John Taylor (“Choice of new IMF head must not be dictated by the old EU order”, August 12) points out that the International Monetary Fund needs new leadership from outside the European bloc to address the multiple challenges facing the world today. As I have spent a considerable part of my professional life in opposing the outdated convention that a European leads the IMF while an American heads the World Bank, I think that the job should go…
Fifty years ago, on July 19, 1969, Indira Gandhi, who was both Prime Minister and Finance Minister at that time, decided to nationalize 14 major privately-owned commercial banks of India. Banks with a deposit base of over Rs500 million were selected for nationalization while foreign banks were excluded. Six more private banks were later nationalized in 1980.
Analysts have described the nationalization of banks as the most significant economic event after India’s independence in 1947. But if we look globally,…
Further to your report “India’s shadow banking crisis sparks credit crunch” (FT.com, July 3): even more worrisome is the danger of the ongoing liquidity squeeze in the shadow banking sector turning into a more serious solvency issue. Several liquidity-starved shadow banks have already initiated the sale of loan portfolios and assets to meet repayment obligations.
As shadow banks are the largest net borrowers of funds from the financial system with a substantial part of funding coming from banks, mutual funds…
By Kavaljit Singh | Briefing Paper # 26 | June 14, 2019
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…
By Biswajit Dhar | Briefing Paper # 25 | June 12, 2019
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…
