epilogue

As 400 Indian troops march along Champs-Elysees today, Nicholas Sarkozy wants to signal a new era of cooperation between France and India. While India has put more than tens of billions of dollars on the line, one can’t help but wonder if promises from the other end of the line will really be kept.

Had the US government respected the dollar, it wouldn’t have out-served its purpose as a global currency. China’s central banker Zhou Xiaochuan recently made strong case to dethrone the dollar. There’s only one problem: 70% of China’s $2 trillion in foreign reserves is in US Dollars.

What really captures imagination and concerns of a majority of Indians are prices of daily consumables. There are wide-spead concerns that the Indian economy may go into deflation by the second quarter of financial year 2009-10 as there are fears of inflation going below zero per cent in the face of unprecedented fall in crude [...]