In all the hoopla created by the ‘shock’ political turnaround in Europe and the revelations from JP Morgan (well, well – that deserves a separate post), we can be forgiven if we let the China trade data pass by without a wink. But, that would be a folly. Exports were exceptionally weak and imports were [...]
On Monday (7th May), India’s Finance Minister tried to undo the damage that his budget presented early in March had caused to investor sentiment towards India. More specifically, retrospective amendments to Indian tax laws and the implementation of General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) sowed confusion and led to heartburn. It was not so much that the [...]
As usual, it is a contestation for power In an excellent post, fellow INI blogger Pragmatic provides the historical perspective on the centre-state relationship in India and aptly describes it as ‘bargained federalism.’ Indeed, that description is perhaps appropriate for even mature democracies like US where constitutionally and historically states have enjoyed a much greater [...]
While I remembered to highlight the trade-off between short-run volatility and long-run stability towards the end of my previous post on the same topic, I thought it is important to stress this. Some very thoughtful comments have also appeared on the previous post. It is true that no system is perfect inasmuch as they are [...]
There’s more to the Mumbai terror alert than meets the eye Yesterday, reports in the media indicated that a terror alert had been sounded in Mumbai and across many Indian airports: five terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Taiba had entered the country and planned to target petrochemical installations in Mumbai using the sea routes. These reports were [...]
Been wanting to post the paragraph below from Tim Price’s blog post titled, ‘Politics of fear’. It captures, rather well, the situation in the world of investment advice and portfolio management today. At a personal level, it is one of the many reasons (but a rather important one) that I chose to leave the industry [...]
On Pakistan, India must not compromise from a position of strength. Former Foreign Secretary, Kanwal Sibal, has a very timely and well-articulated piece in the Daily Mail on India’s position on Siachen, amid rumors that New Delhi was planning some sort of strategic climbdown in the larger interest of bettering India-Pakistan relations: Peace with Pakistan [...]
No magic pills for most of our complex problems Columnist and novelist Sidin Vadukut posted this query on Twitter earlier today: Did any other country have a female infanticide problem that they overcame in the last, say, 50 years or so? If so, how? I do not know if there is any country which overcame [...]
As I had to prepare for some presentations and talks in North America ten days from now, I was spending some time poring over some data from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and their latest Asia Outlook 2012. The special theme of the report was inequality besides the usual macro analysis, outlook, GDP forecasts. A [...]
The historical context of federalism in India In the wake of the controversy over the proposed National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), the debate over federalism has atracted a lot of attention. Most of the chief ministers, who have opposed the NCTC, have opposed it on the grounds that the Centre is trying to encroach upon [...]