governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Indian stock markets look like “mushroom rocks”, top-heavy and delicately balanced, just waiting to be tipped over by bad news, of which there is plenty. Investors, whose stocks are part of the ongoing bull-run starting February 2021, could not care less having gained Rs.11 trillion, since May 24. This bonanza of wealth accretion, for the […]
Read More The morality of stock marketsDeal making in banking is returning after a gap of four years. Banking, not the retail stuff but the kind which gets the economy moving, is classically done through deals struck over convivial lunches and dinners. It’s tough to make deals in an environment of zero tolerance for corruption Stung by the proclivity of the […]
Read More Deal making is back-at last!Covid-19 has made the Bharat-India divide even sharper. The obsessive, 4G connected, masked and gloved urban Indian checking for updates and worrying about a post-Covid-19 future on the one hand and rural India, carrying on stoically as always, too busy with the daily mechanics of agricultural production to care overly about the “outside” world, except […]
Read More Needed tough love not freebiesBabus are hugely upset, understandably so, at the less than laudatory media coverage of Shaktikanta Das, an IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre who had retired as secretary, economic affairs, in the finance ministry and was appointed the 25th governor of the Reserve Bank of India last week. The first two governors of the […]
Read More Das – the new Raja of Mint StreetIt was an unequal fight to begin with. Structurally, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the nation’s central bank, is squarely under the government’s thumb. The government appoints the governor of the RBI and can curtail his tenure. Two-thirds of the RBI’s board consists of government appointees who are not RBI officials. The government can […]
Read More Urjit Patel the only winner in the Govt-RBI slugfestSo, what are we trying to say when we repeatedly stress that 65 per cent of our population is below 35 years of age? It is not as if we are growing any younger. In fact we are ageing. And that is a good thing because it is an outcome of development. India became younger […]
Read More Grow up well IndiaPiyush Goyal, the interim finance minister, will need to be a lucky general if he is to overcome the triple challenge of widening trade and fiscal deficits and lacklustre private investment. Exports – India’s achilles heel Despite our comparative advantage of cheap, skilled labour and entrepreneurial zeal, export pessimism is endemic — unlike in China. […]
Read More Follow the money to tackle the fiscal perfect stormConspiracy theorists are hard at work to identify the drivers behind the ongoing cash crunch, that has left the automated teller machines (ATMs) in cities and towns across large parts of the country dry. There is much finger pointing between the Reserve Bank of India and the commercial banks, both private and public sector, each […]
Read More What the cash crunch foretellsThe international bond market, with an outstanding volume of around $22 trillion, is the final arbiter of a country’s destiny. Bonds, unlike loans, can be traded, or “marked to market”. This makes trustworthy credit ratings, like Moodys’, critical to give pricing signals. Since there is a market, even discards are recycled. Discards are called “junk” […]
Read More Moody God of bond marketsBOOK REVIEW Rethinking Public Institutions in India Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Milan Vaishnav (Eds) Oxford University Press 548 pages; Rs 995 Public institutional reform has a stale air about it. There are plenty of options but little action. The sombre packaging of this book adds to this gloom. Possibly, the “monkish”, value-for-money branding is […]
Read More India’s pressured public institutions
Opinion India 