Nirav Modi, and his uncle Mehul Choksi, are the latest additions to the list of the so-called “entrepreneurs of new India” who have looted public money and decamped with the loot. The Punjab National Bank, the second largest bank in…
What is happening in the U.S. economy provides an object lesson on the functioning of neo-liberal capitalism. Pre-first world war capitalism which had witnessed the long Victorian and Edwardian boom had relied on the colonial arrangement for the system’s dynamics.…
For over half a century after the second world war, fascism had ceased to be a serious political force anywhere. There were no doubt many authoritarian, even murderous, regimes, and military dictatorships, especially in the third world, often installed through…
For India’s post-liberalisation poster-child, the software and IT-enabled services industry, recent developments in the global economy are bound to be disconcerting. Even as early signs of a synchronized global recovery emerge, fears of inflation and high interest rates have resulted…
Like the person on the proverbial tiger, the Indian economy is currently riding a precarious course. The Government of India’s Economic Survey for 2017-18 recognizes this frankly, but its panacea is to keep one’s fingers crossed and hope that the ride continues.…
This Debate contribution describes the promotion of digital rather than cash payments as a form of the financialization of finance, in its role as a payments system, with reference to recent Indian experience. The obsession with digital transactions as a…
The use of exchange rates based on Purchasing Power Parities to compare income across countries and over time has become standard practise. But there are reasons to believe this could lead to excessively inflated incomes for poor countries and in…
It seems that everyone loves to talk about inequality, and how much they dislike it. From Christine Lagarde in the International Monetary Fund to the Indian Prime Minister speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, everyone is united…
Oxfam has just produced a report in which it highlights the dramatic increase in wealth inequality that is occurring in India. The basic data it uses are from Credit Suisse which regularly brings out a Global Wealth Databook; and according to…
When the government presented its third supplementary demand for grants to the winter session of parliament, the list of expenditures included Rs. 80,000 crore for a first tranche investment in equity of the public sector banks to recapitalize them. This…
