Going by the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) latest Financial Stability Report released on Thursday, banks are nice and stable. Bad loans as a proportion of overall loans are at multi-year lows, with their gross ratio standing at 2.8% in March 2024, which could decline further to 2.5% by March next. Their capital buffers have … Read more
If the 1990s was a seminal moment for Indian equities, it’s now the turn of India’s bond market to stake its claim in the limelight. Foreign ownership of Indian government bonds is less than 2% currently. Any allocation to Indian bonds today is active and non-benchmarked, as domestic securities are not part of any global … Read more
How many hours do you end up spending on regulatory matters?” we asked Agarwalji, a garment exporter. “Around 15-20%,” he said, “approvals and inspections, labour audit, water, building certificate, new site formalities and so on. Every day, I spend a couple of hours going through some of these.” Since this involved government officials, he couldn’t … Read more
Several public figures in India have recently been the subject of deepfakes, some of which were widely circulated on social media. While morphed images are not a new phenomenon, deepfakes created by artificial intelligence (AI) are distinguished by a much higher degree of realism. As AI—and deepfakes in particular—go mainstream across online platforms, the question … Read more
A new scientific paper on failure may have succeeded in offering the most depressing opening line in the history of scientific papers: “Is there anything failure does not ruin? It destroys reputations, careers, and families; economic prospects, political prospects, and social ones.” That’s perhaps a useful corrective to all the graduation speakers, motivational gurus, and … Read more
Yet, curiously, the dominant policy debates are all about maximizing GDP growth, with little attention paid to accelerating employment growth. Our economic strategy lens needs to change, focusing on employment growth alongside GDP growth. In the early years of planned development, the emphasis was on heavy industries producing capital goods. Consumer goods industries were given … Read more
This is different from the stance RBI took during the pandemic, which was to do everything to protect growth. But that was a black swan event, and using the same logic today, when the economy is cruising along well after registering a high growth rate of 8.2% in 2023-24, may be misplaced. Conceptually, when interest … Read more
As this year’s final budget nears, taxation changes to relieve citizens and stimulate consumption are a subject of speculation. A focus area that awaits attention, though, is India’s capital gains tax regime. While changes have been made, it remains complex and unfair. The rates of this tax differ by asset classes, while it also lacks … Read more
The sale of 5G telecom spectrum concluded on Wednesday, just the second day of the auction process, with the government reportedly collecting around ₹11,300 crore. This is barely about 12% of the ₹96,238 crore worth of airwaves that had been put up for sale. Clearly, demand didn’t turn out as strong as expected. At the … Read more
The biggest problem with social media is that it is anything but social. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar was the first to do a comprehensive study of the social connections of humans. His study concluded that a human could have five intimate friends, 15 very good friends, 50 friends, 150 meaningful relationships and about 500 acquittances. … Read more
James Tweed has always been fascinated by the act of learning in isolation. Having started life as a maritime derivatives trader, he founded his company to provide education for people on ships, where there was “not a lot of internet,” he says. In recent years, he discovered a new cohort of learners who also can’t … Read more
Given the absence of a clear path to boost exports through traditional methods and anticipated geo-economic changes disrupting manufacturing and distribution across the world, India must prioritize e-commerce exports. Currently, India’s annual e-commerce exports are in a range of $4-5 billion, with the government striving to increase this to $250-300 billion by 2030. This growth … Read more