Over a select dinner briefing last week, the fifth director-general of World Trade Organisation (WTO), Pascal Lamy, suggested that since politics drives international trade, it is governments “not wise men, think tanks or director-generals” who should be driving agreements. Gautam Chikermane writes
The timing is terrible. So is the scale of the error — all of $2 trillion. And as far as implications go, the removal of Deven Sharma as president of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) raises issues of political intolerance in the land of the last superpower.
Gautam Chikermane writes.
Over the past three days, governments across the world have been serving just one set of people — those suffering from financial flatulence. Gautam Chikermane writes.
Market sentiment is one thing, real problems quite another. So, when leaders of the world — the very rich G7, the upcoming G20 or any other nation — think about what to do when the world's most powerful economy loses its Triple-A rating (extremely strong capacity to meet financial commitments), they need to grapple with three hot potatoes.
Gautam Chikermane writes.
They swear by data. They live on growth. They profit from outperformance. But when it comes to the crunch, they revert to history.
Gautam Chikermane explains.
Among the 32 new bills that will be introduced in the Monsoon session of Parliament that begins today, there is one that will change the landscape of India. Gautam Chikermane writes.
How big is a 0.4 percentage point fall in the 2011-12 GDP growth projection that the government announced today -or how small? Ask builders and bankers and an entire volley of wails hits you. Gautam Chikermane writes.
When the markets ignored 2011's biggest terror attack in the commercial capital of India on July 13 that left 19 people dead and 130 injured, nobody blinked an eye. It's only human lives that have been lost, not profits, so why should the markets weep? Gautam Chikermane writes.
A little before the crisis hit us unprepared and accentuated the phenomenon, the past decade has seen an excessive reliance on macroeconomics. Gautam Chikermane writes.
The first email service I used was Sabeer Bhatia’s Hotmail. Finding that to be clunky after Microsoft bought the company in December 1997 for $400 million, I moved to the cooler, hipper Yahoo Mail in October 1999. Gautam Chikermane writes.
If you try and make sense out of what has degenerated into a war between five activists on one side and the entire might of the government on the other you will fail.
You may quibble with RBI governor D Subbarao about monetary policy being a blunt instrument that hits everything from individuals’ home loans to the country’s economic growth. Gautam Chikermane writes.
If you were asked which of the evils you would choose - higher inflation or lower growth - it would put you in the league of finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and Reserve Bank of India governor D Subbarao. Gautam Chikermane writes.
At one level, the managing director of IMF is just another geopolitical job that the 187 governments that “own” it can fool around with.
Gautam Chikermane writes.
Why pick on Air India (AI)? Why not the Railways that has been under a similar pressure for more than two decades, following the short-sighted Rakesh Mohan Committee report?
Gautam Chikermane writes.