missouri’s MOST 529 Advisor Plan, made its way off the list by adding better funds and cutting its formerly excessive expenses to a more reasonable level.

Morningstar complied their best and worst lists byfocusing on diversification, fees, flexibility, and the underlying funds when deciding which 529 plans to highlight. We like to see plans that aren’t heavily reliant on any one area of the market, because that can mean a more volatile ride and lower returns than what investors face at better-diversified 529 programs. Costs are key because they come directly out of investors’ returns, meaning the higher the price tag, the lower the returns.

The Best

• Illinois Bright Start College Savings Program OppenheimerFunds Inc.
• Maryland College Inv Plan T. Rowe Price
• Virginia CollegeAmerica* Virginia (American Funds)
• Virginia Education Savings Trust Virginia
• Colorado Scholars Choice College Savings Program* Legg Mason, Inc

The Worst

• Ohio Putnam CollegeAdvantage* Putnam Investment Management
• Mississippi Affordable College Savings Program TIAA-CREF
• Mississippi Affordable College Savings Program* TIAA-CREF
• New York 529 College Savings Program Upromise
• Nebraska AIM College Savings Plan* Union Bank (AIM)

One billion dollars is no longer enough to gain entry to Russia’s rich list.

Ten billionaires failed to make Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 100 richest Russians that is led by those who built their fortunes on the country’s metals resources. Russia’s richest 100 people had a combined fortune of $522 billion - 3.8 times more than the total when Forbes first published a Russian list in 2004.

Another reason for the increase in dollar billionaires was the fall in the value of the U.S. currency. Boo!

China Surpasses USA in Exports and Now Riding Germany’s Tail

China has overtaken the US as the world’s second-biggest exporter, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) said yesterday. WTO economists are also sceptical about how long emerging developing countries that have spearheaded global growth “can maintain a strong pace in the face of sluggish demand in major developed markets and rising inflationary pressures.”

1. Germany   2. China   3. USA

Germany!? How often do you see ‘Made in Germany’ on labels. Apart from some cars and Adidas, what else does it export?

Another stellar performance by China, which recorded a 26% rise in its merchandise exports to $1.2 trillion, enabled it to surge ahead of the US to be ranked the world’s second biggest exporter and is breathing down the neck of top-placed Germany.