Top 20 banks in the world

One of the purported strengths of India over China is supposedly our well developed financial and banking infrastructure. Therefore, it came as a surprise to me to learn that 3 of the top 5 banks (by mkt cap) in the world today are from China and the Indian banks are nowhere in the picture. HSBC, btw is the third largest.

See:
http://news.hereisthecity.com/news/business_news/7538.cntns

1. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Limited – $277.5bn market capitalization
2. Bank of America – $195.9bn
3. HSBC – $176.7bn
4. China Construction Bank Corp. – $165.2bn
5. Bank of China – $165.0bn
6. JPMorgan Chase – $159.6bn
7. Citi – $140.6bn
8. Wells Fargo – $112.3bn
9. Banco Santander – $109.8bn
10. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial – $105.4bn
11. ABN AMRO – $103.6bn
12. UniCredit – $97.5bn
13. Intesa SanPaolo – $89.8bn
14. BNP Paribas – $88.4bn
15. Goldman Sachs – $87.6bn
16. UBS – $84.8bn
17. BBVA – $78.3bn
18. Sberbank – $77.7bn
19. Royal Bank of Scotland – $76.0bn
20. Wachovia – $75.4bn

The Wockhardt IPO debacle, and what it means

It’s been one hell of a week for the markets, swinging wildly like a yo-yo and if all that wasn’t enough, in the midst of it, we have the Wockhardt IPO fiasco. I can’t recall any other instance in recent memory when such a renowned company had to withdraw its IPO the way Wockhardt has had to.  While the management of the company has blamed it on the prevailing weak market sentiment, it’s clear that there’s more to it and that someone somewhere was being overambitious. It’s just incidental that I have been contemplating and blogging on the interplay between perceptual (or “synthetic” as I referred to it earlier) reality and fundamental reality, and in this case, its quite obvious that there was a huge disconnect between the two.