This has been quite a decade for global corporate leaders, volatile not only in terms of their actual fortunes, but even more so with respect to the shifting perceptions of society. When the decade began, large corporations and those at their helm were at the peak of their power, flush with riches delivered by the dotcom boom in the US economy as well as the vast opportunities created by easier...

The Union finance ministry’s mid-year fiscal Review, tabled in Parliament last week, notes very correctly that the “current period represents a crossroads for the Indian economy”. Having weathered the global Economic Downturn, the Indian economy has performed better than expected. Hence, the Review’s upbeat tone is understandable. Yet, the Review offers an honest account of the challenges ahead, hence the view that India is at a crossroads. Much of the...

The collapse of the Dubai dream is not without any implications; it may be an indication that the travails of finance capitalism are not over. GLOBAL capitalism is in a phase in which it must deal with the fruits of the overextension during the previous boom, and there is no doubt that this is going to be painful. The financial crisis in the United States and some other developed countries...

The recession was less calamitous than many feared. Its aftermath will be more dangerous than many expect IT HAS become known as the “Great Recession”, the year in which the global economy suffered its deepest slump since the second world war. But an equally apt name would be the “Great Stabilisation”. For 2009 was extraordinary not just for how output fell, but for how a catastrophe was averted. Twelve months ago,...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline...