Economic mess: Is India staring at a financial crisis?
Is India immune to the economic crisis in US & Europe?
Global economic crisis and its impact on India
The ongoing financial crisis is affecting markets across the globe, and there are concerns that we might be entering into a phase of global recession. While India has also been affected, there is a palpable sense of relief that the damage was not as large as it might have been, had India been integrated with the global financial system. Is this a false sense of relief—is Indias insulation only a benefit? Are the long-term benefits of integration with the global financial system much bigger? This session sought to examine these two inter-related facets of the global financial crisis.
The session was moderated by T.N.Ninan, Editor, Business Standard and the panel featured
Shankar Acharya, Member, Board of Governors and Honorary Professor, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations; Analjit Singh, Chairman, Max India Group of Companies; Tushar Poddar, Chief Economist, Goldman Sachs and Omkar Goswami, Founder and Chairman, CERG Advisory Private Limited.
Twenty years ago, India had to borrow $6bn from the International Monetary Fund to prop up its economy. Now, however, New Delhi is helping the IMF bailout some of the world’s more developed countries. The country’s economy is expected to grow by seven per cent in 2012, a percentage low by recent standards but higher than most around a recession hit world.
India’s love affair with gold
“No gold, no wedding,” is a saying in India, indicating the importance of gold to Indian culture and tradition. Byron Pitts reports on India’s obsession with gold.
The aphorism “The poor are always with us” dates back to the New Testament, but while the phrase is still sadly apt in the 21st century, few seem to be able to explain why poverty is so widespread. Activist filmmaker Philippe Diaz examines the history and impact of economic inequality in the third world in the documentary The End of Poverty?, and makes the compelling argument that it’s not an accident or simple bad luck that has created a growing underclass around the world.
Diaz traces the growth of global poverty back to colonization in the 15th century, and features interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians who explain how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policies that allow powerful nations to exploit poorer countries for their assets and keep money in the hands of the wealthy rather than distributing it more equitably to the people who have helped them gain their fortunes.
Diaz also explores how wealthy nations (especially the United States) seize a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources, and how this imbalance is having a dire impact on the environment as well as the economy. The End of Poverty? was an official selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL
Based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity’s journey over the last 13,000 years — from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century. Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.
Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet? Why didn’t the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead? Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East? Why did farming never emerge in Australia? And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty? As he peeled back the layers of history to uncover fundamental, environmental factors shaping the destiny of humanity, Diamond found both his theories and his own endurance tested.
Filmed across four continents and combined ambitious dramatic reconstruction with moving documentary footage and computer animation. Includes contributions from Diamond himself and a wealth of international historians, archeologists and scientists. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a thrilling ride through the elemental forces which have shaped our world — and which continue to shape our future.
So how do you best target Asian markets? An exclusive television event focusing on achieving success in Asian markets.
• How do you create consumer products and services that address Asia’s unique needs?
• What are the ingredients of an Asia-focused consumer strategy and what role do cultural differences play in shaping it?
• How can corporations innovate for Asia while staying true to their core strengths?
Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.
Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.
With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?
This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.
Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts—sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scraping by or rolling in it, there’s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
THE MIDAS FORMULA OF STOCK MARKET
The story of the mathematical formula that transformed capitalism and the world
COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Interaction of government, markets and societies
Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy confronts head-on Americans’ critical concerns about the new interconnected world. Based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, this groundbreaking series explores our changing world—the great debate over globalization and the future of our society.
Commanding Heights reunites the team that created The Prize— award-winning producer William Cran (From Jesus to Christ) and Daniel Yergin—and is the first in-depth documentary to tell the inside story of our new global economy and what it means for individuals around the world. Filmed on five continents, the powerful narrative combines stunning film footage with dramatic stories and extraordinary interviews with world leaders and thinkers from twenty different countries, including: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Singapores Lee Kuan Yew, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Rep. Richard Gephardt, and President George W. Bush’s Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey.
Commanding Heights dramatically captures the issues that have defined the wealth and fate of nations and shows how the battle over the world economy will shape our lives in the twenty-first century.
DERIVATIVES
‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ or Generators of Market Stability?
Roger Lowenstein, financial journalist and former Wall Street Journal columnist, and Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor and an assistant editor of the Financial Times, participated in a public discussion titled, “Derivatives: ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ or Generators of Market Stability?”
“The American people should see that corporations have abandoned them long ago,” says scientist, environmentalist, and food justice activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, named one of the seven most influential women in the world by Forbes magazine. “The people will have to rebuild democracy as a living democracy.”
Dr. Shiva has been fighting corporate takeover in every area in her native India, combating a nuclear plant one week and patented, genetically modified seeds another. She advises American activists how they can fight the merging of corporations and government at home and around the world. Understanding the Corporate Takeover http://www.vandanashiva.org/?p=678
[en] Auftaktrede beim Attac-Kongress «Jenseits des Wachstums» in Berlin, 20.5.2011. Die Inderin Vandana Shiva ist Umwelt- und Bürgerrechtlerin, Trägerin des alternativen Nobelpreises,Vorsitzende des International Forum on Globalization, Mitglied des Club of Rome und des Exekutivkomitees des Weltzukunftsrates.
ASIA: Regaining the economic dominance it enjoyed a millennium ago
ASIA’S RISE IN 2050
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ASIA
INET’s Conference at Bretton Woods on April 10, 2011
Joseph Stiglitz is a Professor at Columbia University
Charles Dallara is the Managing Director of the Institute of International Finance
Y.V. Reddy is the Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
Yasheng Huang is Professor of Political Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management
Brad Delong is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley
Yu Yongding is the Director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Question and Answer Discussion session from INET’s Conference at Bretton Woods, with participants including Paul Blustein, Joseph Stiglitz, Charles Dallara, Y.V. Reddy, Yasheng Huang, Brad Delong, and Yu Yongding
ASIA’S STRATEGIC PARTICIPATION IN THE G-20 FOR GLOBAL ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE REFORM
PIIE Director C. Fred Bergsten speaks at an event cohosted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on April 25, 2011. The event was held to assess the accomplishments of the G-20 summit in Seoul in November 2010 and to release the ADB-PIIE report “Reshaping Global Economic Governance and the Role of Asia in the Group of Twenty.” Bergsten’s presentation was followed by a speech by Iwan J. Azis, Head of the Asian Development Bank’s Office of Regional Economic Integration (OREI).
the hague asia knowledge 