The Economics of Scams

What exactly was the Harshad Mehta Scam of 1992? And how do scams happen in the first place? Book of Sins attempts some answers.

For as long as there has been finance, there have been scams. Whether it is Nigerian princes emailing you to transfer money, or Bernie Madoff promising impossible returns, or a sketchy startup raising money, Enron manipulating accounts or brokers and bankers manipulating the stock market.

India got its first mainstream taste of it in 1992 when the equity scam broke after super broker Harshad Mehta landed himself into a soup with the SBI. What was the economic story behind it? What Econ frailties of ours do scamsters and fraudsters exploit? And why do we fall for them? My podcast, Book of Sins, is an Econ exploration of these questions and an attempt to break down the mechanics and the characters of financial scams into easily understandable points.

If you enjoyed the teaser above for the first season that deals with the 1992 Stock Market scam in India, why not give the whole thing a listen?

You can find it on all leading podcast platforms. Subscribe and listen to BOOK OF SINS on

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MSD - Mahi, Supply, aur Demand

I was on my way back from watching an IPL game – RCB beat table toppers RR in a tense match at the Chinnaswamy. My phone battery had drained out, and so had my voice and the bus arrived later than usual, so I was not really following on what was happening in the second game of the double header Sunday – CSK v KKR. The college kid sitting next to match was watching it on his phone (with the commentary set on loudspeaker) but I was mostly lost in reading a book I had just picked up. That is, until, Ravindra Jadeja got out, and in walked a certain MS Dhoni, with two balls left to play.

IPL-onomics

This is not an edition of discussing the economics of the Indian Premier League in the sense of dissecting the commercial numbers, whether it be the billions of dollars that were bid for the media rights, or the billions that were paid out to buy franchises. But this season's IPL has two new interesting twists in the form of rule changes that probably deserve an economics lens.

The Economics of Smriti Mandhana

After the Women's Premier League (WPL) auction on Monday, Smriti Mandhana, the elegant left hander and No. 3 batter in the ICC T20I rankings, became the most expensive player in women's cricket. Smriti's economic bonanza is a culmination of quite the journey for the women's game. It is also a reflection of how the economics of being a cricketer, and more specifically, a female cricketer has evolved. Playing professional sport is entering, what in economics parlance is called, a winner-take-all market, or being subject to 'superstar economics'. In short, this translates to the reality that that while many will vie for a place in that market, only a few will be successful, and as a corollary, the rewards from the profession will accrue disproportionately to the top performers, the superstars, as it were. In the WPL auction, the top 20 players sold out of the total 87, received 64% of the total purse of Rs. 600 million that was available.

Nightingale-onomics

When Adam Smith and David Ricardo extolled the virtues of specialisation and how it can unlock higher levels of productivity, they could scarcely have been thinking about a little girl born in Indore who would start singing with a singular devotion at age five, be correcting subtle errors in the pitch and tone of learners twice as old as her at age eight, and in fifteen short years, be recording a song every other day on average for the next decade - a level of output that cannot be imagined even for the most efficient machine, let alone a human being.

The Curse of Private Value (or why Glenn Maxwell went for Rs. 14.25 Cr.)

It's become an annual ritual almost at this point to be disappointed in the purchases made at the Indian Premier League (IPL) auction by the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), who happen to be the team I cheer for at the tournament. The IPL Auction has been a fairly unique sporting and economic event since its inception, not least because most other sporting leagues see players recruited through drafts or through private negotiations.

Be Kind: 2020 (Econ) Rewind

The year 2020, to paraphrase an often quoted line, did not build our character; it simply revealed it. An extraordinary turn of events upended how we thought about everything - life, love, work, social connections, the value of well-being. It shone a sharp spotlight, across the world, on humanity at its best and at its worst, our actions exacerbated by the extreme circumstances we collectively faced. But it was also, in a way, a reiteration of an extraordinary aspect that gets talked about often in economics, but is surprisingly ignored in a lot of its formalised models.

Rockstar Economics: How to tackle information asymmetry

One of the most ideal scenarios is economics is a marketplace that has innumerable buyers and sellers transacting on pretty much identical goods with free flowing information about how much someone is willing to buy and what price they are willing to pay for it. Economists term it ‘perfect competition’ where there is no chance anyone – buyer or seller – gets ripped off because as Tim Harford writes in his book ‘The Undercover Economist’:

The Economics of Scams

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Rose, ek roz

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MSD - Mahi, Supply, aur Demand

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IPL-onomics

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The Economics of Smriti Mandhana

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Price & Prejudice

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Invisible touch

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Nightingale-onomics

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The Market Solution

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The Bowrne Supremacy

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The Curse of Private Value (or why Glenn Maxwell went for Rs. 14.25 Cr.)

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Be Kind: 2020 (Econ) Rewind

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Auction Replay: What the IPL tells us about the 2020 Economics Nobel

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Rockstar Economics: How to tackle information asymmetry

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Pausing Rationality: Why we can't resist sale events

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Dispatches From The Econ Highway

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