Prof. Jayanth R. Varma's Financial Markets Blog

Central banks could buy foreign equities when they run out of other assets to buy

Hong Kong protests could be an opportunity for India's offshore financial centre

A recent judgement of the Australian Federal Court shows that financial sector regulators are by and large unprepared for the challenge of regulating a financial world that is increasingly run on algorithms.

Prof. Sebastian Morris and I propose a mechanism to resolve the stress in infrastructure and real estate by using financial markets for price discovery with the sovereign covering the left tail risk.

I argue that Steven L. Schwarcz' paper on abstraction bias as a cause of excessive risk-taking is an instance of what Gigerenzer called the bias bias - the tendency to spot biases even when there are none.

Emily Strauss' paper on how during the Global Financial Crisis, judges in the US interpreted a boilerplate contractual clause to reach a result clearly at odds with its plain language demonstrates that the law is elastic as argued by Katherina Pistor.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has engaged in a series of flip-flops on whether floating rate loans should be pricied using internal or external benchmarks. Illiquid term money markets and inadequate competition in banking are to blame.

Many proposals for fixing modern finance ignore the ability to replicate one instrument with another set of instruments.

SEBI should step in to protect integrity of clearing

US had no SSFs till recently but is now encouraging them

Lessons from Korean equity derivatives market

Businesses and individuals need to derisk big tech

Deep fakes might become a problem in finance

Bankers did well in 1918 and in 2008

Deep pocketed LLCs might be good independent directors

Illiquid bonds are like loans

Future of the blockchain in finance