Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...

Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Friday he intends to regulate but not strangle the microfinance industry, which is in crisis because of new regulations and political attacks in its biggest Indian market, the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. In comments at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, Mr. Mukherjee said a committee of the Reserve Bank of India is looking at all aspects of microfinance, which has come...

Close on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding over the microfinance institutions, Karnataka government has decided to foray into the micro finance business with an initial corpus of Rs 500 crore. With this, Karnataka will join the league of Andhra Pradesh to have its own state-funded microfinance institution. The government plans to lend at the rate of 4 per cent interest per annum to unorganised sector workers. “There are about 3.5...

While the Yeddyurappa-led BJP government in Karnataka is embroiled in a land scam, farmers are up in arms against the acquisition of their lands for industrial use in Mysore district. They have alleged that the government was acquiring 25,000 acres of land. Dismissing their allegation, authorities have come out with a statement saying that they were acquiring 8,520 acres in the district as a mutual consent of farmers. The clarification has come...

In India, commercial Banks, both public and private, are required to direct a large chunk of their net credit to designated “priority sectors” seen as having a positive impact on India’s economy, and wider society – to ensure funds flow into areas the government deems important, but might otherwise be neglected. These sectors – designated by the Reserve Bank of India – currently include broad areas of agriculture, small scale industries,...