Saturday, November 29, 2008

Some Finance Basics

CRR Rate in India
Cash reserve Ratio (CRR) is the amount of funds that the banks have to keep with RBI. If RBI decides to increase the percent of this, the available amount with the banks comes down. RBI is using this method (increase of CRR rate), to drain out the excessive money from the banks.

Relation between Inflation and Bank interest Rates
Now a days, you might have heard lot of these terms and usage on inflation and the bank interest rates. We are trying to make it simple for you to understand the relation between inflation and bank interest rates in India.
Bank interest rate depends on many other factors, out of that the major one is inflation. Whenever you see an increase on inflation, there will be an increase of interest rate also.

What is Inflation?
Inflation is defined as an increase in the price of bunch of Goods and services that projects the Indian economy. An increase in inflation figures occurs when there is an increase in the average level of prices in Goods and services. Inflation happens when there are less Goods and more buyers, this will result in increase in the price of Goods, since there is more demand and less supply of the goods.

What is a Repo Rate?
Whenever the banks have any shortage of funds they can borrow it from RBI. Repo rate is the rate at which our banks borrow rupees from RBI. A reduction in the repo rate will help banks to get money at a cheaper rate. When the repo rate increases borrowing from RBI becomes more expensive.

What is a Reverse Repo Rate?
Reverse Repo rate is the rate at which Reserve Bank of India (RBI) borrows money from banks. Banks are always happy to lend money to RBI since their money are in safe hands with a good interest. An increase in Reverse repo rate can cause the banks to transfer more funds to RBI due to this attractive interest rates. It can cause the money to be drawn out of the banking system. Due to this fine tuning of RBI using its tools of CRR, Bank Rate, Repo Rate and Reverse Repo rate our banks adjust their lending or investment rates for common man.

Short Selling of Stocks
In
finance, short selling or "shorting" is the practice of selling a financial instrument that the seller does not own at the time of the sale. Short selling is done with intent of later purchasing the financial instrument at a lower price. Short-sellers attempt to profit from an expected decline in the price of a financial instrument. Short selling or "going short" is contrasted with the more conventional practice of "going long" which occurs when an investment is purchased with the expectation that its price will rise.
Typically, the short-seller will "borrow" or "rent" the securities to be sold, and later repurchase identical securities for return to the lender. If the security price falls as expected, the short-seller profits from having sold the borrowed securities for more than he later pays for them but if the security price rises, the short seller loses by having to pay more for them than the price at which he sold them. The practice is risky in that prices may rise indefinitely, even beyond the net worth of the short seller. The act of repurchasing is known as "closing" a position. Short Selling is often used in
hedge funds.

No comments: