Also known as ek teer se do nishaane (re meeting my real life goals) .
I was reading today how Germans, during their period of hyperinflation were afflicted with cipher stroke. Where they would unnecessarily tack on zeros when reporting numbers. So if someone was asked the time, they could respond with 3000. This ex boss of mine was affected similarly with the dollar stroke. If asked to convert 300 million people to lacs, he was wont to multiply the number with 70.
Basu (in Economist in a Real World) spends a lot of time explaining how inflation management policy may not be as straightforward as commonly understood. So while in general, raising policy rates is supposed to be a way for liquidity tightening, it may not necessarily help if distortions lead to the rate settling at a situation of deficit liquidity. Assuming regular downward sloping demand for credit and upward sloping supply of credit curves, a raising of rates may mean that demand falls but supply rises, thus only exacerbating the liquidity and inflation situation.
The Economist recently covered a related policy niggle - the measurement of inflation itself, in a modern economy. For one, goods being consumed change every year, so statisticians may be quite behind in tracking inflation. In fact they never quite catch the first fall in prices of a good or service, that in fact, enables mass consumption. CPI measures not accounting for quality change is again a problem that is more notable for digital access goods than others. Controlling for quality, it's likely that digital access prices are falling, though the index itself will reflect otherwise.
More fundamentally, the CPI measure may mean nothing if critical goods and services have a price of zero, as is true for most digital platforms. This is a non trivial issue if you consider the fact that imputed rent (with no actual transaction backing it) is a part of price indices.
The Indian government is planning to import bull semen from Brazil to impregnate desi cows, in a bid to increase the milk output but some cattle breeders are protesting this love jihad. (No, I'm being flippant.)
To bypass liquidity constraints that farmers face due to delayed cash transfers (for instance in the case of fertiliser subsidies), the Government is mulling e wallets that will be pre loaded with cash, and will only be redeemable at PoS at the input suppliers'. I feel pressured to use PayTM now.
Pixel 4 would have been a hit with all the bengali pipu pishu types. Had they released it in India and had any bengali the capacity to buy it.
