On 14 October 2008, Jahangir Aziz, Ila Patnaik and I released a short note on what was going on. It was titled The current liquidity crunch in India: Diagnosis and policy response.
On Monday (20th), Ila Patnaik has an article in Indian Express with one more piece of evidence that the APS story was basically on the right track.
Today, when we look back at the APS paper, it seems mild. But I distinctly remember at the time, the world was much more confusing. Lehman died on 15 September. After that, there was a ‘fog of war’ problem: a lot was going on, there was information overload in many ways, lots of critical information from within RBI is not released into the public domain in a timely manner or is not released at all, and the statistical system has such long lags that on 10 October, when we started writing, almost nothing was known about the period immediately after 15 September.
Speaking for me personally, I had the right starting conditions in terms of being oriented towards the themes of de facto convertibility, Indian multinationals, etc. I should have got the story quickly after 15 September. But still, it took me a long time to understand what was happening.
Similar problems — on an immensely magnified scale — have afflicted crisis responses everywhere in both the private sector and governments. Whether it was Northern Rock, Bear Stearns, or Lehman: analysts and decision makers have been ambushed by difficult questions, very little time within which to make calls, and bad information at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to criticise what was done, but this stuff is hard.
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