We’ve been preparing for this ever since Trump’s election campaign in the US last year: higher tariffs across the board on all countries and all product categories. Now that it is here, the media cannot stop talking about it with its breathless reporting on the subject. No matter what type of media – newspapers, television… Continue reading Let Us Not Get Distracted by Trump’s Tariffs
If many of us thought that Trump’s first term was chaotic and polarizing, we are already beginning to see what Trump 2.0 is going to be like. With his campaign rhetoric of Making America Great Again and America First at his swearing in ceremony at the start of his first term, he had painted this… Continue reading How Should Countries Respond to Trump’s Tariffs?
In recent months and years, India has been basking in the global spotlight. From the G20 presidency two years ago, to India’s overseas State visits to western countries where large trade and investment deals were signed, to India co-chairing the AI Summit in France recently, and intentions to host the next one in India, we… Continue reading India Needs to Pay Attention to its Neighbourhood
It’s been a long time since I last wrote on the UK and the EU economies, which was just around the time of their elections in 2024 and not since then have I considered how they’re faring. Of course, France had its own very consequential election soon after the EU elections, and the big one… Continue reading Weak Economic Growth, Big Plans on the Anvil
Once again it is time for me to react to the Indian Union Budget, and given all the pre-budget media hype around it on television news of a possible tax relief for the middle-class, I should have expected what we finally got to hear on February 1, 2025. I knew it would once again be… Continue reading Desperately Seeking Growth Budget
Once again, the world’s most powerful countries and business and political leaders converged for the Annual World Economic Forum Summit at Davos in January 2025. But what a changed environment it is, this time. With Trump inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term, the world is bracing itself for more chaos, disruption and uncertainty. The context… Continue reading The New Year, Trump Tariffs and the Davos World
At the start of the new year as we wait for corporate earnings season to begin again, I thought it might be worth spending some time thinking about where the Indian economy is headed in 2025 and beyond. We tend to focus on headline GDP growth of the economy all the time, but rarely look… Continue reading Challenges For the Indian Economy in 2025
For the past few years since the Covid-19 pandemic, economic growth around the world has been subject to many constraints, including geopolitical ones, but most of all to cyclical and structural factors as well as to base effects. And every year of economic recovery since the pandemic, we have been speaking of it being the… Continue reading Navigating 2025 the Slowdown Year
The last time the world saw a tariff and trade war it was 2017, in Trump’s first term as President of the US when he took on the world’s second largest economy, China, in a tariff war. It ended with China too imposing retaliatory tariff increases on American imports and before we knew it, Europe… Continue reading The World Economy Bracing for Trump 2.0
After Dubai, yet another oil rich country got a chance to host the UN Climate Change Summit or COP as it is known. I am not sure what the purpose of this is, but an obvious implication is that it would tend to limit conference discussions and deliberations, given that there would be resistance to… Continue reading Ideas for Garnering Private Climate Finance
Peripatetic Perch 