India is an outlier in terms of low government spending during the pandemic, as we noted last month in an earlier article. Unlike advanced economies and even most developing and emerging market economies, the Indian government did not ramp up…
One of the most important arguments advanced by John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist, was that the operation of financial markets under capitalism is deeply flawed. Such markets are intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between “enterprise” where an asset is held…
In recent years, when the economy as a whole performed poorly, reports on how old and new businesspersons accumulated huge volumes of wealth in short timespans have been commonplace. There is also evidence that conspicuous consumption is on the rise.…
In early December, the State Bank of India (SBI), which dominates the country’s banking sector announced that it had entered into a partnership with Adani Capital, a private sector non-bank finance company (NBFC). The aim was to engage in “co-lending”…
In a recent report the People’s Commission on the Public Sector and Public Services has rightly drawn attention to the sheer un-constitutionality of the Modi government’s plan to privatise en masse the assets of the public sector. The constitution of…
A charade played out in the weeks preceding the fall meetings of the IMF and the World Bank has subsequently occupied time that should have been devoted to more crucial issues such as a looming debt crisis, inequalities in vaccine…
It is by now well known that three decades of financial globalization have led to massive increases in income and asset inequalities in the United States and Europe. But in the developing world, the effects of financial globalization have been…
The Doing Business controversy has shaken the confidence in the Bretton Wood institutions, but it must not obscure the real problems with their functioning - the disproportionate power of the US; the IMF’s deeply procyclical approach to countries that seek…
The period of neo-liberalism witnesses an increase in the share of economic surplus in total output both in individual countries and also for the world as a whole. This is because the “opening” up of the economy to freer trade…
China’s Evergrande group, identified as the world’s most indebted property company with accumulated liabilities in excess of $300 billion, missed an interest payment instalment due on September 23, 2021 on bonds borrowed through US dollar bond markets. Though the company…
