The Gold Standard  

There is a bombardment of news stories on China or may be, it is my imagination. After Premier Wen Jiabao’s speech (even before that) at the concluding session of the NPC, we have seen a minute parsing of his comments on the Yuan revaluation, his labelling of US demands as exchange rate protectionism, in a [...]

I.M.F. policies call for it to disclose documents and information on a timely basis, with the deletion only of market-moving information. But under the rules a member country may decide to withhold a report, an organization official said.
China allowed the release of its reports until the monetary fund’s executive board decided in June 2007 that [...]

Thanks to the wonderful blog that FT.COM Alphaville is, I came across this recantation by Jim Chanos who now says that he is only shorting the China property sector and not China! He became prominent among China bashers for his comment that China was Dubai * 1000. Jim Rogers, former hedge fund manager and now [...]

Barely had I blogged on the the observations of Prof. Bhagwati on whether the US was right to call for China to revalue the exchange rate here and on the opinion of Prof. Arvind Subramanian on this matter, came an interesting report from the Research folks at Standard Chartered Bank (I am not in a [...]

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati is now blogging. It is good news. Even better news is that he seems regular with his comments. They are not sporadic. With Professor Bhagwati, one cannot offer the excuse that one did not understand where he stood and what he stood for.
His latest comment is on China-bashing on exchange rate. Suffice [...]

I had deliberately labelled this part 4.  The first three parts appeared in May 2009. See here, here and here. Good friend Sushant sent me this post in ‘Foreign Policy’. It rehashes many old theories and expressions. That is why I had linked to all the three previous posts I had made on this topic. [...]

Called up Niranjan, editor of MINT and good friend, last afternoon to ask him whether he had seen any recent studies on India’s growth sensitivity to global growth. I remain concerned that India’s nominal GDP growth assumptions for 2010-11 up to 2012-13 – used in the budget – do not leave any room for disappointments.
He [...]

This article by Geoff Dyer and this one in Bloomberg seem to have been anticipated by James Kynge in this piece written in February 2010.
Geoff Dyer writes this in the opening sentence:
A high school boasts an impressive indoor swimming pool and several of the region’s main universities have built large campuses. Pristine high-rise apartment blocks [...]

The release of the monthly TIC data by the US Treasury was cause for some hyperventilation among journalists and others. China’s holding of US Treasuries Notes and Bonds had dropped by about USD35 billion. Is China dumping the dollar? Some wondered if it had anything to do with President Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama. [...]

The decision of the Federal Reserve Board (this is not the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee that decides on monetary policy) to increase the discount rate (it calls it the ‘primary credit rate’) by 25 basis points to 0.75% and to reduce the maximum maturity of the borrowing at the discount window to just a [...]