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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given at the end.Passage 4Public sector banks (PSBs) are pulling back on credit disbursement to lower rated companies, as they keep a closer watch on using their own scarce capital and the banking regulator heightens its scrutiny on loans being sanctioned. Bankers say the Reserve Bank of India has started strictly monitoring how banks are utilizing their capital. Any big-ticket loan to lower rated companies is being questioned. Almost all large public sector banks that reported their first quarter results so far have showed a contraction in credit disbursal on a year-to-date basis, as most banks have shifted to a strategy of lending largely to government-owned "Navratna" companies and highly rated private sector companies. On a sequential basis too, banks have grown their loan book at an anaemic rate.To be sure, in the first quarter, loan demand is not quite robust. However, in the first quarter last year, banks had healthier loan growth on a sequential basis than this year. The country's largest lender State Bank of India grew its loan book at only 1.21% quarter-on-quarter. Meanwhile, Bank of Baroda and Punjab National Bank shrank their loan book by 1.97% and 0.66% respectively in the first quarter on a sequential basis.Last year, State Bank of India had seen sequential loan growth of 3.37%, while Bank of Baroda had seen a smaller contraction of 0.22%. Punjab National Bank had seen a growth of 0.46% in loan book between the January-March and April-June quarters last year. On a year-to-date basis, SBI's credit growth fell more than 2%, Bank of Baroda's credit growth contracted 4.71% and Bank of India's credit growth shrank about 3%. SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya said the bank's year-to-date credit growth fell as the bank focused on ‘A’ rated customers. About 90% of the loans in the quarter were given to high-rated companies. "Part of this was a conscious decision and part of it is because we actually did not get good fresh proposals in the quarter," Bhattacharya said.According to bankers, while part of the credit contraction is due to the economic slowdown, capital constraints and reluctance to take on excessive risk has also played a role. "Most of the PSU banks are facing pressure on capital adequacy. It is challenging to maintain 9% core capital adequacy. The pressure on monitoring capital adequacy and maintaining capital buffer is so strict that you cannot grow aggressively," said Rupa Rege Nitsure, chief economist at Bank of Baroda.Nitsure said capital conservation pressures will substantially cut down "irrational expansion of loans" in some smaller banks, which used to grow at a rate much higher than the industry average. The companies coming to banks, in turn, will have to make themselves more creditworthy for banks to lend. "The conservation of capital is going to inculcate a lot of discipline in both banks and borrowers," she said.For every loan that a bank disburses, some amount of money is required to be set aside as provision. Lower the credit rating of the company, riskier the loan is perceived to be. Thus, the bank is required to set aside more capital for a lower rated company than what it otherwise would do for a higher rated client. New international accounting norms, known as Basel III norms, require banks to maintain higher capital and higher liquidity. They also require a bank to set aside "buffer" capital to meet contingencies. As per the norms, a bank's total capital adequacy ratio should be 12% at any time, in which tier-I, or the core capital, should be at 9%. Capital adequacy is calculated by dividing total capital by risk-weighted assets. If the loans have been given to lower rated companies, risk weight goes up and capital adequacy falls.According to bankers, all loan decisions are now being assessed on the basis of the capital that needs to be set aside as provision against the loan and as a result, loans to lower rated companies are being avoided. According to a senior banker with a public sector bank, the capital adequacy situation is so precarious in some banks that if the risk weight increases a few basis points, the proposal gets cancelled. The banker did not wish to be named. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point. Bankers add that the Reserve Bank of India has also started strictly monitoring how banks are utilising their capital. Any big-ticket loan to lower rated companies is being questioned.In this scenario, banks are looking for safe bets, even if it means that profitability is being compromised. "About 25% of our loans this quarter was given to Navratna companies, who pay at base rate. This resulted in contraction of our net interest margin (NIM)," said Bank of India chairperson V.R. Iyer, while discussing the bank's first quarter results with the media. Bank of India's NIM, or the difference between yields on advances and cost of deposits, a key gauge of profitability, fell in the first quarter to 2.45% from 3.07% a year ago, as the bank focused on lending to highly rated customers.Analysts, however, say the strategy being followed by banks is short-sighted. "A high rated client will take loans at base rate and will not give any fee income to a bank. A bank will never be profitable that way. Besides, there are only so many PSU companies to chase. All banks cannot be chasing them all at a time. Fact is, the banks are badly hit by NPA and are afraid to lend now to big projects. They need capital, true, but they have become risk-averse," said a senior analyst with a local brokerage who did not wish to be named.Various estimates suggest that Indian banks would require more than Rs. 2 trillion of additional capital to have this kind of capital adequacy ratio by 2019. The central government, which owns the majority share of these banks, has been cutting down on its commitment to recapitalize the banks. In 2013-14, the government infused Rs. 14,000 crore in its banks. However, in 2014-15, the government will infuse just Rs. 11,200 crore.Which of the following statements is correct according to the passage?
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MCQ-> Before the internet, one of the most rapid changes to the global economy and trade was wrought by something so blatantly useful that it is hard to imagine a struggle to get it adopted: the shipping container. In the early 1960s, before the standard container became ubiquitous, freight costs were I0 per cent of the value of US imports, about the same barrier to trade as the average official government import tariff. Yet in a journey that went halfway round the world, half of those costs could be incurred in two ten-mile movements through the ports at either end. The predominant ‘break-bulk’ method, where each shipment was individually split up into loads that could be handled by a team of dockers, was vastly complex and labour-intensive. Ships could take weeks or months to load, as a huge variety of cargoes of different weights, shapes and sizes had to be stacked together by hand. Indeed, one of the most unreliable aspects of such a labour-intensive process was the labour. Ports, like mines, were frequently seething pits of industrial unrest. Irregular work on one side combined with what was often a tight-knit, well - organized labour community on the other.In 1956, loading break-bulk cargo cost $5.83 per ton. The entrepreneurial genius who saw the possibilities for standardized container shipping, Malcolm McLean, floated his first containerized ship in that year and claimed to be able to shift cargo for 15.8 cents a ton. Boxes of the same size that could be loaded by crane and neatly stacked were much faster to load. Moreover, carrying cargo in a standard container would allow it to be shifted between truck, train and ship without having to be repacked each time.But between McLean’s container and the standardization of the global market were an array of formidable obstacles. They began at home in the US with the official Interstate Commerce Commission, which could prevent price competition by setting rates for freight haulage by route and commodity, and the powerful International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) labour union. More broadly, the biggest hurdle was achieving what economists call ‘network effects’: the benefit of a standard technology rises exponentially as more people use it. To dominate world trade, containers had to be easily interchangeable between different shipping lines, ports, trucks and railcars. And to maximize efficiency, they all needed to be the same size. The adoption of a network technology often involves overcoming the resistance of those who are heavily invested in the old system. And while the efficiency gains are clear to see, there are very obvious losers as well as winners. For containerization, perhaps the most spectacular example was the demise of New York City as a port.In the early I950s, New York handled a third of US seaborne trade in manufactured goods. But it was woefully inefficient, even with existing break-bulk technology: 283 piers, 98 of which were able to handle ocean-going ships, jutted out into the river from Brooklyn and Manhattan. Trucks bound‘ for the docks had to fiive through the crowded, narrow streets of Manhattan, wait for an hour or two before even entering a pier, and then undergo a laborious two-stage process in which the goods foot were fithr unloaded into a transit shed and then loaded onto a ship. ‘Public loader’ work gangs held exclusive rights to load and unload on a particular pier, a power in effect granted by the ILA, which enforced its monopoly with sabotage and violence against than competitors. The ILA fought ferociously against containerization, correctly foreseeing that it would destroy their privileged position as bandits controlling the mountain pass. On this occasion, bypassing them simply involved going across the river. A container port was built in New Jersey, where a 1500-foot wharf allowed ships to dock parallel to shore and containers to be lified on and off by crane. Between 1963 - 4 and 1975 - 6, the number of days worked by longshoremen in Manhattan went from 1.4 million to 127,041.Containers rapidly captured the transatlantic market, and then the growing trade with Asia. The effect of containerization is hard to see immediately in freight rates, since the oil price hikes of the 1970s kept them high, but the speed with which shippers adopted; containerization made it clear it brought big benefits of efficiency and cost. The extraordinary growth of the Asian tiger economies of Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong, which based their development strategy on exports, was greatly helped by the container trade that quickly built up between the US and east Asia. Ocean-borne exports from South Korea were 2.9 million tons in 1969 and 6 million in 1973, and its exports to the US tripled.But the new technology did not get adopted all on its own. It needed a couple of pushes from government - both, as it happens, largely to do with the military. As far as the ships were concerned, the same link between the merchant and military navy that had inspired the Navigation Acts in seventeenth-century England endured into twentieth-century America. The government's first helping hand was to give a spur to the system by adopting it to transport military cargo. The US armed forces, seeing the efficiency of the system, started contracting McLean’s company Pan-Atlantic, later renamed Sea-land, to carry equipment to the quarter of a million American soldiers stationed in Western Europe. One of the few benefits of America's misadventure in Vietnam was a rapid expansion of containerization. Because war involves massive movements of men and material, it is often armies that pioneer new techniques in supply chains.The government’s other role was in banging heads together sufficiently to get all companies to accept the same size container. Standard sizes were essential to deliver the economies of scale that came from interchangeability - which, as far as the military was concerned, was vital if the ships had to be commandeered in case war broke out. This was a significant problem to overcome, not least because all the companies that had started using the container had settled on different sizes. Pan- Atlantic used 35- foot containers, because that was the maximum size allowed on the highways in its home base in New Jersey. Another of the big shipping companies, Matson Navigation, used a 24-foot container since its biggest trade was in canned pineapple from Hawaii, and a container bigger than that would have been too heavy for a crane to lift. Grace Line, which largely traded with Latin America, used a foot container that was easier to truck around winding mountain roads.Establishing a US standard and then getting it adopted internationally took more than a decade. Indeed, not only did the US Maritime Administration have to mediate in these rivalries but also to fight its own turf battles with the American Standards Association, an agency set up by the private sector. The matter was settled by using the power of federal money: the Federal Maritime Board (FMB), which handed out to public subsidies for shipbuilding, decreed that only the 8 x 8-foot containers in the lengths of l0, 20, 30 or 40 feet would be eligible for handouts.Identify the correct statement:
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MCQ->A government is federal or unitary on the basis of relations between the....
MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words are given in bold to help you answer some of the questions.At the heart of what makes India a better regime than China is a healthy respect for the civil rights and liberties of its citizens. There are checks and balances in our government. But India’s new surveillance programme, the Central Monitoring system (CMS), resembles a dystopian society akin to George Orwell’s 1984.According to several news reports, the CMS gives the government, Indian security agencies and income tax (IT) officials the authority to listen to, and tape phone conversions, read emails and text messages, monitor Posts on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and track searches on Google of selected targets, without oversight by the courts or parliament. To call it sweeping is an understatement.Typically, Indian Security agencies need a court order for surveillance, or depend on Internet/telephone service providers for data, provided they supply a warrant. CMS allows the government to bypass the court.  Milind Deora, India’s Minister of State for Information Technology says the new system will actually improve citizens’ privacy because telecommunication agencies would no longer be directly involved in the surveillance; only government officials would have these details – missing the point that in a democracy, there has to be freedom from government surveillance. This is hardly comforting in a nation riddled with governmental corruption.India does not have a privacy law. CMS will operate under the Indian Telegraph Act (ITA). The ITA is a relic of the British Raj from 1885, and gives the government the freedom to monitor private conversations. News reports quote anonymous telecommunications ministry officials as saying that CMS has been introduced for security purposes, and “this is to protect you and your country”.That is irrational. For one, there are no ‘security purposes’ that prevent the government from having a rational debate on this programme and getting approval from our elected representatives before authorizing such wide-reaching surveillance. If the government is worried that a public debate in a paralysed parliament would half the programme’s progress, then it can convene a committee of individuals or an individual body such as CAG to oversee the programme. It can seek judicial approval from the Supreme Court, and have a judge sign off on surveillance requests without making these requests public.As of now, the top bureaucrat in the interior ministry and his/her state level deputies will have the power to approve surveillance requests. Even the recently revealed US surveillance Programme, had ‘behind the doors’ bipartisan surveillance approval. Furthermore, US investigation agencies such as the CIA and NSA are not the ruling party’s marionettes; in India, that the CBI is an arm of the government is a fait accompli. Even the Supreme Court recently lambasted the CBI and asked it to guarantee its independence from government influences after it was proved that it shared unreleased investigation reports with the government.There is no guarantee that this top bureaucrat will be judicious or not use this as a tool to pursue political and personal vendettas against opposition parties or open critics of the government. Security purposes hardly justify monitoring an individual’s social media usage. No terrorist announces plans to bomb a building on Facebook. Neither do Maoists espouse Twitter as their preferred form of communication.Presumably, security purposes could be defined as the government’s need to intercept terrorist plans. How does giving the IT department the same sweeping surveillance powers justify security purposes? The IT office already has expansive powers to conduct investigations, summon individuals or company executives, and raid premises to catch tax evaders. In a world where most financial details are discussed and transferred online, allowing the IT departments to snoop on these without any reasonable cause is akin to airport authorities strip searching everyone who boards a flight.What happened on 26/11 or what happens regularly in Naxal – affected areas is extremely sad and should ideally, never take place again. But targeting terrorists means targeting people who show such inclinations, or those who arouse suspicions, either by their travels or heir associations with militant or extremist groups. And in a country where a teenager has been arrested for posting an innocent comment questioning the need for a bandh on the death of a political leader, gives us reason to believe that this law is most likely to be misused, if not abused. Select the word which is MOST OPPOSITE in meaning to the word printed in bold, as used in the passage. AKIN....
MCQ-> Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Following the end of the Second World War, the United Kingdom enjoyed a long period without a major recession (from 1945 - 1973) and a rapid growth in prosperity in the 1959s and 1960s. According to the OECD, the annual rate of growth (percentage change between 1960 and 1973 averaged 2.9%, although this figure was far behind the rates of other European countries such as France, West Germany and Italy. However, following the 1973 oil crisis and the 1973-1974 stock market crash, the British economy fell into recession and the government of Edward Heath was ousted by the Labour Party under Harold Wilson. Wilson formed a minority government on 4 March 1974 after the general election on 28 February ended in a hung parliament. Wilson subsequently secured a three seat majority in a second election in October that year. The UK recorded weaker growth than many other European nations in the 1970s; even after the early 1970s recession ended, the economy was still blighted by rising unemployment and double-digit inflation. In 1976, the UK was forced to request a loan of $ 2.3 billion from the International Monetary Fund. The then Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey was required to implement public spending cuts and other economic reforms in order to secure the loan. Following the Winter of Discontent, the government of James Callaghan lost a vote of no confidence. This triggered the May 1979 general electron which resulted in Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party forming a new government. A new period of neo-liberal economics began in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher who won the general election on 3 May that year to return the Conservative Party to government after five years of Labour government. During the 1980s most state-owned enterprises were privatised, taxes cut and markets deregulated. GDP fell 5.9 % initially but growth subsequently returned and rose to 5% at its peak in 1988, one of the highest rates of any European nation. The UK economy had been one of the strongest economies in terms of inflation, interest rates and unemployment, all of which remained relatively low until the 2008-09 recession. Unemployment has since reached a peak of just under 2.5 million (7.8 %), the highest level since the early 1990s, although still far lower than some other European nations. However, interest rates have reduced to 0.5 % pa. During August 2008 the IMF warned that the UK economic outlook had worsened due to a twin shock : financial turmoil and rising commodity prices. Both developments harm the UK more than most developed countries, as the UK obtains revenue from exporting financial services while recording deficits in finished goods and commodities, including food. In 2007, the UK had the world's third largest current account deficit, due mainly to a large deficit in manufactured goods. During May 2008, the IMF advised the UK government to broaden the scope of fiscal policy to promote external balance. Although the UK's labour productivity per person employed¡¨ has been progressing well over the last two decades and has overtaken productivity in Germany, it still lags around 20% behind France, where workers have a 35 hour working week. the UK's labour productivity per hour worked is currently on a par with the average for the sold EU (15 countries). In 2010, the United Kingdom ranked 26th on the Human Development Index. The UK entered a recession in Q2 of 2008, according to the Office for National Statics and exited it in Q4 of 2009. The subsequently revised ONS figures show that the UK suffered six consecutive quarters of negative growth, making it the longest recession since records began. As of the end of Q4 2009, revised statistics from the Office for National Statistics demonstrate that the UK economy shrank by 7.2% from peak to trough. The Blue Book 2013 confirms that UK growth in Q2 of 2013 was 0.7 %, and that the volume of output of GDP remains 3.2% below its prerecession peak; The UK economy's recovery has thus been more lackluster than previously thought. Furthermore The Blue Book 2013 demonstrates that the UK experienced a deeper initial downturn than all of the G7 economies save for Japan, and has experienced a slower recovery than all but Italy. A report released by the Office of National Statistics on 14 May 2013 revealed that over the six-year period between 2005 and 2011, the UK dropped from 5th place to 12th place in terms of household income on an international scale ¡X the drop was partially attrib10 uted to the devaluation of sterling over this time frame. However, the report also concluded that, during this period, inflation was relatively less volatile, the UK labour market was more resilient in comparison to other recessions, and household spending and wealth in the UK remained relatively strong in comparison with other OECD countries. According to a report by Moody's Corporation, Britain's debt-to-GDP ratio continues to increase in 2013 and is expected to reach 93% at the end of the year. The UK has lost its triple. A credit rating on the basis of poor economic outlook. 2013 Economic Growth has surprised many Economists, Ministers and the OBR in the 2013 budget projected annual growth of just 0.6 %. In 2013 Q1 the economy grew by 0.4 % Q2 the economy grew by 0.7 % and Q3 the economy is predicted to have grown at 0.8%.A new period of neo-liberal economics began in United Kingdom with the election of Margaret Thatcher after five years of Labour government. Margaret Thatcher came in power in
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