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,…
Imperialism Still Alive and Kicking: An interview with Prabhat Patnaik
An interview by C. J. Polychroniou C. J. Polychroniou: From the 1980s onwards, with the process of economic globalization having picked up speed, the concept of Imperialism has been largely removed from the political lexicon of much of the Western…
The GDP Elephant
National income is hard to estimate in India where so much activity and employment is in the informal sector. Much of GDP calculation is not purely “technocratic” but relies on judgments and assumptions. As long as our system of national…
World Capitalist Crisis getting Accentuated
At the last Spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, had confidently stated that the world economy was on the path of recovery, a view echoed by most official soothsayers…
Bad Bank Proposal for India
The author's bad bank proposal for India would be capitalised with zero coupon perpetual bonds the government would issue and would give the country some breathing time so that she can attack and tackle all her other problems. Click here…
Is it India’s Subprime?
The Indian corporate sector is grappling with a severe bad debt crisis, and as a result, the banks (public sector banks) are increasingly getting saddled with non-performing assets. Calling it India’s subprime crisis might be an exaggeration but I would…