Making Merry on Bitcoin
Bitcoin has left the world of finance gasping. Though the total market value of all of that cryptocurrency in circulation is only a fraction of the value of the world’s financial assets, the rapid rise in the value of the…
Engineering a New Crisis
News that the US economy grew at 3 per cent during the hurricane-blighted third quarter of 2017, close to the 3.1 per cent recorded in the previous quarter, has once more revived claims that the world economy has left the…
The Slide of an Aging Leader
After 15 years, the Tata group has exited the mobile telephony business. Its assets in the area located in Tate Tele Services Ltd (TTSL) have been taken over by Bharti Airtel. The Tata name has featured in the mobile telephony…
Create a Crisis and make it Worse
On August 10, the government tabled a new bill in Parliament, with the aim of using its majority to push through a desperate policy initiative in the form of the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance (FRDI) Act. The Act seeks…
Mixed Signals from the External Sector
A slew of numbers released recently point to rather peculiar and contrary trends in India’s balance of payments. Exports have revived but the trade and current account deficits widen, pointing to an excess of foreign exchange expenditure relative to earnings.…
A Bull in a China Shop
The BJP government, like a bull in a China shop, is wrecking the economy. A neo-liberal regime, even at the best of times, i.e. even when the economy is booming, brings misery to the vast mass of the working people…
The Truth About Demonetization
After months of dilly-dallying the Reserve Bank of India has finally come out with the figure that nearly 99 percent of the currency notes demonetized in November 2016, came back to the banking system. The total value of demonetized currency,…
Twenty Years after The Asian Financial Crisis
Exactly twenty years ago, a major financial crisis had hit the countries of East and South East Asia in July 1997. This crisis was a watershed in the history of third world development, in the sense that these “tiger economies”…
NPAs: All talk and no action
The media are full of it. Viral Acharya, a recently inducted Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has declared publicly that resolving the problem of bank stress resulting from large non-performing assets (NPAs) on their balance sheets…
Justice in the Age of Finance
The big news late in June 2017 was that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the UK had charged four former senior executives of Barclays bank, including its former chief executive, John Varley, with fraud committed almost a decade earlier,…