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…
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…
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…
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,…
U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package is one of the most ambitious measures to revive the U.S. and, with it, the world economy. Coming on the heels of Trump’s $2 trillion package last year and a further $900…
With the cabinet approving amendments to the Insurance Act of 1938, to raise the cap on foreign direct investment (FDI) in insurance companies from 49 to 74 per cent, the process of implementing the next stage of reducing public control…
In their saner moments, most progressives in the European Union might concede that the bloc has not acquitted itself very well as a global player during the pandemic. To be sure, it has finally displayed some good sense in looking…
Voltaire had said “one can always kill a man with incantations, plus a little poison”. Voltaire was a rationalist which the BJP government alas is not. It believes that one can revive an economy with incantations alone, for that is…
It defies all logic. As expected, once the implications of the Covid-19 contagion began to be absorbed, the BSE Sensex lost 37 per cent in value, falling from a level just above 41,000 on February 19, 2020, to just below…
In an attempt to persuade listeners into believing that Budget 2021 will complete the conquest of disease and unleash an era of post-Covid expansion, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman placed special emphasis in her budget speech on two sets of initiatives.…
