Where are we heading?
By bringing down a despotic leviathan, the anti-discrimination student movement has earned the moral authority to be spokespersons for the whole nation
3m ago
Rebooting the economy
The crackdown on the nonviolent uprise of the students and the subsequent one thing leading to another chain of events locked down the economy, only figuratively reminiscent of the pandemic in 2020
4m ago
Not much beyond lip service
In their Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) for the first half of FY25, Bangladesh Bank (BB) has stuck to the policy stance already in place.
4m ago
Not much beyond lip service
Let’s begin with the central question to gauge what more this MPS could have done to increase the potency of monetary policy in restoring macro-financial stability.
4m ago
Export data correction was long overdue
Bangladesh Bank’s latest data on the balance of payments has remarkably altered the narrative on the drivers of external stress without changing the signal on the overall stress.
4m ago
Making sense of revisions in balance of payments
Bangladesh Bank's latest data on the balance of payments has remarkably altered the narrative on the drivers of external stress without changing the signal on the overall stress. The bottom line on persistent external imbalance remains pretty much the same but the composition is palpably different
4m ago
A post-election defining moment
The economy has been in a rough patch since 2022 like never before in the past decade and a half
5m ago
Fifty years of learning from rises and slips in the Bangladesh economy
We are hubristically living through our ecological implosion.
7m ago
February 9, 2020
Treasury bills: a double-edged sword
The surge in public borrowing from banks has significantly elevated the risk of further reducing the availability of credit to the private sector through two channels. One channel is through reducing the availability of liquidity for lending to the private sector. The other channel is interest rates.
February 7, 2020
The 9 per cent cap will hurt the financial inclusion agenda
Banks prefer to work with large national and multinational business groups and the government, which offer less risk and higher returns.
January 29, 2020
What is riding on remittance?
Thinking about the role of remittance in our economy often makes us think about growth and standard of living.
January 21, 2020
NEW MONETARY POLICY: Nothing really new except renewal of old worries
The Bangladesh Bank (BB) has adjusted the monetary programme for the current fiscal year. Although the adjustment is limited to just one component, it is a big one.
January 17, 2020
Alternative facts and contradictory policies
Like dead characters in Hollywood and Bollywood movies, paradoxes seem to reappear in Bangladesh’s economic landscape more often than analysts would like. Here are two new arrivals:
January 14, 2020
Revisiting the devaluation debate
The debate on taka devaluation is a debate on whether the exchange rate is currently overvalued. How do we know?
January 10, 2020
The economics of remittance growth
Most economic indicators on the state of the Bangladesh economy during the first half of FY20 are down with one big exception—remittances.
January 6, 2020
How well founded are the devaluation worries?
In an interview published in this newspaper on January 3, the finance minister stated unequivocally “no currency devaluation”. Is such a sweeping stance compatible with the government’s own economic policy objectives?
January 2, 2020
Back to square one
It’s deja vu all over again. On June 21, 2018, Bangladesh Association of Bankers (BAB), a platform of private banks’ owners, agreed to cap the interest rate on deposits at 6 percent and the lending rate at 9 percent from July 1, 2018.
December 13, 2019
Missing the cause for the symptoms
The stock of non-performing loans (NPLs) is increasing in both public and private banks. This is raising the threat to financial stability, impairing financial intermediation and damaging the resilience of the banking sector to shocks, thus increasing systemic risk. NPLs are also associated with higher funding costs and a lower supply of credit. However, the recent hot debate in Bangladesh has centred on whether high NPLs are a cause or a consequence of high lending rates.
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