| Subir Roy: Romancing the railways | 13-NOV-09 |
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| The romance of train journeys, warts and all, came back to me recently. A hastily planned trip to Mumbai, only sky-high air fares available for the return journey, more time on a retiree’s hands, and by some stroke of luck — maybe because people hadn’t cottoned on to it — reservation to Howrah available in the very new Duronto. And so there I was, lugging my malfunctioning American Tourister contraption which would not stroll, at grand old VT, CST if you want to be politically correct and dodge the ire of MNS, looking forward to 26 hours of alternately reading Paul Krugman on the return of Depression Economics and dozing off. |
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| Jaimini Bhagwati: Whither economics and finance? | 21-AUG-09 |
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| It would have been inconceivable just a year ago that the US government would need to support Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and become a de-facto majority shareholder in General Motors, AIG, Citibank and Bank of America, and the UK government would hold controlling shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Financial Times was concerned enough to run a series on the “Future of Capitalism”. |
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| Global confidence rises on signs of recovery | 14-AUG-09 |
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| Confidence in the world economy surged to a 22-month high in August on signs the worst global recession since World War II is approaching an end, a Bloomberg survey of users on six continents showed. |
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| Withering shoots? | 15-JUL-09 |
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| The debate on the economic condition of the US has most recently focused on the effectiveness, or lack of it, of the fiscal stimulus package that the Obama administration initiated very early into its term. There is a growing body of opinion that says the $787 billion boost is simply not large enough. Although there has been much talk of green shoots in the past few weeks, as indicators like consumer confidence and housing starts have begun to stabilise, the one persistent source of concern has been unemployment. In June, the economy lost a further 467,000 jobs, less than the 700,000 job losses per month in the first quarter but still symptomatic of severe recession. This raised the unemployment rate to 9.5 per cent, a level not seen since the recession of the early 1980s. |
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| Don't trough too soon | 16-JUN-09 |
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| GSS: A record-breaking football transfer, the launch of a new boutique hotel. It may not be the spring of 2007, but green-shootists have plenty to feel good about at the moment. |
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| Abheek Barua: Should we listen to Paul Krugman? | 08-JUN-09 |
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| There is apparently serious debate in the American economics community on whether the large amount of dollars sloshing around in the system will fuel inflation going forward. The venerable and loquacious Paul Krugman is on one side and argues that in the current environment the textbook relationship between excess money and inflation does not quite hold. “These aren’t ordinary times,” he writes on his blog, “banks aren’t lending out their extra reserves. |
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| Accounting fiction | 23-APR-09 |
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| US banks have started reporting profits, even repaying some of the funds given to them by the government. But, as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman points out, a bank’s profits aren’t really hard numbers, since a great deal depends on how much money the bank sets aside to cover the possibility of future losses. As Citigroup’s $1.6 billion first quarter profits show, there is quite a lot of elbow room for massaging the numbers. |
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| Mild slump became a plunge: Krugman | 19-MAR-09 |
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| Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman said the world is in a “coordinated global slump” that “looks worse in Europe and in Japan” than in the US. |
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| Stiglitz enabled Obama with Nobel ideas to scorn them | 14-MAR-09 |
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| Joseph Stiglitz’s 2003 book “The Roaring Nineties” is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s blueprint to reshape the US economy. Yet the Nobel Prize- winning economist says “there’s no natural position for somebody like me” in the new administration. |
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Content Guide
