Anticipating The Asian Financial Crisis -II
August 29, 2013 2 Comments
Swaminathan S A Aiyar is always well worth listening to,This piece by him is superlative and well worth reading,Do pass it around.There are too many people pretending that everything is fine or will be so in the near future.Unless we accept that there is a problem and a serious one,we are unlikely to go looking for solutions.
Make no mistake, a second Asian Financial Crisis is on its way. This storm will not blow over soon. It originated in the US, when the Fed proposed to taper and end quantitative easing. The frightening thing is that this will happen in stages over the next 12-18 months, and each turn of the liquidity screw can cause a fresh financial storm. Nothing Chidambaram or Raghuram Rajan say can avert the storm.
Learning from the 1997-99 experience, all Asian countries (including India) have built up large forex reserves, reduced leverage compared with 1997, and shifted to floating exchange rates. This makes them far more resilient, so they should not collapse as in 1997-99. But they will suffer severe damage regardless. Depreciation raises the price of all items that can be exported or imported. Estimates differ, but a 10% depreciation probably sucks out 1-1.2% of purchasing power through inflation. At . 68 to the dollar, currency depreciation is around 25% since May, implying a loss of purchasing power of 2.5-3% of GDP. That is hugely recessionary. It will be reflected in much higher prices of petroleum products, fertilisers, most commodities, and knock-on transport and material costs. Read more of this post
This article was published in today’s Mumbai Mirror.Reading it took me back to another time when India was a very different place.I was then still in school.India was anything but shining.Poverty and shortages were so much a fact of life that few of us really had an idea of how poor we were since everyone around us was in the same situation and most people had very little exposure to what was going on in the rest of the world.There was no talk of India being an emerging/emerged nation.We considered ourselves as belonging strictly to the Third World and few asked why we should not want better for ourselves.Read the article below and if you’re Indian take a minute to pat yourself on the back for how far we have come in 2 decades.Take heart from it and know that we have it in us to overcome out present problems.And remember the story so that we are never again in the same situation. 
wealthymatters 