Alarm bells rang earlier this year within the ministry of finance and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) over slowing deposit growth at a time when credit growth was robust. Banks need the fodder of fresh deposits to keep lending going. As Indian economic activity picked up after the Covid shock, and with both bank...
The Indian stock market rose 16% between March 24 and July 17, powered by a clutch of reforms, and fuelled by retail and foreign institutional investor money Stock markets make headlines when they either throw a tantrum and crash dramatically or reach lifetime highs. Gaining a breathless 16% from March 24 to July 17,...
De-dollarisation predicts the fall of the hegemony of the US, but no alternative currency currently exists. There are some keywords that are periodically tossed around to indicate a looming crisis. De-dollarisation is the latest one that predicts the crumbling of the United States (US) global hegemony as the world moves on from the dollar....
Silicon Valley Bank failure is a text-book case of an asset liability mismatch. It’s roots are in poor risk management practices that zero interest rate decade in the US triggered. Like an episode of a fast-paced crime thriller, the story of the 16th largest bank of America, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), moved from a...
Investors need protection from fraud, toxic products and mis-selling. Not from volatility. The Supreme Court may consider widening the terms of the panel on investor protection The Supreme Court (SC) has advised the government to set up a committee to review the current investor protection regime in light of the recent crash in the...
With the global crypto industry in a state of total disarray, the collapse of crypto giant, FTX, points to the grim future of an industry premised on decentralisation, albeit with no underlying asset to safeguard its value. The implosion on November 10 of one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, FTX, valued...
This article is part of the series 30 Years After: Review and Renew the Reforms Agenda. At the heart of the complex web of bits and bytes that is the modern financial system is the ability to exchange and transfer capital (money) between various participants in an economy. Borrowers, lenders, investors and entrepreneurs form the...
Mis-selling by banks has been flagged, caught and proven multiple times in the past decade, but nothing other than half-hearted circulars have emerged from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). For a regulator, that is also the central bank for a $3 trillion economy, busy with large issues like monetary policy and government debt, the consumer protection...
Retail investors are the last to know when things go wrong with their money. This is especially true of difficult-to-value-and-trade (in India) financial products such as bonds. The story gets even more complicated on how to treat bonds that behave like (or worse than) equity – for example AT1 bonds. AT1 bonds are issued by...
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) working paper by Harendra Kumar Behera and RBI deputy governor Michael Debabrata Patra on inflation targeting has waded right into one of the world’s most vibrant policy debates, one between inflation hawks and dis-inflationists. The former believe that easy-money policies pursued after the West’s financial crisis of 2008-09 that have given...