Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s Blog

In the Hindi blockbuster movie Gajini, the lead actor suffers from a disastrous aliment “Short-term Memory Loss”.  The current market euphoria across the world reminds me of a similar mental state for investors across  asset classes who are unable to grasp the toughest lessons of last year’s global economic crisis.  The crisis was predominantly about [...]

The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently released a report, Another Chinese Riddle: How Reliable Are GDP Figures?  In this  the intergovernmental organization cited research that China’s first-quarter GDP growth, announced as 6.1 per cent was most likely flat to negative.  As a result of such reports, public trust is eroding, and not just in China. [...]

Both too much and too little are expected of China’s response to the economic crisis: too much, because the Asian giant can play only a modest role in rescuing the world economy; too little, because few believe the economy will be radically changed. The stimulus programme is helpful, for China and the world. But the [...]

Athenian owls, Roman denarii, British sovereigns, US dollars.  There have been many pseudo reserve currencies down the ages.  Now the governor of the People’s Bank of China has called for a new global currency “disconnected from individual nations”.  Russia, too, wants to move away from a world dominated by the dollar. Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev [...]

With the recent sharp decline in Chinese manufacturing output, the global decoupling theory seems to have died a well-deserved death.  The idea that developing countries had become less dependent on US economic conditions, and so were insulated from the US crisis, was based on a potent combination of bad analysis and wishful thinking.  In fact [...]