Read this interview in the Times of India with Steve Coll, and this Congressional testimony of his. If you haven’t yet read Ghost Wars, you should.
Vijay Kelkar’s recent speech on privatisation.
The comments on this [...]

There are two paths to nice cities: to take a messy old city and fix it, or to start from scratch.
The process of solving the problems of an old city is hard. Some cities started over owing to the destruction caused by war, an earthquake, or a great fire. We wouldn’t wish that [...]

Watching, monitoring, and analysing the economy and her markets is as much about tracking discourses (and how they change) as it is about perusing data material on various leading and lagging indicators. And thus, as I am still knee deep into putting the last touch on my thesis [1] I thought that I might as [...]

Three fascinating new takes on Mumbai as an international financial centre:

Mukul Asher and Azad Singh Bali in DNA a few weeks ago.
In the February 2010 issue of Pragati released yesterday, there are two articles on this: by Percy Mistry himself, and by V. Anantha [...]

Sometimes no news is more telling than one might initially think and although it was hardly earth shattering for the market that the BOJ chose yesterday to keep its main benchmark rate sitting at 0.1% it does highlight the extraordinary difficulties Japan currently face in terms of sparking its economy back into some kind of [...]

In short, if the world economy is to get through this crisis in reasonable shape, credit worthy surplus countries must expand domestic demand relative to potential output. How they achieve this outcome is up to them. But only in this way can the deficit countries realistically hope to avoid spending themselves into bankruptcy.
Martin Wolf [...]

You may remember us pointing to China’s rebounding manufacturing sector last quarter. Well, the country’s overall economic growth continues to accelerate and drive a global economic rebound.
On Thursday China announced that its gross domestic product in the fourth quarter 2009 grew by 10.7% year-over-year — thats up from a revised growth rate of 9.1% [...]

A perennial debate rages in India, about the merits of the traditional family-run business versus the knowledge of the fancy-pants consultant or MBA. A remarkable paper by a group of economists sheds new light on this question. I wrote a column in Financial Express today titled Are Indian family businesses well run? where I describe [...]

I shall openly admit that I have always found the exact role of the rating agencies a bit odd in the global financial system. I mean, do we really need them to tell us which bonds are good and which are not? I am not sure and what is more; rating agencies sometimes, if not [...]

Global factory activity continues to accelerate. According to business managers worldwide, manufacturing vivification is now at the highest rate in nearly four years and new orders growth is now at a rate not seen in more that five and a half years.
The global PMI index is produced by JP Morgan with input from research and [...]