EcoPolitical

Shruti, Yukti, Anubhuti… The Bookkeeper would like to start off this post with a story. The story is of a man called Antony Fisher. Antony came from a family of migrants, mine owners, military men, and politicians. As those of his time with a robust pedigree, he joined Eton and later graduated from Cambridge University. After graduation he joined the Royal Air Force, where he was grounded following a flying accident. Antony’s weakness was his love of the periodical The Reader’s Digest. Every copy was read (and re-read) cover to cover, underlined, notes made thereon and many a times read out aloud to his family and friends. He had created a library of decades worth of the digest. In the April 1945 issue, The Reader’s Digest had published a condensed version of Austrian Economist Fredrich Hayek’s masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom”. The Book was hugely popular and despite war time paper shortages had gone for several re-prints. Still, it was incredibly difficult to get a copy of the ...

The Bookkeeper's concerns on the state of the Indian banking system are now well known. In this post it has been attempted to quantify the issue and this analyst is pleased to note that the problem, while steep, a resolution is not a pipe dream. In policy, like in comedy, timing is everything. As such, steps taken to solve this problem will have to be swift to placate investors and industries that the problem is well in hand. The more drawn out the solution, the less potent the impact. For the puposes of this analysis, The Bookkeeper has painstakingly compiled the latest available data for 16 public sector banks (PSU banks) that account for ~90% of PSU Banking NPLs. It may be noted that NPLs in the PSU banking space account for ~90% of system NPLs. As mentioned in the last post, NPLs are primarily a PSU bank issue and it is there that a solution needs to be provided.  The Bookkeeper has assumed that Gross NPLs are fully recognised by now, but to be conservative ha...