Loan Waivers , burning effigy and Micro finance downgrades
When 67 per cent of India’s farms are below one hectare, a size that is not optimal for ensuring higher investments in raising productivity and incomes, how can endless subsidies solve farm loan waiver problem. The call for repeated farm waivers is a sign that farmers need to get out of farming when they can and It is the government’s duty to aid this change, not retard it. Put the emaciated picture of a poor farmer on the front page, add a graph on farmer suicides, obtain sound-bites from unemployed farm labour and it is easy to make out a strong emotional case for farm loan waivers. After promising waivers as part of its Uttar Pradesh manifesto, BJP’s Maharashtra Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, has been under pressure to write off farm loans in the state, with estranged partner Shiv Sena too getting vociferous on this count. SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya spoke bitter truth for which her effigy was burnt “We feel that in case of a (farm) loan waiver there is always a fall in credit discipline because the people who get the waiver have expectations of future waivers as well. As such future loans given often remain unpaid”. “Today the loans will come back as the government will pay for it but when we disburse loans again then the farmers will wait for the next election expecting another waiver. The collateral damage of farm loan waiver and demonetisation is already felt by Micro finance companies with a rating agencies downgrading the credit rating of two leading MFI last week because of increase in delinquencies.
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Antimicrobial resistance still does not ring alarm bell for us
The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) determined that, left unchecked, in the next 35 years antimicrobial resistance could kill 300,000,000 people worldwide and stunt global economic output by $100 trillion. There are no other diseases we currently know of except pandemic influenza that could make that claim. In fact, if the current trend is not altered, antimicrobial resistance could become the world’s single greatest killer, surpassing heart disease or cancer. With each passing year, we lose a percentage of our antibiotic firepower. In a very real sense, we confront the possibility of revisiting the Dark Age where many infections we now consider routine could cause severe illness, when pneumonia or a stomach bug could be a death sentence, when a leading cause of mortality in the United States was tuberculosis. Think of a couple, both of who work fulltime. One day, their 4-year-old son wakes up crying with an earache. Either mom or dad takes the child to the paediatrician, who has probably seen a raft of these earaches lately and is pretty sure it’s a viral infection. There is no effective antiviral drug available to treat the ear infection. Using an antibiotic in this situation only exposes other bacteria that the child may be carrying to the drug and increases the likelihood that an antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria will win the evolutionary lottery. But the parent knows that unless the child has been given a prescription for something, the daycare center isn’t going to take him and neither partner can take off from work. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to write an antibiotic prescription to solve this couple’s dilemma, even if the odds the antibiotic is really called for are minute. We see another frightening example of the mess we’re in China, with the use of colistin, an absolute last-ditch antibiotic for bacteria that react to nothing else. They don’t use it for people in China, but are using it in agriculture—thousands of tons a year. Likewise, in Vietnam it is only approved for animal use, but physicians obtain it from veterinarians for their human patients.Colistin is used for people, though, in much of the rest of the world, including India. As other antibiotics with fewer harmful side effects have become resistant, colistin is about the only agent still effective against certain bloodstream infections in newborn infants. In early 2015, as reported by Bloomberg, physicians treating two babies with life-threatening bloodstream infections at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Pune, India, found that the bacteria were resistant to colistin. One of the babies died.“If we lose colistin, we have nothing,” stated Umesh Vaidya, head of the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. “It’s an extreme, extreme worry for us.” Some hospitals in India are already finding that 10 to 15 percent of the bacterial strains they test are colistin-resistant.
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US tourism faces a Trump slump
How many of you are reconsidering their plans to visit US for a holiday ?Flight app Hopper released research earlier this month that showed flight search from international origins to the US has dropped 17% since Trump’s inauguration, compared with the final weeks of the Obama administration. It found a similar pattern to Kayak, with San Francisco and Las Vegas seeing the largest declines in search interest. Hopper found there has been a sharp drop in flight searches to the US since Trump’s travel ban, with a 30% decrease in predominantly Muslim countries regardless of whether they were included in the ban. In Saudi Arabia flight searches dropped by 33% and in Bahrain by 37%, even though neither were included in Trump’s executive order. Though flight demand to the US dropped in 94 of 122 countries, Hopper found a notable exception in Russia, where flight search demand to the US was up by 88%.It is the latest in a string of reports from the travel industry that suggests a “Trump slump”, with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) estimating that since being elected President Trump has cost the US travel industry $185m in lost revenue. On March 3, the European Parliament voted to end visa-free travel for US citizens visiting the EU. Enforcement could begin within two months. This isn’t even related to the Trump administration’s new rules. It’s been a long-running dispute about travellers from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, and Romania. Those countries are EU members, but—contrary to agreements—the US government still requires their citizens to obtain visas to enter the United States.This kind of tit-for-tat could be the beginning of a trade war for people instead of goods.
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https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/feb/28/us-tourism-experiences-a-trump-slump
Emergence of Populism to shape Economic conditions
Billionaire Ray Dalio, assessing the impact of President Donald Trump’s surprise election, warned that global populism will be an economic force more powerful than monetary and fiscal policies over the next year. We have seen similar forces at play in India’s recent election as well. In an 81-page paper published Wednesday that details the history of populists in 10 countries from Franklin Roosevelt to Hugo Chavez, Dalio analyzed the phenomenon to make sense of today’s current political environment. “We believe that populism’s role in shaping economic conditions will probably be more powerful than classic monetary and fiscal policies. “We will learn a lot more over the next year or so as those populists now in office will signal how classically populist they will be and a number of elections will determine how many more populists enter office.”Populism today is at its highest level since the late 1930s, said Dalio, 67. Bridgewater notes that populism is commonly brought about by gaps in wealth and opportunity, as well as xenophobia and frustration with government inefficiencies. Those factors lead to the emergence of a strong leader to serve the common man, as well as protectionism, nationalism, militarism, conflict and greater attempts to influence and control the media. Populism has been a key focus of Dalio’s in recent months, as it’s emerged in countries including the U.S., U.K., Italy and the Philippines. In mid-January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that the rise of populism threatens multinational corporations and is the biggest force in the world today.