Manas Chakravarty
April Fool stories
April 1, New York: In a stunning development, leaders of the world’s richest economies today agreed to fund a programme that will ensure food, shelter, health and education for every person in the world within a year. Sources say that trillions of dollars...
6 months ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | An elephant called Inflation
Dear Reader,(RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das: "Two years ago, around this time, when CPI Inflation had peaked at 7.8 per cent in April 2022, the elephant in the room was Inflation. The elephant has now gone out for a walk and appears to be returning to the f...
6 months ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | Horses for courses
Dear Reader,The scandal of the week was definitely the US CPI print coming in at a high 3.5 percent year-on-year for March 2024, higher than 3.2 percent for February. US bond yields moved up immediately, while market expectations of the Fed’s rate cut wer...
6 months ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | Is the Fed behind the curve again?
Dear Reader,The markets seem to have been inspired by the Paris Olympics to climb to Olympian heights. After all, the Olympic motto ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ could very well be a description of recent market behaviour. But while the markets rose very hig...
2 months ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | The terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles
Dear Reader,Everybody in the markets now knows about the immediate causes of the recent bout of nervousness in the markets. The worse-than-expected US unemployment data triggered expectations of an imminent 50 basis points cut in the US policy rate, while...
2 months ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | Powell-in-the-Hole
Dear Reader,There’s a traditional British dish of sausages baked into a Yorkshire pudding, called Toad-in-the-Hole. How did it have such an astonishing name? The origin is shrouded in the mists of time, but this article says it’s because, just as we see t...
1 month ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender: Q1 GDP numbers provide comfort on both consumption, private capex
Dear Reader,GDP data releases are non-events for the market, unless they presage policy action that could affect interest rates and corporate earnings. Since the real GDP growth of 6.7 percent in Q1, FY25 is lower than the 7.1 percent pencilled in by the...
1 month ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender: Fairy Tale Economics
Dear Reader,The September issue of the IMF’s Finance and Development magazine has an article titled, intriguingly, ‘Fairy Dust’s Economic Possibilities’ by Zachary Carter, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The reference to fai...
1 month ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | Xi rides to the rescue
Dear Reader,The Chinese authorities lost no time in taking advantage of the leeway provided by the Fed rate cut to signal a policy turnaround of their own this week.On Tuesday, the People’s Bank of China announced that it would reduce the banks’ reserve r...
2 weeks ago
Moneycontrol Pro Weekender | The dogs of war
Dear Reader,Have the dogs of war lost their fangs? Are they all bark, no bite? To be sure, oil prices have moved up sharply, stock markets have come off a bit, the US dollar has strengthened somewhat, and gold prices have gone up on safe haven demand. But...
1 week ago