Union Budget is almost on us with the mandarins in the finance ministry and sundry politicians along with policy wonks of various hues looking forward to their day under the arc lights, while they sanctimoniously offer their expert opinion for what it is worth. The fact, however is that the State Budgets and GST, which…

Mughal Emperor Babur is popularly credited with introducing canons in the Battle of Panipat in 1526. He had then decisively used gunpowder firearms and field artillery to defeat the much larger army of Ibrahim Lodhi. In fact, the once impregnable forts that had safeguarded many a kingdom for centuries were easily conquered with might of…

As in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the climate pilgrimage from Glasgow to Sharm el Sheik, that is from COP26 to COP27, has made little progress. As the gavel went down on Sunday, 20th November, 2022, to mark the end of COP27, the closing spectacle evoked the picture of siblings quibbling even as their ancestral home…

The then prevailing medieval cocktail of moral vigilantism and the rising specter of Marxism prompted Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher to call economics a “dismal science”. Most people agreed with the philosopher, particularly in the wake of, monk turned economist, Thomas Malthus predicting that humanity is doomed in a world where population growth would always…

Biases insidiously control the world and more often than not, we are not even aware of them. In the world of investments, being aware of one’s biases is essential to succeed over time. A well known but not easily recognized bias is the boundary bias which inhibits thinking “out of the box” because of an…

A big question mark hangs over the prospects for fossil fuel industry given its adverse environmental impact. Consider the following: EV adoption is accelerating, solar panels are getting cheaper (at a faster rate than the most optimistic estimate), battery cost has decreased by 89% from 2010 to 2021 and renewable energy’s contribution to the global…

Of late the rupee has been hogging the headlines, most of them for the wrong reasons. To date in 2022 alone, the rupee has lost nearly 8 per cent against the US dollar and is dangerously flirting with 80 to a dollar mark. To appreciate broad implications of a falling currency one doesn’t have to…

There is carnage on the markets across the globe, from Wall Street to Dalal Street. Only recently, one had to just go to sleep and wake up to see one’s wealth swelling. Now, it’s the reverse. Does this volatile world of investments offer any hope, at least for the long term investor? If one were…

Inflation is a many headed Hydra. Both electronic and print media are awash with headlines regarding inflation these days. Retail inflation based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) surged to near 8 year high in April this year to 7.79 per cent. Producers’ inflation based on the wholesale price index (WPI) has hit 15.08 per…

Quietly, unobtrusively a significant change has been gathering momentum in the Indian economy over nearly the last 3 decades.  First it was the financial institutions, including banks, that have been gradually, but progressively shifting their focus from enterprises to retailers. In fact over the last decade, more and more banks have realized that an important…