saugata bhattacharya Columns, Leading Columnist

saugata bhattacharya The Indian Express Group

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Tuesday 19 Mar '13The companion piece to this article, a few days ago, sought some insights into why India’s inflation, initially manifest largely in food inflation, but now gradually disseminating to other components in the consumer price index, remained so persistently high, particularly in an environment where growth has slowed so dramatically and swiftly.
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Friday 15 Mar '13This is not a paean to cutting rates. It can’t be. Which central bank can legitimately wade into (further) monetary policy easing when the maximum function of the multiple inflation indicators that are tracked by RBI is reading 11%?
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Monday 25 Feb '13We had written about India’s large and troubling current account deficit in early January and how the theories of currencies and finance seem to be failing in India.
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Tuesday 29 Jan '13Why RBI will start cutting rates, maybe even more than expected.
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Thursday 03 Jan '13India’s current account deficit in the July-September quarter turned out to be far worse than anticipated, a record 5.4% of GDP.
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Wednesday 12 Dec '12This is the surprising finding of a recent IMF paper on understanding the dynamics of inflation in various markets.

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column-d-j-vu-in-the-power-sector
Thursday 02 Aug '12The Chief Ministers’ Conference held in March 2011 discussed the state of the Power Sector and emphasised the urgency of power sector.
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Wednesday 01 Aug '12RBI has developed a knack in bowling googlies at market analysts, using “gotcha” manoeuvres to confound.
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Monday 30 Apr '12European banks have withdrawn less of their investments from India than anticipated, but the threat remains.
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Monday 16 Apr '12Reversing India’s growth slowdown will require reviving investment, which has fallen quite sharply.
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Tuesday 03 Apr '12Sir Humphrey, in one of the Yes Minister episodes, explains the word “egregious” to his minister as “outstanding, in one sense or another”.
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Tuesday 07 Feb '12The Second International Research Conference organised by RBI got off to an excellent start with the introductory expositions of the Governor and Deputy Governor.
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Saturday 21 Jan '12As we head into RBI’s third quarter review of the 2011-12 monetary policy, the question foremost on our minds is the seeming reluctance to reverse the policy stance right away.
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Thursday 15 Dec '11The November inflation data has quashed the faint hope of a reversal in RBI’s monetary policy stance in its forthcoming mid-quarter policy review.
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Saturday 12 Nov '11Pulling out another item from its cornucopia of surprises, RBI announced a complete deregulation of the interest rate on savings deposit accounts with banks in late October.
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Tuesday 25 Oct '11Given the sense of inevitability of continuing tightening at its monetary policy review yesterday, RBI will have sewn up the arguments of its inflation-fighting stance preparatory to another 25 basis points hike to 8.5%, together with a statement of its commitment to carry on with “its unfinished task of taming inflation”.
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Monday 12 Sep '11In the hubbub of news of various central banks trying to prevent a sharp appreciation of their respective currencies, portents of deeper changes in the configuration of global currency markets have remained muted.
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Monday 25 Jul '11Economists have developed a taxonomy of the growth-inflation tradeoff: supply- and demand-led inflation, deflation, stagflation, and so on.
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Tuesday 26 Apr '11The importance of the downgrade of the outlook for US long-term sovereign credit ratings from stable to negative by Standard & Poor’s a few days ago lay not so much in a deep impact on global economic and financial conditions but a reaffirmation of the concerns that have been repeatedly voiced by a wide variety of stakeholders regarding the ballooning US sovereign debt.
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Friday 04 Feb '11Given the increasing importance of markets in India’s economy, the need for an accurate reflection of economic reality, in order to calibrate policy and commercial decision making, is becoming acute.
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Thursday 23 Dec '10The dismay at the steep increase in airline fares has not been as vocal as the outrage over the 2G telecom licences mess, but is disturbing nevertheless.
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Friday 17 Dec '10RBI continued its pause on policy tightening, as expected, its discomfort with the extent of current liquidity tightness overriding its concern with the emerging risks to prices and inflation.
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Monday 15 Nov '10The US Federal Reserve is obviously following the creed of Tagore’s Ekla Chalo. The extraordinarily vocal criticism, in the run-up to this weekend’s G20 Summit, even from as august an individual as Germany’s finance minister, of the Fed’s $600 billion large-scale asset purchase programme, popularly dubbed QE2 conjures up an image justifying the Chairman’s nickname “Helicopter Ben”.
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Saturday 09 Oct '10The RBI leaning against the wind is not likely to make a material difference to the direction of the rupee for any sustained period of time.
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Tuesday 21 Sep '10Coinciding neatly with the second anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision, the oversight body of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, announced a substantial strengthening of capital requirements on banking entities, known as Basel-3, endorsing the capital and liquidity measures originally proposed in December 2009 and amended in July 2010.