It had to come one day, and today is that day.  I had been pondering for a long time about the name of this blog. It began, as some of its early visitors know, two years ago, at 6.29 pm on January 22, 2009 as a blog that tracked the esoteric domain of Research with Is knowledge stealing our silent moments? Read more

Wearing my business journalist cap, I went to meet him on matters economic — the G20 that I track very intensively, the threat to economic growth, the danger of inflation, land acquisition and so on. But Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is the government’s No. 1 trouble shooter and I brought him to Ayodhya. Read more

And eight core values, 10 broad directions, 50 semi-specifics, 67 clauses of intent, 23 pages and 9,254 words later, what we have from the world’s biggest ever clubbing exercise of the world’s 19 most powerful countries and EU is a score of 5.3 out of 10. This score at the Pittsburgh Summit of the Group of 20 (G20) got on its September 25 communique is lesser than the 6.4 the same group got in the London Summit. Read more

This post is going to go national today as your blogger evaluates the six pledges and 38 recommendations that the leaders of G20 signed and what they means for India. As I mentioned earlier, there are more benefits than costs and if we were to look at the big picture, I think India has gained. But 6.4 is a pathetic score for leaders of G20 to get in what was the biggest financial event this world has ever seen. Here’s the break-up: Read more

In the high profile tracking of recommendations from governments and multilateral agencies, I overlooked some others. Here are four that I wasn’t able to bring to you as they were released but are nevertheless important. This quad of recommendations are important not because of what they contain, but because it heightens, very elegantly, the expectations people across continents, ideologies and interests have. Read more

Not that other countries have a position paper ready to dish out, but most of them have their stances clear. Between November 15 when the Washington Declaration was signed and today with the London Summit just 48 hours away, the positions — and the divides — are fairly clear. Read more

I hate to say ‘I told you so’, but I told you so — I really did.

Coming to a global congregation of the world’s largest economies and hoping 18 members to blindly follow what the US dictates and the UK furthers was nothing short of a foolish expectation. High on intent, reason and morals but low on humility, persuasion and mutual respect, the audacious spend-your-way-out-of-the-crisis proposal, born in the USA, grown in the UK and parroted by IMF, was destined to die. Read more

A March 20, 2009 paper from Yale has tips for Obama to negotiate this crisis. Written by Michael S. Solender, a senior research scholar and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, How the Obama Administration Should Regulate the Financial Sector puts forth five key attributes that US regulators should have. These are:  Read more

Speaking only of official recommendations — that is, suggestions made by governments or regulators of G20 and not think tanks or economists — I have with me a master list that has crossed a century. Taking the 126 page The Turner Review, published by UK’s Financial Services Authority on March 18, 2009, which adds 32 of its own (listed at the bottom of this post), the total number of sovereign suggestions stands at 101 — and counting. Here’s the timeline.  Read more

Today, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pressed for a greater role of China in International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a prelude to the G20 meeting on April 2. With this, the first step in reforming this multilateral institution has been taken. That step is to give a greater voice to borrower countries that are poorer than the wealthy nations that lend to the bank. Read more