| Think about the risks | 15-OCT-09 |
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| Interest rates: Near-zero policy interest rates are powerful. If the claims of financial economists are to be believed, they are holding up economic activity and bank balance sheets. But their magic isn’t only beneficial. They also distort behaviour in dangerous ways. |
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| Bhupesh Bhandari: The basket case of Uttar Pradesh | 09-OCT-09 |
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| Business Standard Hindi had, some days ago, organised a roundtable in Lucknow. The idea was to bring together bureaucrats, economists and industry for a discussion on industrial development in the state. From the word go, businessmen proved very difficult to get. Normally, they are more than happy to get a platform to interact with top bureaucrats. Here, on one excuse or the other, they all opted out. |
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| V V: Keynes - The Master returns | 03-OCT-09 |
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| Unlike the Chicago economists under Milton Friedman who argued that the unrestricted operation of private enterprise—seen as the most efficient form of economic organisation—was essential for economic development and that prices should be determined purely by market forces and inflation controlled by means of controlling money supply, Keynes, the most influential macroeconomist of the 20th century, had argued in his classic work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that there is uncertainty in the world—uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities and has come to be described as “unknown unknowns.” This irreducible uncertainty, he said, lay behind panics and bouts and the instability of market economics that we see around us today. |
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| Too few good men | 22-SEP-09 |
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| If Kaushik Basu of Cornell University is chosen as the next chief economic advisor in the finance ministry, and Subir Gokarn of Standard and Poor’s as deputy governor in the Reserve Bank of India, the government would have made a significant departure from the convention of filling such top-level positions with economists who have prior experience of working within the government system. |
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| U is for slow, F is for finance | 04-AUG-09 |
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| GSS: Economists love the letter game. The recession created a downward stroke. If the upcoming recovery is sharp, there will be a V. Or it could be slow like a U, or flat like an L. As yet, the right letter looks like U. |
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| Dollar, Yen slump versus Euro | 01-AUG-09 |
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| The dollar and the yen declined versus the euro after a government report showed the US economy shrank less than economists forecast, reducing the demand for the currencies as a refuge. |
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| Frank Sieren & Andreas Sieren: A spark for growth | 11-JUL-09 |
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| Lao Jiang’s old boat could use some fresh paint. But he doesn’t have the money. Jiang cruises on the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia, almost 200 kilometres north of its mouth near Shanghai. Jiang sells razor blades, Harbin beer and Chinese snacks to crews on big ships. Jiang has little understanding of economics but he has a good nose for business opportunities: “There are fewer big container ships with products bound for America. |
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| Economists glad with reforms agenda | 02-JUL-09 |
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| The economists today welcomed the Economic Survey prescribed reforms in various sectors, but said it failed to accord priority to the listed reforms. |
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| What recession? | 02-JUL-09 |
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| Economists go on about recessions and stuff like that based on data they crunch in their gloomy offices. They’d do well, however, to step out into the daylight, at the Wimbledon for instance. According to an AP newswire report, Wimbledon sold more tickets than it has ever before on opening day. Monday’s attendance was 42,811, up nearly 3,500 persons in comparison with the previous opening-day record in 2001. And more than 14,000 persons lined up to buy tickets — that’s around 1,600 higher than it was last year. A club spokesperson told AP that ‘If the capacity here was 100,000, there’d be 100,000 here. |
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| Alok Sheel: Of economists and historians | 13-JUN-09 |
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| As an erstwhile keen graduate student of history who stumbled into finance and economics as a professional hazard, I was not a little bemused by the recent spat between Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, first in public debate, and subsequently spilling over onto the pages of Financial Times. Unsurprisingly, the Nobel Laureate and Princeton economist faulted the Harvard historian for his shallow understanding of economics, in this case the theories of John Maynard Keynes. |
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| Factory output grows after 2-month decline | 13-JUN-09 |
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| Industrial output expanded 1.4 per cent in April after two months of decline, leading experts to predict that the economy had bottomed out. A return to 8-plus per cent industrial expansion was, however, some time away, they added. |
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Content Guide
