[ ]… Its 1 July today and we start the month with news that truckers in Karnataka are calling an indefinite strike to raise their voice against a hike in sales tax on diesel.

Now truckers are intelligent too. Their argument is that sales tax should be done away with as it is not constant across the country. People might pay more in Punjab than Haryana. They have instead recommended putting VAT (Value Added Tax) as it levied equal across the country….[ ] Read the rest of the great post here!

This time its the turn of the European Banks to take the hit – and that right on their balance sheet!! Due to subprime mortgage, short-term lending is poised to rise again even as central bankers are pumping billions and billions of dollars into their businesses.

This may be summed as an ‘end-of-the-quarter‘ effect, where banks pump in a lot of cash to make their balance sheets look stable [even in the worst times] mainly to boost investor confidence and trump their competitors. Cold, hard cash is raised through a variety of processes, including international funding, and borrowing dollars from Americans (probably Federal Reserve…) and selling part-stakes (Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers did that last year to ADIA Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Bear Stearns sold itself fully to JP Morgan)