Monetary policy can only make credit cheaper, it cannot bring money into the hands of workers. It cannot compensate for a fiscal stimuli, especially when India is in a liquidity trap. For such an unprecedented crisis, fiscal spending has been…
While the Covid-19-induced lockdown has yielded mixed and spatially diverse results so far in terms of disease containment, the socio-economic impact has been uniformly devastating across states in India. This warrants a careful appraisal of the lockdown strategy and a…
The current pandemic has brought to the fore, and with exceptional clarity, the fundamental contradiction underlying contemporary globalization, namely, the contradiction between the interests of finance and those of the people. Indeed this contradiction, which characterizes the era of globalization…
This lecture will try to essentially look at the impact of COVID-19 on the Indian economy — though, as we all understand, we are at a point where we don’t know anything about a lot of things, as the future…
The crisis at Yes Bank is only the concentrated expression of a deeper malaise afflicting the Indian banking system as a whole, namely its vastly increased financial fragility. The Chief Economic Advisor is no doubt right when he assures depositors,…
The revival package announced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to rescue insolvent Yes Bank smacks of desperation. Having placed a moratorium on the bank’s activities and capping withdrawals by depositors at Rs 50,000, the government has called upon…
Changes in estimation methods have of late made statistics on the Indian economy increasingly bewildering; besides, whenever the statistics show the performance of the economy in a poor light, the BJP government simply suppresses them. Nothing however can suppress the…
The Supreme Court has set aside a circular issued by the Reserve Bank of India in April 2018, which directed all entities regulated by it to “not deal in virtual currencies (VCs) or provide services for facilitating any person or…
India’s financial landscape appears set for a sea change. Early into its second term, the Modi government, through the Budget speech of its Finance Minister, has signalled the likelihood of a fundamental transformation of Indian finance. There were five indications…
These notes are meant to clarify a point made earlier (Peoples’ Democracy, June 30, 2018) about the erstwhile socialist economies not having over-production crises as capitalist economies do. It is in the nature of capitalism to have “over-production crises”, i.e.…
