I believe the technical term for what we have been experiencing in the financial markets is: Aargh! (‘Bloodsuckingly bad’ also works.) I’m not sure how much it helps, but I’ve been through something like this before, during the market meltdown of 2008, when the S& P 500 fell more than 38 percent in just that year. But most millennials, the …

King dollar is rising. Other currencies are falling like ninepins. But to gauge the impact of this surge on Asia, you have to move beyond spot exchange rates and into an esoteric corner where tens of trillions of dollars of off-balance-sheet debt lives in the accounting footnotes of banks, investors and even central banks. That corner is currency swaps. These …

On 10 February, wire services reported that the then interim finance minister Piyush Goyal favoured “printing currency” as a mode of deficit finance, approvingly citing the example of the US. “As finance ministers we are always in need of money,” Goyal said. He added, “I have heard that the US does deficit financing only by printing currency,” a canard that …