Prime Minister Modi is selling the idea that the engineered cash shortage that resulted from the disastrous demonetisation exercise is an opportunity to force-march India to being what is inelegantly termed a “less cash” society. In his view, that transition,…
Growth in India’s non-financial corporate sector shrank in 2015-16, after three consecutive years of “steep moderation” according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In its annual study of the Performance of the Corporate Business Sector, the RBI attributes this…
Three parallel developments that caught media attention over the last month point to the restoration of the hegemony of Finance Capital in the years since the 2008 crisis. They also reveal the likely consequences of the neoconservative backlash, led by…
In an acceleration of a trend towards mega-mergers in the agribusiness area, German pharma and agrochemicals major Bayer has announced an all-cash $66 billion deal to take over American seed major Monsanto. To clinch the deal, Bayer raised its initial…
In the final stretch of his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan chose to make one more effort at revving up India’s bond markets. A number of measures aimed at galvanizing the debt market, culled…
On August 9, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan released the last bi-monthly monetary policy statement that would be drafted under his leadership. No changes were made: the benchmark ‘repo’ rate was kept at 6.5 per cent, the cash reserve ratio at…
In the fourth round of what has become a periodic exercise, the All India Bank Employees Association (AIBEA), the “oldest and largest” trade union in the industry, has released a list of 5,610 wilful defaulters on debt they owe commercial…
July 1991 is widely seen as a watershed month in Indian economic policy making. That was when the Indian government openly declared that it was unwinding the interventionist regime which had been in place since Independence, involving controls on economic…
Britain has voted to leave the European Union (EU). And the managers of global capitalism have their hands full addressing the fall-out of ‘Brexit’, even as their efforts to manage the after-shocks of the crisis of 2008 remain unsuccessful. It…
As the Modi government completes two years in office, one of its major economic programmes—the Make in India initiative—that promised manufacturing growth based on exports, is staring at failure. According to the most recent monthly figure available at the time…
