Before the ink could dry on India’s quarterly gross domestic product statistics, officials have been quick to parade last quarter’s 20% growth as vindication of their prediction of “imminent V-shaped recovery.” How sensible is that claim? The April-June period was when the pandemic overwhelmed…

Why should banking watchdogs worry about the consumer internet? The answer, as researchers have been warning for some time, lies in their “DNA loop,” shorthand for data, network, activity. It’s a powerful circuit, which regulators must be prepared to break if they want to stop the next financial…

In Hong Kong, money has been privately issued since 1846. The bill in my wallet is a promise from HSBC Holdings Plc’s local banking unit to pay the value written on it. In accepting it, I gave no thought to the creditworthiness of the lender. Whoever it’s passed on to will also take the banknote at…

Is the idea of a digital dollar just a fad — like the 1980s craze with parachute pants that became synonymous with Michael Jackson and M.C. Hammer? Randal Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision, recently used that very imagery to express his skepticism. He wasn’t trying to…

Narendra Modi has rearranged his cabinet, but the changes give no indication of a meaningful sharing of power. Within the trappings of a parliamentary democracy, India’s prime minister will probably continue with his trademark presidential style of governance. For the country of 1.4 billion people,…

The list of what e-commerce platforms aren’t allowed to do in India has been growing for some time, but the latest prohibition on flash sales has simply gone too far. If the rules get implemented, the entire business model of Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. could come unstuck before their…

Mercedes-Benz AG recently introduced its Maybach sport utility vehicle in India — right in the middle of a fierce second wave of the pandemic. The 50 cars the German automaker wanted to sell by the end of 2021 were lapped up in a month. It turns out that just as the rich were scrambling to own…

India’s vaccine strategy has flopped. A dismissive attitude toward the second Covid-19 outbreak that has raged uncontrolled, and a mistaken belief that indigenously made shots would be equal to the task of inoculating a billion adults, have left the nation scrambling. Efforts are under way to…

Inflation is coming. Or wait, it’s already here. Bond investors are looking at the 4.2% annual rate that US consumer prices jumped to in April and wondering if it’s all because of depressed levels from last year. Could it be that the Federal Reserve is wrong about higher prices being transitory? …

If you haven’t heard of B.1.617 yet, chances are you soon will. This particular Covid-19 variant is at least partly behind the overwhelming second wave in India, the current global epicenter of the pandemic. The World Health Organization has now raised B.1.617 from a “variant of interest” to a …