G7: Promising more from less
In early June Finance Ministers and central bank governors of the G7 met over two days in London, as a prequel to the meeting of heads of states of the grouping a week later. The meet was of special significance.…
The Impasse in External Debt Relief
When the pandemic first swept across the globe and destroyed economies in its wake, there were at least some expressions of international solidarity among leaders of the rich countries. External debt problems were widely recognised to be inevitable in the…
The Inadequate Food Safety Net
With India experiencing a severe second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing decentralized lockdowns, a crisis of loss of jobs and livelihoods and resulting hunger is being reported from across the country. A reluctant central government has, therefore, been forced…
The Hunger Pandemic
The disease ripping through the country is only one of the destructive forces affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians. The dramatic increase in hunger is another. Like devastation wrought by the current surge in coronavirus infections, this…
Financial Fragility in ‘Mature’ Markets
With rising non-financial corporate debt and evidence of elevated borrowing levels among non-bank financial companies, the fragility resulting from excess leverage has returned to haunt developed country financial markets. The fact that the collapse of a little-known family office firm…
Down the Rabbit Hole: Asset reconstruction companies and the bad debt of Indian banks
The finance minister’s Budget speech 2021 revealed the government’s plans to establish an Asset Reconstruction Company to take over bad debt from the books of public sector banks for eventual disposal. That suggests that the ARC route rather than recapitalisation would in…
Economic Divergence Gone Awry
It is the second year running in which the IMF and the World Bank have been forced by the Covid pandemic to hold their annual Spring Meetings online. But this time there was slight cause for optimism. Signs of a…
Asia’s Post-pandemic Encounter with Foreign Finance
It is by now a much-repeated story. Despite the devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, punters in global financial markets have had a field day. If there is one location where the pandemic has not been able to wreck damage,…
The Growing Perils of India’s open Capital Account
In an important new paper (“External balance sheets of emerging economies: low-yielding assets, high-yielding liabilities”, Review of Keynesian Economics, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2021, pp. 232–252) the Turkish economist Yilmaz Akyuz has identified new channels of transmission of global…
The Long Search for Stability: Financial cooperation to address global risks in the East Asian region
Forced by the 1997 Southeast Asian crisis to recognize the external vulnerabilities that openness to volatile capital flows result in and upset over the post-crisis policy responses imposed by the IMF, countries in the sub-region saw the need for a…