Indian Westerlies

IMF released its quarterly world economic outlook on the 11th of October.   The report predicts that "Global growth is forecast to slow from 6.0 percent in 2021 to 3.2 percent in 2022 and 2.7 percent in 2023 ." About the situation of inflation it says, "Global inflation is forecast to rise from 4.7 percent in 2021 to 8.8 percent in 2022 but to decline to 6.5 percent in 2023 and to 4.1 percent by 2024 ." The report recommends continued monetary tightening, while supporting the low income vulnerable population. The risk factors continue to be inflation, geopolitcal tensions and wars, slowing global trade, Chinese property collapse, pandemic related disruptions etc . The growth outlook for 2021, 22 and 23 are as follows:  The above numbers make India the fastest growing large economy for the current year and the next year.  It might be interesting to take a step back, and discuss the macro-economics and how India landed up at this sweet spot in terms of monetary and f

There's no hedge here: Zero-hedge, the perpetual pessimist website, claims that India is creating a massive global rice shortage through the ban on rice exports from India . Zerohedge is wrong when he says that India accounts for 40% of the world's rice exports. That's not the usual case. Here are the actual figures for last 10 years:  India was a large supplier to the extent of 40% only in the year 2021. During other years, it was a supplier of around 15% of global supplies. There was a big jump in exports from India in 2021, not at the cost of other exporting countries, but to bridge the demand that went up by around 32% in that year. The same continued over to 2022 till the exports were banned on the 9th of September. While India has reasons to ban the exports of rice, it won't lead to a catastrophe as Zerohedge predicts.  Broken rice in USA mostly goes into animal feed. And making ethanol at many places. The main importers of broken rice are China, Senegal, Belgium,