ON February 19, 1881, Karl Marx had written a remarkable letter to NF Danielson, the renowned Narodnik economist who had also gone under the name of Nikolayon and whose work had been much discussed by Lenin. In that letter Marx had said the following:“In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store for the British government. What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus; pensions for military and civil service men, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc.

ON November 30, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) came out with quarterly estimates of GDP for the second quarter (June to September) of 2017. Predictably, analysts and spokespersons of the government spent the evening in newsrooms of various TV channels celebrating what they claimed was a sign of revival of the economy. Next morning, revival of economy was the front page news in almost every newspaper. If there was any adverse impact of demonetisation and GST, it was claimed, here was the evidence that such an impact was only short-term and had started to wane.

CREDIT-rating agencies, discredited by the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States when they had blithely endorsed all so-called “sub-prime lending”, are now crawling out of the woodwork, and the Indian establishment is predictably impressed by the sight. Moody’s have just upgraded India’s credit rating marginally and the BJP is beside itself with joy.

THE finance minister Arun Jaitley had announced on October 24, a Rs 2.11 lakh crore plan for capitalising the public-sector banks. Out of the total announced amount, the banks will get a capital of Rs 1.35 lakh crores through recapitalisation bonds. Jaitley was vague on, who is going to issue the bonds.  Rs 76 thousand crores  will be raised by selling banks’ shares from the market. Only a paltry Rs 18,000 crores will be from the central exchequer.

FOR long one could divide the world’s currencies into three distinct categories: (i) the leading currency, typically belonging to the leading imperialist power,in the present case the United States, which was considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders; (ii) other metropolitan currencies in terms of which the world’s wealth-holders also held their wealth, but which, precisely by virtue of not being considered “as good as gold”, had to maintain a certain stable value vis-à-vis the leading currency through the pursuit of appropriate macroeconomic policies, including contraction