India’s shadow banking system is in deep trouble. An imminent crisis has been slowly but surely brewing in India’s shadow banking sector for the past one year. The first signs of trouble in this sector emerged in June 2018 when Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) – a major non-banking financial company – defaulted in payment obligations on inter-corporate deposits and commercial papers worth Rs 4.5 billion.

Thereafter, a string of defaults by IL&FS group’s subsidiaries on bank…

In June 2018, the Council of the European Union gave the European Commission a mandate “to pursue WTO modernisation in pursuit of the objectives of making the WTO more relevant and adaptive to a changing world, and strengthening the WTO’s effectiveness”. A few months later, a group of 13 countries, which also included the EU, unveiled a process for WTO reform for “developing 21st century trade rules at the WTO”.

Couched under these broad-brush objectives lay the intent to alter…