Some good news at last

I read the new RBI governor’s speech twice today because quite frankly I wasn’t able to grasp all the things he had announced at the first read.

This is quite amazing because it covers an incredible amount of ground, and takes a very liberal, progressive and long term view of the economy – something that we haven’t seen for a while. The speech can be found on this link and Business Standard has a good summary of the announcements that can be found here.

My first idea was to write about some things that would impact a regular person directly like the CPI linked bonds he spoke about, but that is simply taking too narrow a view. In this particular case, the steps that don’t directly impact you or the steps that are longer term in nature like building individual credit histories (not a new idea) are likely to impact you a lot more than any purchase of CPI linked bonds.

What Dr. Raghuram Rajan showed today was how RBI can take several small steps to liberalize the economy, instead of fixating over the Repo rate or conducting strange operations to drain liquidity which have terrible unintended consequences.

The Rupee and the market both gained today and normally I hate ascribing any market moves to an event, the speech quite clearly did the trick today, and I myself am feeling a little positive after a very long period.

I realize that there is a lot of difference between a speech and executing these steps, but if you don’t have a plan to execute then you there is no hope of execution. In this case there is a plan and let’s all hope that the RBI stays on course.

As I was reading through the speech, I came across the part where Dr. Rajan said these were his plans for the “short term time table” for the RBI, and I thought to myself, wow if this is really short term, I can’t wait to see what long term is like.

6 thoughts on “Some good news at last”

  1. When there is politics getting played at each and every corner of this country, it would be interesting to see how Rajan performs his role to the best of his abilities. Each and every move of this govt is politically inspired. Why there was no parliament session extension in the last 9 years, why only now ??

    http://ibnlive.in.com/news/aap-leader-yogendra-yadav-hints-at-politics-behind-the-ugc-axe/419786-37-64.html

    Thank God, at least Rajan has Chidambaram like FM and not Pranab Mukherjee !! Will he work autonomously and honestly or as a guy positioned there by a political party ?? We need a big change, God please help us !!

  2. Me and my friends always talk about how nobody cares for India as a country anymore. How the Politicians actually think about getting votes and staying in power while ignoring the economy. Its good to read something “good” once in a while 🙂 Thanks for the article!

  3. Yes, the RBI Governer has given us hope and confidence that all is not lost and WE CAN improve our economy by taking small steps in the correct direction.

    Manshu, most of your articles are informative imparting financial knowledge, but this is from your heart.

    Keep up the good work.

    1. Thank you Ramesh, this indeed is from my heart, I don’t wish to be over-optimistic but it was refreshing to see that he came up with so many ideas in such a short duration of time. Hopefully they get executed and the economy improves. Like an oasis in the desert 🙂

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