The Union Budget 2018 presented by Arun Jaitley was in the strict sense of the word a macro budget. It takes a look at the big picture and focuses on the larger aspects like the farm distress, the MSME sector, rural purchasing power, middle class and the senior citizens etc. It may be recollected that …
Union budget 2018 has actually been a big picture budget. It has not been about the nuances of taxes and levies but it has been more about the macro issues and the focus areas for the government from an economic perspective. The following new initiatives in the Union Budget are critical from the long term …
The Union Budget speech would be typically divided into two parts. The first part would contain all the government allocations and resources and the second part contained the key changes pertaining to direct and indirect taxes. Effective July 2017, most of the indirect taxes including excise duty, VAT, CENVAT, Sales Tax and Service Tax were …
A popular joke ahead of the Union Budget is that the text of the Union Budget 2018 will be substantially shorter and hence the budget speech could be over in less than 1 hour. Each year, a good part of the Budget speech was devoted by the finance minister to elaborate on the changes in …
It is natural to look at the Union Budget each year from the point of view of the equity markets. The Sensex and the Nifty have been the barometers of market value and market sentiments and their gyrations best reflect the market interpretation of the Union Budget. If you look back at the last 2 …
It has been an extraordinary year so far. We have seen both, Sensex and Nifty, hitting new highs, which reverberates the power of long term equity investing. At the beginning of 2017, nobody could have guessed how the year would eventually turn out to be. The year 2017 was expected to reflect the effect of …
The trade data that came in for the month of August continued the trend of monthly trade deficit staying above the $11 billion mark. For the first five months of the fiscal, the trade deficit has come in at $63 billion and India looks set to cross $150 billion of trade deficit for the full …
Retail CPI inflation for the month of August 2017 came in sharply higher at 3.36%. This is 100 bps higher than the inflation level in July and 190 bps higher than the level in June this year. This was a concern that the RBI had repeatedly expressed through the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). In fact, …
The IIP for the month of July 2017 was slightly higher at 1.2% compared to the negative growth shown in the month of June. However, manufacturing continued to disappoint. This IIP number was important for a variety of reasons. For the first quarter ended June 2017, the GDP had come at a multi-year low of …
Over the last few weeks there have been some key data points that have raised concerns over the pace of rate cuts adopted by the RBI. It may be recollected that back in February 2017, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) had shifted its monetary stance from “Accommodative” to “Neutral”. Over the last few quarters there …
