In a barely noticed development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has “reformed” and extended the conditions it imposes in return for emergency balance of payments support to less developed countries with stressed external accounts. The evidence of that shift comes…
A New York Times News Service report reproduced in The Telegraph of Kolkata (May 7), discusses the findings of a global public opinion survey carried out by the Bennett Institute of Public Policy of Cambridge University. These show that the…
Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings,…
It is well known that several countries of Latin America are among the most unequal in the world, in terms of both income and asset distribution. There are many political economy forces leading to such inequality, but what makes matters…
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the US is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardising the…
The world economic outlook released in time for the recently concluded spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF presents a gloomy picture. Global GDP growth is expected to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in…
The month of March 2023 has come out to be yet another nightmarish experience for the world of global finance, after the collapse of Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers in September 2008. This started when on March 10, the world…
There is nothing mysterious about the reasons for the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and the Signature Bank in the United States. There is also nothing mysterious about why the entire banking system of the capitalist world has come…
The global distribution of surpluses and deficits in the balance of payments, or the excesses or shortfall in foreign exchange earnings vis-à-vis expenditures, has for multiple reasons been in constant flux. This has implications for the directions in which capital…
C. P. Chandrasekhar speaks to us about the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and whether the financial contagion is likely to spread to India and other countries. Last week, California-based Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the United States,…
