US trade deal; India's middle power dilemma; Single asset securitisation

Interpreting the US trade deal

We’re all slowly coming to grips with what happened. My column in the Business Standard yesterday places the US trade deal in the larger context of Indian trade policy, and the global trade non-system.

India’s middle power dilemma

Mark Carney’s famous speech envisions a world of cooperation between middle powers, of which India is one. I wrote a column on this on Project Syndicate : India’s middle power dilemma [another link]. It will take time for the country’s foreign-policy establishment to move away from “strategic autonomy” as a guiding principle, and recent US behavior has confirmed skeptics’ arguments (in India) that the West is unreliable.

The importance of single asset securitisation

In their article Beyond Syndication: Unlocking the Power of Single-Asset Securitisation, published on The Leap Blog, Amrita Agarwal and Harsh Vardhan examine the 2021 Reserve Bank of India regulatory shift that allows lenders to securitize individual project loans rather than diversified pools. The authors argue that this mechanism offers a superior alternative to traditional consortium lending by transforming illiquid private contracts into tradable financial instruments. Their analysis reveals that while this "securitisation of one" addresses systemic asset-liability mismatches and opens infrastructure debt to institutional investors, its adoption remains hindered by high state stamp duties and restrictive listing regulations. This is an important path for financing private capital expenditure and managing long-term credit risk in Indian banking.