Looking at aggregate global economic growth obscures important changes in the world economy, especially if these are analysed using actual market exchange rates. The recent period has seen a reassertion of the western countries as major drivers of global growth, and a relative decline of Asia.

Karl Marx had once said that all criticism must begin with the criticism of religion. Paraphrasing Marx one can say in the current economic context that all criticism must begin with the criticism of the GDP.

When Azerbaijan as the Presidency of this year's Conference of Parties (COP29) held at Baku, in Azerbaijan, informed delegates working on extended time that participating countries had arrived at an agreement, there were many who disagreed.

The collapse of COP29, slated as a climate finance summit, should come as no surprise. Developed countries had shown in multiple ways that when it comes to the crunch they would walk away.

In global climate negotiations, that continued at the twenty ninth edition of the Conference of Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, there is agreement on one issue.

While the evidence that GDP growth in China has slowed is clear, the dire predictions they have given rise to are exaggerated.

The "inevitable striving of finance capital", Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) "to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory".

The fact that the world economy has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 is beyond dispute. In fact even conservative American economists have started using the term “secular stagnation” to describe the current situation (though they have their own peculiar definition for it).

Growing concern about defaults on unsecured retail loans reflects not just fear about the health of the banking system as a whole, but about the impact that such defaults could have on macroeconomic performance.

Europe is clearly battling to stall its decline in the global economy. Most recently, the Mario Draghi report on “The future of European competitiveness” commissioned by the European Union reflected that sentiment.

With the short-term, frenzied interest that accompanies annual budget presentations in India having ended, it is time to raise issues that were largely ignored in the debate.

There is massive unemployment in the country that especially afflicts the youth; there is a huge and persistent inflation in food prices; there is acute and unprecedented rural distress; there is a crisis in the petty production sector; and income and wealth inequality has reached levels where the whole world is talking about it.

The Sri Lankan government announced that it has reached an agreement with its foreign private creditors to restructure the $12.5 billion of its external debt that they hold. The agreement incorporates a novel instrument: a macro-linked bond for which the payout is linked to the GDP performance of the debtor country.

A persistent rise in the volume and share of lending to the retail sector could lead to vulnerability in a banking system that only recently overcame its bad loan problem.

In what may appear to be a paradox, a decline in the net financial savings of the household sector in India may be the factor sustaining the growth it records.

Trends in consumption expenditure confirm the evidence of increased inequality and point to the constraints to future growth posed by the lack of expansion of a mass market for consumption goods.

The rise in India's services exports has encouraged the view that this is reflective of India’s pursuit of an alternative trajectory of development. The evidence does not support that view.

Less than a year back, a former chief executive of Mastercard, Ajay Banga, was in a surprise move picked to head the World Bank. Putting a Wall Street player addicted to profits in charge of a development institution claiming to help lift poor countries out of their underdevelopment seemed incongruous.

Both private and public sources of capital have been disturbingly procyclical for low and middle income countries, forcing them to become net providers of financial resources to the North and to multilateral institutions.

John Stuart Mill was among the foremost liberal thinkers of modern times who wrote extensively on economics and philosophy. Though under the influence of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, he came closer towards socialism late in his life, it was a kind of cooperative socialism that attracted him; he continues to be regarded primarily as a pre-eminent liberal thinker.

Maldives is vulnerable to debt distress as the IMF suggests, but that is not a problem to be resolved only by the Maldives government but by an international community that has aggravated the island nation's vulnerability.

The BJP government holds that truth is what Modi says; if evidence points otherwise then evidence must be wrong and should be suppressed. Modi says that India never had it so good as during the last decade of his government; but since official statistics contradict him, the statistics must be wrong and the statistical system must be changed.

A decade of decline and stagnation in investment rates is at odds with the official narrative of a resurgent and buoyant economy, which is held back by the demand effects of rising inequality.

There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement. The inclusion of the service sector within GDP is something that Adam Smith would have objected to on the conceptual grounds that those employed in this sector constituted "unproductive workers";

We observe a strange phenomenon everyday, so strange that its strangeness goes generally unnoticed. Government spokespersons from the prime minister downwards go on repeating ad nauseam that India is the most rapidly growing major economy in the world today, that it will soon become a 5 trillion dollar economy, and that it has overtaken China in terms of the growth rate of the gross domestic product.

A longish bull-run that added to investor cheer over Christmas week 2023 took the most cited index of Indian stock market activity, the Sensex, to a record 77,240 level on the last trading day of the year.

Argentina's new president Javier Milei proposes to use US dollars as the currency of his country, while abolishing its central bank altogether. What is involved in this proposal is not just maintaining a fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the domestic currency, but an abolition of the domestic currency altogether.

The claim that COP28 marked a significant step forward in the battle against climate change is not corroborated by the willingness of the developed countries to commit the needed finance.

Financial imbalances that impact on countries' net international investment positions are now much more important than current account imbalances, in determining debt stress.

The focus on fossil fuel phase out and net zero target dates is geared to diverting attention from the responsibility of developed countries to provide higher climate finance flows to developing countries.

New estimates of offshore wealth held globally allow for a more granular examination of wealth held abroad by India residents. The results are disturbing—and raise questions about why Indian tax authorities are not doing more to prevent this.

The IMF's stance on modes of financing the climate mitigation and adaptation effort amounts to a call to absolve developed countries of their historical responsibility.

Many low and middle income countries face sovereign debt crises even though they have been much more fiscally prudent than advanced economies through the Covid-19 pandemic and after.

With three middle income countries serving or designated as consecutive Presidents of the G20, it is expected to serve as a forum to advance dialogue on debt justice and climate finance. But progress may be slow and limited.

The June 22-23 Summit for a New Global Financing Pact promised to catalyze a revolution in climate finance and empower the Global South. But it failed to meet its lofty goals, concluding without a single firm commitment or concrete proposal to help developing countries reduce their debt burden and move away from fossil fuels.

India and other third world countries can morally justify their being a part of G-20 alongside the imperialist powers, only if they raise common and pressing problems of the third world as a whole at G-20 meetings.

On July 1, Sri Lanka's parliament approved through a majority 122-versus-62 vote, a plan to restructure the government's domestic debt totalling 15.4 trillion Sri Lankan rupees (SLR) at the end of March 2023.

The decision to allow banks to settle with willful defaulters and fraudsters reveals the actual stance of the government on ‘rescuing’ corporate debtors. The hype around the IBC conceals that.

Apprehensions by India and other countries of possible excesses in capital inflows and the inflationary impacts led them stiffen the domestic interest rates. The Fed, however has reversed its policy to meet domestic inflation by pitching the US Fed interest rate high.

In its efforts to boost India's underdeveloped manufacturing sector, the government has been emphasising the role of foreign direct investment. But the strategy is not working.

The estimates of India's Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023 were released on May 31. These show a growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the fourth quarter of the previous year, which is higher than the 4.4 per cent growth that the October-December quarter had recorded over the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

Official survey data on employment suggest that recent processes of rural employment diversification could already be reversing because of the lack of other viable employment opportunities beyond farming.

Under pressure from globalised finance capital, most countries of the world have enacted legislation fixing the size of the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP; generally it is 3 per cent, and in India it is 3 per cent for the centre and 3 per cent for the states.

In a barely noticed development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has "reformed" and extended the conditions it imposes in return for emergency balance of payments support to less developed countries with stressed external accounts.

The practice of making much of any small increase in aggregate GST collections only serves to divert attention from the fact that this tax regime has not delivered and precipitated a fiscal crisis in many states.

Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings, however minor, were.

Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies of the world in 2020-21.

The world economic outlook released in time for the recently concluded spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF presents a gloomy picture. Global GDP growth is expected to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in 2023, and recover only marginally to 3.0 percent in 2024.

The month of March 2023 has come out to be yet another nightmarish experience for the world of global finance, after the collapse of Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

There is nothing mysterious about the reasons for the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and the Signature Bank in the United States.

C.P. Chandrasekhar speaks to us about the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and whether the financial contagion is likely to spread to India and other countries.

A strike on the Adani group by short-seller the U.S.-based Hindenburg Research has led to the unravelling of the Gautam Adani story, which celebrated the spectacular rise, in an extremely short period of time, of the wealth of a man and his business empire.

If we ignore the hype that accompanies and follows the presentation of the Centre's annual budget, there are principally two strands in it that have attracted attention.

The most outstanding feature of the Indian economy today is the sluggish increase in real consumption expenditure. Between 2019-20 and 2022-23 for instance the per capita real consumption expenditure has grown by less than 5 per cent which is less than the rate of growth of the gross domestic product.

We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister's Office and the ministry of home affairs being the loci of real power.

It seems that the Narendra Modi government has decided, in an election year, that general elections can be fought and won without efforts to improve the material conditions of the bulk of the people, and even simply ignoring their suffering.

This was never going to be an easy Union Budget to present for any Finance Minister, even before last week. Despite all the hype about a resurgent Indian economy, almost all the indicators that matter suggested that economic conditions were far from positive.

The semi-annual Financial Stability Report from India's central bank signals that India's banking system, especially the public banking system, has put behind it the stress from disturbingly high non-performing or bad loans on its books.

While the resilience of inwards remittance inflows during the pandemic is a source of comfort for India balance of payments, the sharp shift in the share of different sources in 2020-21 is a cause for concern.

The large cryptocurrency exchange FTX went out of business on November 11. Many have likened this phenomenon to the collapse of the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis of 2008, believing the FTX collapse to be as important an event in the cryptocurrency world as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the official financial system.

There are two defining and portentous features of the current world economic situation. One, which is well discussed, is the world-wide increase in interest rates in response to the pervasive inflationary upsurge; it would indubitably generate recession and unemployment, which, notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary, is the real objective behind it.

The IMF's most recent World Economic Outlook, released in time for the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, presents a confusing picture of what shapes the present global conjuncture.

The Indian tax system is heavily weighted in favour of large corporations, and has become even more so in recent times.

There are fundamental objections to the plan of the government to privatise at least some of the public sector banks. They centre around the fact that such a move will change the pattern of deployment of credit, away from productive activities towards speculation, away from peasant agriculture towards big business (with dangerous implications for peasant viability, food security and employment), and away from domestic to global destinations.

The long-standing debate on whether India's public sector banks should be privatized has resurfaced in recent days. Two articles, besides numerous statements from advocates of 'reform', triggered this round of debate—one wittingly and the other, perhaps unwittingly.

At the end of the five-year period in which states were being compensated for shortfalls in GST revenues relative to targets, they are on the verge of a fiscal crisis. That could spell the end of the GST regime.

The hegemony of the US dollar was based on the fact that the world's wealth-holders considered it to be "as good as gold", even when it was no longer officially convertible to gold at a fixed rate, as it had been under the Bretton Woods system, after the collapse of that system.

The recent exit of portfolio capital from emerging markets reveals the vulnerability built up over the years when excess liquidity originating in the developed countries spilt over into global markets.

Food and fuel price increases have wreaked a lot of damage and generated inflationary pressures in many economies. However, the current debt problems of so many developing countries cannot be blamed on these higher prices.

The government's celebration of record levels of FDI inflows in 2021-22 as indication of the strength of the Indian economy misreads the numbers that point to several underlying weaknesses in India's external account.

The announcement, on May 4, for a 40 bp raise in the policy Repo rate along with a 50 basis point rise in the cash-reserve ratio by the Reserve Bank of India is claimed officially as a measure to put a rein to current inflation, currently fuelled by the rising food prices rising at 7.68%, oil and fats at 18.79% and vegetables at 11.64% over the same month.

Sri Lanka's economy is sliding into chaos afflicted with multiple crises, triggered by a steep fall in foreign exchange revenues during the Covid pandemic, a difficult to manage external debt servicing burden, a collapse in the volume of foreign exchange reserves, and finally the ripple effects of the war in Ukraine.

The centre-pieces of the 2021-22 budget and the projected budget for 2022-23 fiscal years is the claim by the Finance Minister to have increased capital expenditure sharply in order to strengthen infrastructure in seven areas (Roads, Railways, Airports, Ports, Mass Transport, Waterways, and Logistics Infrastructure).

No budget has been presented in recent memory at a time when the economy is in such dire straits: unemployment is so high that there are job riots; wealth and income disparities are among the worst in the world; millions more have been pushed into poverty as a result of the pandemic and lockdown; and inflation is accelerating even in the face of massive unemployment.

According to the government's own report to the IMF, central government spending declined in the pandemic year 2020-21.

Keynes argued that the operation of the financial market under capitalism was deeply flawed and the distribution of investible resources could not be left to it. The Indian government is so utterly mindless that it is planning to hand over a largely State-owned banking system to private capitalists, thereby exposing the system to the threat of collapse.

Despite the collection of substantial information on household asset holdings through the official Debt and Investment Surveys, India still lacks an official source of data that allows for reliable and meaningful assessments of trends in the levels and distribution of household wealth.

SBI's partnership with Adani Capital is yet another instance of leveraging a public sector financial behemoth to promote the interests of a private group. As in all public-private partnerships under capitalism, the public sector will bear the risk and cost of investment, while the private sector will share the rewards generated through it.

The Modi government is abandoning the basic social philosophy underlying the constitutions through its agenda of privatisation and monetisation of public sector assets. The proposed privatisation of public enterprises is the most scandalous instance of corruption in post-independence India.

The weeks preceding the IMF and World Bank meetings have been spent discussing whether Kristalina Georgieva should step down from her current position as the IMF MD owing to the 2018 Doing Business controversy, instead of discussing important issues such as the debt crisis, vaccine inequality or climate change.

The Doing Business controversy has shaken the confidence in the Bretton Wood institutions, but it must not obscure the real problems with their functioning - the disproportionate power of the US; the IMF's deeply procyclical approach to countries that seek its support, and the G7 advanced economies' unwillingness to address global problems.

Neo-liberalism implies a shift from wages to surplus that depresses the level of aggregate demand, leading to an over-production crisis. Since fiscal conservatism in neo-liberal economies prevents State spending, the only possible counter is provided by asset price bubbles that can boost demand in the short run.um.

China's Evergrande group is the world's most indebted property company with accumulated liabilities in excess of $300 billion. Although the company enjoys a grace period to avoid being in default and the government is expected to intervene, would the government relent, that is the Evergrande conundrum.

The freshly issued SDRs by the IMF would provide only a temporary comfort for the heavily indebted third world countries and most of it will go into the private financial institutions who are the creditors of the third world debts.

A price rise in the emission trading market should be welcomed as it would trigger emissions reduction. However, prices of EU allowance seem to be rising not only due to excess demand, but also because of the entry of financial firms wanting to play with this new commodity, carbon, and the tradable securities deriving from it.

Announced with much fanfare as an innovative means of financing green field infrastructural projects, the NDA government’s asset monetisation plan raises concerns regarding potential returns over long term investments and collateral effects that adversely affect consumers and workers.

With Vodafone-Idea threatening to throw in the towel, India's telecom business is headed for a private sector duopoly that shares the market with an emaciated public sector. But matters may not stop there.

ESG investment is much the rage among high net worth investors who are happy to address social and environmental issues, while building a portfolio that enhances their wealth, but misleading hype about ESG investing that rides on public concern to garner private profit is hardly what we need.

Videocon has been in news lately because of the twists and turns the bankruptcy proceedings following its default on a pile of debt has been through. These proceedings question the integrity of the IBC that has been deemed as a game-changer in the resolution of accumulated bad debt in Indian banks.

On July 19, 1969, 14 major Indian banks were nationalised. Today, after 52 years, it is important since the issue of privatisation of banks cannot be discussed without reference to this perspective.

Financial liberalisation that was meant to mobilise more resources for domestic investment in emerging markets in the 'dynamic' East Asian region has led to exactly the opposite.

In a stealthy game played over two decades, corporate India is walking away with huge wealth transfers, largely from the public banking system. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) has not been able to help banks recover the loans they have given major corporate players, who with impunity have just refused to service those liabilities.

The tax proposal decided at the G7 meeting has been hailed as 'historic' and 'transformative', but unfortunately its neither. Changes need to be made by the G20, if there is to be any serious global tax reform.

The NDA government has decided to further tighten its regulation of e-commerce. The amendments go beyond strengthening consumer protection per se. The intent seems to be to rein in dominant players in an area and to exert control on how the large volume of data on suppliers and customers that e-commerce entities gather, is used.

The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has been officially hailed as a powerful instrument to resolve defaulted corporate debt quickly and efficiently. But five years after the code was enacted, the evidence establishes that claim to be just a myth.

The impending debt crisis in several developing countries is spread across low- and middle-income countries, and complicated by the growing role of private players. Yet global leaders show few signs of urgency or adequate action to deal with it.

The government is planning to establish an Asset Reconstruction Company to take over bad debt from the books of public sector banks for eventual disposal, so as to postpone the problem of bad debt resolution and to avoid having to recapitalise the banks with budgetary resources, which would widen the central fiscal deficit.

With rising non-financial corporate debt and evidence of elevated borrowing levels among non-bank financial companies, the fragility resulting from excess leverage has returned to haunt developed country financial markets.

Though displaying trends similar to other Asian emerging markets, foreign portfolio capital inflows and market performance in India have distinctive features that give cause for concern.

The Biden fiscal package will benefit the US economy but could actually harm developing countries, unless global finance is restrained.

Along with the process of inducting foreign capital into Indian insurance, the decision to privatise at least one general insurance company and enact legislative amendments permitting an initial public offer of equity by the venerable Life Insurance Corporation of India, implies a move towards privatisation of LIC as well.

The large European Union-wide fiscal stimulus suggests that the bloc has displayed some good sense finally in looking after its own, but vis-à-vis the developing world, the EU's behaviour has ranged from dismaying to reprehensible to downright appalling.

Defying all logic, India's equity market has been experiencing a heady and prolonged boom in a year when the real economy contracted. A correction is inevitable.

The shares of GameStop, a brick-and-mortar retailer of gaming consoles and video games, which had been losing value over the past few years, rose by 2000% in January. This rise in GameStop's stock price was driven by a loose community of day traders, thus shocking Wall Street and financial pundits.

Although the Finance Minister claimed that the Budget 2021 would be one "like never before", it actually seems like a return to business as usual in 2021-22, with the pandemic having made some limited fiscal difference. There is no shift from fiscal conservatism or the neoliberal agenda.

Financial indicators are hugely favourable from the point of view of those who benefit from them even when the real economy is performing badly. Thus, in this Covid-afflicted year, amidst economic contraction, both the stock market returns as well as the stock of forex reserves in India registered great increases.

A report of an internal working group set up by the RBI is reconsidering allowing entry of corporate players into India's banking space, which may restrict access to credit of agriculture and small business sectors and encourage advances based on criteria not focusing on risk management.

To treat the divergence in the performance of stock markets and the real economy as purely externally driven and only capable of self-correction is to avoid taking much-needed action.

A New Deal attempted by any State today through larger fiscal deficit of taxing the rich will run the risk of capital flight and hence financial crisis. Such an effective opposition by global finance will require a mobilized working class to overcome.

Developing Asia's external debt can emerge as a major vulnerability not so much because of the volume of debt, but because of its composition, especially the greater reliance on short term debt and foreign holders of debt securities.

Continuing to welcome FDI without qualifications will further weaken the domestic capabilities and sovereignty of India. The government instead extend the new rule for FDI screening to all countries defined in terms of livelihood and data security.

The Indian industry has been hollowed out by rapid trade liberalization without the requisite preparation to face cheaper imports. Transition from dependence on China for critical products to self-sufficiency would require some fundamental policy changes.

Taxing a universal intermediary like oil is the most absurd among all options to reduce fiscal deficit. It will not only severely reduce aggregate demand but will also increase wealth inequality, unlike a wealth-tax.

The stock market boom amidst a real economic crisis in the US reveals the absolute hegemony of finance in a neoliberal system, which is forced to rely on asset price bubbles to stimulate the economy.

The performance of financial markets and the real economy have diverged sharply in the aftermath of the Covid-induced crisis. The Fed's actions have a role to play, by infusing the cheap liquidity that fuels speculative investment and lending.

The build up of external debt in developing countries is putting further strain on their already dwindling public revenues. Deferring debt service payments by the G20, instead of writing off some debt, will only increase their burden in the future.

In April 2020, while 'emerging market economies' remained steeped in the Covid-induced crisis, in a paradoxical turn, equity markets in some of these countries experienced a recovery. That may not be a good sign.

The utter insensitivity towards the migrant workers, the abrogation of labour laws, the opening up of crucial sectors to foreign capital, all done under the pretext of a "rescue package" are a part of the agenda to please finance capital.

The RBI, in deciding its rescue package needs to distinguish between liquidity risk and solvency risk. Rescuing mutual funds which, despite SEBI guidelines, chose to invest in high-risk debt securities may encourage such errant behaviour.

The plan of some state governments to dilute labour laws in order to attract investment is not just ethically vile but economically stupid.

Globalised finance was known to increase inequality and create economic volatility. The pandemic has shown that it can even make crucial state intervention impossible in a major crisis. People everywhere have a choice of submitting to its hegemony or striving for a new class equilibrium.

There is ample evidences to suggest that Chinese investments in India have been a help to employment rather than to casino finance. Hence, new FDI norms which corner China do not qualify as good economics in crisis time.

The exodus of finance from third-world countries is impairing their ability to manage foreign-exchange reserves. Unlike swap-line accommodation by the US, fresh issue of SDRs will help boost the reserves of these countries without any discrimination.

India has betrayed the developing world by blocking a proposal for the IMF to issue new SDRs, which would have provided much-needed liquidity at a time of crisis.

Under Covid-related uncertainty, as investors desert global markets and seek safety in the US, the Fed has decided to deploy swap lines to ease dollar-funding strains in countries that matter. India is not yet among them.

As millions are suddenly rendered jobless, the government must enlarge its spending immediately. The current pandemic has brought to fore the fundamental conflict between interests of finance capital and those of people.

The flight of footloose portfolio capital from India has attracted attention because of its impact on stock indices and the value of the rupee. But the bigger danger is of a debt shock that can be more damaging for the corporate sector.

The relief package announced by the Finance Minister is a niggardly response to an unprecedented health, economic, and humanitarian crisis, severely affecting both demand and supply. The Centre does not seem interested in moving much beyond the lockdown.

The crisis at Yes Bank is only the concentrated expression of the vastly increased financial fragility in Indian Banking. The very nature of a neo-liberal economy requires financial instability for sustaining a boom.

The Yes Bank plan is risky and there is little doubt that the SBI is acting on government's bidding. But given the uncertain investor support in a gloomy economy, the success of this restructuring exercise in not guaranteed.

The recent Supreme Court's judgement has recharged the virtual currency eco-system in India. The power of the RBI to supercede this judgement by banning VCs may not pass the test of proportionality.

The Budget speech includes measures that could fundamentally transform of India's state-regulated financial sector. With the government clearly keen on washing its hands of the mess in the public banking system, privatization could be the end result.

Although unresolved trade tensions and shocks like the coronavirus epidemic are valid concerns for the world economy, the low growth syndrome that policy has not addressed predates these new concerns.

Expenditure cuts in rural welfare sectors and disinvestment in public institutions show that the Modi government is interested merely in short-term fixes. It is too timid to circumvent the constraints of international finance capital and provide a viable economic solution.

This survey was about wealth and entrepreneurship and free markets and privatisation, not about poverty or inequality or public employment schemes.

Budget 2020 clearly shows that the privileges enjoyed by finance in terms of their ability to influence policies in their favour remain rather exclusive. Can the practice of ignoring the voices of the working population and the poor be viewed as a legitimate democratic process?

Reliance industries has achieved success through a combination of aggressive investments, predatory pricing and consolidations. Government policies favouring its interests ensures that it holds out well even as the economy is in crisis.

Budget 2020 has turned out to be a huge disappointment. The central government has not only made budget numbers even more opaque but also added to the recessionary tendencies in the Indian economy, starving critical social sectors of demand-generating funds.

The government has been unable to raise its spending at a time when circumstances demand a proactive fiscal policy. This demonstrates the absence of any macroeconomic vision, clear in the budget speech that only promises to privilege wealth creation.

Low allocations and specific policy statements in Budget 2020 point to greater privatisation and withdrawal of the state. The government fails to deliver for the country's poor and marginalized, a fact reflected clearly in reduced Revised Estimates across the board.

Despite blatant attempts to fudge the data, it is clear that Budget 2020 will not provide the required fiscal stimulus to kick-start the economy. The few benefits will go to a handful of crony capitalists as the economic conditions worsen.

Budget 2020 does nothing for either growth or welfare. Incentives for wealth creation suggests that the government is looking to the private sector while the latter waits for government to take the lead.

The Finance Minister cannot credibly provide for Budget 2020 from resources of the central bank. The government is unlikely to obtain windfall gain from interest and net incomes of RBI of the magnitude recorded in 2018-19.

Instead of increasing public spending to pull the economy up, the Modi government till now has been in denial. Admitting to a higher fiscal deficit and increasing expenditure would help, but it may be too much to wish for.

After last years' experience of fudged fiscal statements, Union Budget numbers are suspect. The fear is that falling revenues will once again lead to reduced public spending, a disastrous trend for the economy.

Given the obsession to limit dressed up fiscal deficit figure and unable to think of better responses to the growth slowdown than tax cuts, it is more than likely that better economic management and ways to address the intensifying stagflation would not be the focus of Sitharaman's Budget.

With no credible source of meeting revenue shortfall, economic slowdown is likely to intensity in the next financial year, even as Sitharaman struggles with Modi's and Jaitley's fiscal consolidation fixation.

As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman prepares to present her second budget, growth is decelerating sharply, revenues are lagging behind targets, the government's off-budget transactions that make a mockery of budget estimates are being revealed, and ambitious plans to sell public sector equity are proving difficult to realise.

Indian start-ups today are teeming with $ billion firms with no profits to show. As questions are being posed about OYO’s strategy, accelerating expansion has not delivered. So long as liquid financial capital is in free flow, the OYO spiral may keep unfolding.

Even while the effort to resolve the crisis of NPAs was underway, India's financial sector was overwhelmed by failures of large non-bank financial companies. Apart from poor financial management and downright fraud, there were structural reasons why these institutions accumulated bad assets, which are often ignored.

Capitalists' opposition to State intervention arises not because of any valid economic reasons but because of their "class instinct". Programmes such as Jeremy Corbyn is putting forward would undermine the social legitimacy of capitalism.

Instead of compensating for falling private demand, the government is cutting taxes and zealously sticking to its fiscal deficit target. This is proving to be a recipe for disaster, further shrinking public spending and slowing down already sluggish growth.

The current inflation does not indicate excessive demand; rather it is caused by decline in output of several commodities relative to shrinking purchasing power. Reducing aggregate demand will only worsen growth-slowdown without affecting inflation in any way.

In their recent working paper, Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman correctly recognise the growth slowdown afflicting the Indian economy, but fail to see it as the result of a deep structural crisis worsened by neoliberal reform that constrains demand.

Faced with dwindling revenues in 2018-19, the government chose to discreetly slash expenditure, with burden of the cuts falling disproportionately on sectors of social and developmental importance and on the states.

As an aftermath to Moodys' decision of downgrading India's credit rating, the government's obsession with fiscal consolidation may see it curtailing expenditure further. If that transpires the descent into recession could be sharper.

"Financial uncertainty and slowing income growth are driving household savings out of bank deposits and increasing reliance on borrowings from NBFCs. With NBFCs under stress this can lead to a recession unless measures are taken to stimulate demand."

Financial flow has shrunk drastically in recent months, affecting the real economy in multiple ways. But the problem is systemic, arising from investment decisions driven by the euphoria of neoliberal reform that proved to be wrong. Minor measures to increase credit flow may not be the solution.

RBI's "clarification" that depositors should not succumb to rumours of impending bank failures is overly optimistic, suggesting that the PMCB crisis is an outlier. In fact, the current precarious situation has deeper roots in the neoliberal transformation of public banking since the 1990s, creating an environment that breeds delinquency and fraud.

The sudden and steep rise in the repo rate signals a major liquidity crunch in the US money market, and even urgent action by the US Fed to bring rates down might not be able to prevent an economic recession.

"ICRICT's proposal of unitary taxation on MNCs would not only ensure that multinational companies pay their fair share of taxes but also help the Indian government tackle declining tax revenues without adopting regressive tax measures."

"Central governments' tightening control on fiscal resources is preventing state governments from undertaking the much-needed public spending which have recently propped up economic activity."

The unprecedented additions to the terms of reference for the 15th Finance Commission continue the Modi government's attempts at fiscal centralisation and denial of resources to states.

Demonetisation further added to the problems of Indian banking in the medium term.

Bank consolidation would neither spur credit growth nor address the factors that led to the large NPA burden that weakened banks.

The recent rate cuts and restraint on monetary tightening by the US Fed are unlikely to do much for US growth, but could increase financial speculation fuelled by the availability of cheap credit.

Despite recognising the damaging effects of austerity on Greece's economy, the IMF has made the same mistakes in its subsequent deals with Argentina and Ecuador.

External debt is emerging as a potential concern for many Asian developing countries, even for those whose aggregate external debt to GDP ratios do not appear to be large. This is because of the growing importance of private bond holders in such debt, even as capital flows to the region turn more volatile.

The delayed resolution of the Essar Steel debt default case reveals a problem at the core of the IBC process - unclear specification of how the loss burden should be shared among the players encourages them to game the system.

The argument made by votaries of finance capital, that government borrowing crowds out private investment, is analytically false and driven only by ideology.

New flow-of-funds data point not to a change in financing pattern of the corporate sector but to the depressed investment environment in the economy.

C.P. Chandrasekhar examines "Libra"- the cryptocurrency launched by Facebook - and discusses the dangers associated with control of a widely used currency by for-profit oligopolies.

C. P. Chandrasekhar argues that the cause of the financial sector crisis in India- in the form of rising NPAs, and now coming out as crisis in the NBFC sector - is primarily deregulation and liberalisation of this sector.

Prabhat Patnaik explains that neo-liberal capitalism suffers from an inherent tendency towards stagnation because it no longer has the instruments used earlier to avoid slipping into recession and stagnation.

C.P Chandrasekhar points out that markets are whimsical, so the current rise in the stock market does not fit well with the economic performance and likely political uncertainties of the NDA regime.

C.P. Chandrasekhar argues that the reduction in GST rates for the housing sector is primarily directed towards addressing the concerns of real estate developers who have generated excess inventories because of easy excess to credit and high profit expectations.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that wealth tax and inheritance tax, even if levied only on dollar billionaires in India, will be sufficient to finance the creation of a welfare state in India in which every citizen will enjoy basic economic rights.

In trying to deal with large volumes of bad debt, especially corporate debt owed to the banking system, measures to activate the corporate debt market are being pushed. But experience suggests that investors are unlikely to bite.

Under the NDA government disinvestment is increasingly turning out to be a process in which surpluses are wrung out of PSEs or government linked institutions to support the budget, instead of the usual route of sale to private buyers. Apart from adversely affecting the modernization and expansion plans of PSEs, this change in the nature of disinvestment does not enable the government to raise its expenditure to the desired levels in a pre-election year.

The government's desire to use RBI’s reserve is based on the erroneous theoretical understanding. This faulty formulation results from the need to avoid upsetting global finance

Markets never were nor can be “rational”, they cannot be sensible enough to discipline governments and central banks to do the right thing. Rather, they have in recent decades forced central banks to adopt measures that fuel speculation, and are therefore patently wrong.

The strategy of the current budget seems to be simple: make immense noise about “helping the victimized” but do not give an extra paisa from the budget towards that ends. With the expenditure squeeze being carried out to reduce fiscal deficit, the share of central government spending in GDP is in fact budgeted to fall.

For those with short memories, let’s remind ourselves that Arun Jaitley has been promising “top priority to farmers” for a while now.

The slight upgrade of India’s credit worthiness by Moody, that equates finance with nation, is being celebrated by the media as a mark of Modi’s success, but the criteria it has used to judge are in actuality open assaults by the government on the working population. To transcend such neo-liberal capitalism, the wrongness of this criteria must be understood first.

Central banks are deciding to scale back their policy of "quantitative easing" in the form of liquidity infusion through asset purchases, but they are unwilling to commit to a quick unwinding of balance sheets fearing market reaction to a radical change in the easy money environment.

The recent acquisition of TTSL by Airtel indicates the deep-seated problems of mismanagement and debt-ridden books of the Tata group, which was once a frontrunner among business conglomerates but is now, only a shadow of its former glorious self.

The government's proposal to set up an all-powerful entity to solve the NPA problem has serious implications for banks and could leave them vulnerable to, among other things, runs by depositors.

Large capital inflows have boosted foreign exchange reserves and resulted in the rupee strengthening. Although exports have not done badly, the widening trade deficit owing to a rise in the import bill can worsen the current account position and create a vicious circle.

The BJP government, through demonetization and GST, coupled with the world economic situation, it is causing a rare co-occurrence of three phenomena: a stagnation of the countrys' economy, a revival of inflation, and a yawning current account deficit on the balance of payments. As the era of cheap money in the U.S. and elsewhere come to an end, Indian assets might pass into foreign hands.

The recent RBI report that shows that 99% of the demonetized currency notes have been returned proves false the governments’ claim that the scheme, that shook the whole economy, would cripple the black economy, an argument whose success lay in the demonetized currency not coming back to the system. Moreover, with re-monetization complete, there has been no "flushing out" of black money whatsoever.

It was the free flow of foreign capital through "financial liberalization" that led to the East Asian Crisis of 1997, from which the "tiger economies" have not yet recovered fully. Even now, the augmented foreign reserves of these third world countries remain woefully inadequate to finance debt to foreigners, as the hegemony of international finance capital builds over their own assets.

The problem of large NPAs of nationalised banks can be traced to the neoliberal reforms in the financial sector and outside, which prevent large government investments in infrastructure and capital-intensive industries that are imperative for development but too difficult a responsibility for the private sector to shoulder.

The very limited Barclays prosecution comes in the wake of a half-hearted investigation effort, which has thus far completely let off all those who took the world economy to the verge of a crisis akin to the Great Depression. It is not clear if anything will finally come out of even this case, which is aimed at merely teaching a lesson to those who hurt a bunch of financial investors by violating insider rules.