
Indian economy resilient despite global flux, central bank bulletin says
MUMBAI, June 25 (Reuters) - India's economy remains resilient despite a state of flux in the global economy due to the twin shocks from trade and geopolitical tensions, the Reserve Bank of India said in its monthly bulletin released on Wednesday.
The RBI cut its key policy rate by a larger-than-expected 50 basis points earlier this month and slashed the reserve ratio for banks as low inflation gave it room to focus on supporting growth amid volatile global conditions.
"In this state of elevated global uncertainty, various high-frequency indicators for May 2025 point towards resilient economic activity in India across the industrial and services sectors," the RBI said in its 'State of the Economy' article.
"Agriculture showed a broad-based increase in production across most major crops during 2024-25. The domestic prices situation remains benign with headline inflation staying below the target for the fourth consecutive month in May," it said.
India's annual retail inflation slowed to 2.82% in May, the lowest in more than six years, from 3.16% in April.
Financial conditions remain conducive to facilitate an efficient transmission of rate cuts to the credit market, the central bank said in the bulletin.
The trade policy outcomes in July, after the temporary tariff hiatus is over, and the future course of geopolitical events would likely shape medium-term economic prospects, the RBI said.
"Going forward, as noted by the MPC (monetary policy committee) in its resolution, the MPC decided to remain data-dependent to chart the future course of monetary policy and strike the appropriate growth-inflation balance," it said.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
The government adviser who says everyone should work less for the same pay
The number of people of working age who are not working – currently 9.3 million, or 21.6 per cent of 16-to-64-year-olds – is a crucial issue for the UK's economic growth and our productivity. There has been a rash of policy solutions from government and business in recent years, but little direct engagement with those out of work about what they feel would help. This is where Hilary Cottam comes in. She is the expert called in by Labour and Conservative governments over the past quarter century to provide new thinking on intractable social problems – or how to make David Cameron 's vague promise of a 'Big Society' into something real and practical. In 2019, she received the OBE for her achievements. She has spent the last five years travelling around 'left-behind' areas both in Britain and the United States, meeting communities and listening to their suggestions to improve their lot. It is their voices that shape the arguments in her new book, The Work We Need: A 21st Century Reimagining (£22, Telegraph Books). Its focus is on reimagining a workforce for the future where everyone has access to what she refers to as 'good work' rather than languishing on benefits. 'I'm a social change maker' Cottam, 60, is keen to make clear what she isn't: not an economist (her degree was in history); not from a privileged, metropolitan background (she was the first in her Herefordshire family to go to university when she landed a place at Oxford); and emphatically not part of the think tank elite. 'I've never worked for a think tank,' she says. So what is she? 'I'm a social change-maker, I am a community worker, I am a public servant who uses business principles to try and start social organisations.' She may not be a familiar name to many, and some of her ideas can be hard to pin down, yet she steadfastly refuses to be cast as a blue-sky thinker. In the 2010s, David Cameron, with his 'Big Society' hat on, backed her blueprint for a radical makeover of the welfare state, to set up community concierge services called 'Circles' to help older residents with hospital visits and a range of everyday challenges. A decade later, she is currently advising the Labour Government on how to bring together farmers and environmentalists. Another current project is advising the Danish government on the policy shifts required to address an ageing population. And former German chancellor Angela Merkel is an enthusiast for Cottam's previous book, the 2018 international bestseller, Radical Help (£12.99, Telegraph Books), which argued for a reinvention of the welfare state. She sees herself as someone grounded in her own experience of being the first in her family to go to university. 'All my work depends on people collaborating with me,' she explains. 'So the ideas in my new book on work are people's ideas.' But she has, she insists, been doing the legwork by putting in the miles to listen to first-hand experience of work and worklessness. Like that of Jonny, a gravedigger in post-industrial Kilmarnock, where suicide rates are high. He told her: 'I don't want to work until I'm broken without a chance to travel or really learn. I don't want to try and care for my family in the gaps in between. Why can't we just rethink [work] top to bottom?' She found similar reservations being expressed in other places around the UK, including Grimsby, once home to Britain's fishing industry, which have received targeted investment to create green energy jobs. And in Peckham, south London, on the doorstep of the family home she has shared for 20 years with her husband Nigel, a psychotherapist whom she met when both were working on a prison project, and their student daughter, Mabel. Top-down initiatives, whether they are called regional development boards or levelling-up projects, have drawbacks when it comes to the nitty gritty detail, she warns. 'Having an industrial policy that just decides, 'we'll invest in this region and they'll have jobs', is like sprinkling seeds from a plane and not watering the ground. Nothing is going to grow.' In her book, she sets out six criteria that those she spoke to felt were important for the creation of 'good work' that will get Britain back to work. The first is a decent salary. But who is going to stump up extra cash with businesses cutting back after hikes in the minimum wage and employer National Insurance contributions? 'The data universally shows,' she replies, 'that if you pay workers well, you retain them and they are productive. Any productive business is going to pay for it.' There is also a larger macroeconomic argument, she adds, where the figures tell their own story. 'It is about how skewed our economy is. Because people are not paid decent wages at the lower end, we have 18 million people on benefits while they are in work. It is a massive transfer of wealth from the state [and the taxpayer] to businesses.' Another on the list of six is 'time'. She wants to see more flexible working hours, not the four-day-week promised by Jeremy Corbyn in his 2019 election manifesto, but the opportunity to work a focused, more effective 32-hour-week (rather than the standard 40) over five days for a full-time salary, that will appeal to those with caring and other responsibilities. 'I'm saying a 32-hour week [for the same wages now paid for five full days] because women don't want a four-day week. If they are doing the caring, which many still are, having flexibility over five days around child and other caring responsibilities is really important.' It is what is keeping people like Julie in the workforce. She met Cottam in Barnsley, where jobs in mining have been replaced by roles in assembly and distribution warehouses. 'When I clock out here,' she says of her flexible-hours role, 'that's me done. Until last year I cared for my mum – she lived with me and had dementia – and my brother. I do his medication. He's got epilepsy. Here, I can work and take the time to care: that's revolutionary.' Again, though, such flexibility will surely push up employer costs, and we could end up with more people unemployed? 'The data shows you are more productive on 32 hours. Why don't we believe the data? Because the data doesn't go with our politics.' 'Left-behind is an insulting term' As part of the research for her book, she tells me that she encountered a wide range of companies who have tried out flexible working. 'Seventy in the UK, from a small chippy in Norfolk, to a Sheffield robotics company and London-based blue chip corporates. They piloted a shorter working week, and it was so productive they are sticking with it. There are 60 doing the same in the US.' Did she hear different things when travelling around left-behind towns in the States? 'I heard the same growing demands for social justice, the same wish to live in a different world where their children would have good work, a house and time to be with their family. But there is less experience of social organisations there that can cross divides in society like the NHS.' What exactly is a social organisation? The NHS has enough on its plate right now to be helping find people jobs. 'It is social infrastructure, libraries, youth clubs, sports clubs, churches, anywhere that people from different groups, different parts of society, can gather and get to know each other.' 'Place' is the final of her six criteria for 'good work'. 'Place is absolutely at the core. We are not going to have functioning democracies without people having their places in the world, and that requires functioning local economies with good work.' She prefers not to use 'left-behind'. 'It is very insulting, because people there are choosing to stay. They have pride, they have imaginative ideas about how to do things differently that are just not being heard.' Is that sense of being ignored by policy-makers, contributing in the areas she visited, to disillusionment with the main parties and the switch towards Reform? 'Because I have been working in Brexit-voting places, I wasn't surprised by the Brexit result. There are people in my book saying, 'do they [the elite] even realise we are here?'.' Right now, she is also working with Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, on a project working with upland communities in Cumbria, trying to find common ground between upland farmers and rewilders who want to banish sheep from the fells. Cottam is clearly effective at listening and identifying deeper-rooted causes. But what bigger solutions can she offer to the national problem of worklessness? 'We need a new social contract in which business, the state, unions and intellectuals [like her] have a role to play. We need to build 21st-century work organisations to see the economy grow.' The Work We Need by Hilary Cottam is published by Virago.


Reuters
3 hours ago
- Reuters
JPMorgan sees tariff-induced US 'stagflationary' slowdown in 2025
NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) - U.S. trade policies will likely slow down global economic growth and rekindle inflation in the United States, where there is a 40% probability of a recession in the second half of this year, JPMorgan analysts said on Wednesday. U.S. economic growth is expected at 1.3% this year, down from a 2% forecast at the beginning of 2025, with higher U.S. tariffs seen as adding negative shocks to the economy, the bank said in a mi-year outlook research note. "The stagflationary impulse from higher tariffs has been the impetus for our lowered GDP growth outlook for this year," it said. "We still view recession risks as elevated." Stagflation is a worrying mix of sluggish growth and relentless inflation that haunted the U.S. in the 1970s. The U.S. bank has a bearish outlook on the U.S. dollar due to slower U.S. growth when compared to growth-supportive policies outside of the United States that will bolster other currencies, including in emerging markets. It expects the share of demand for U.S. Treasuries from foreign investors, the Federal Reserve, and commercial banks, to decline given the growing size of the U.S. debt market. The compensation required by investors for the risk of holding U.S. Treasuries, known as term premium, could increase by 40-50 basis points over time, it said, though it does not expect sharp increases in Treasury yields such as the ones seen in the first half of this year. In April, Treasury yields spiked amid broader market volatility caused by U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement of sweeping tariffs. JPMorgan expects U.S. Treasury two-year yields will end the year at 3.5% and benchmark 10-year yields at 4.35%. They stood at 3.8% and 4.3%, respectively, on Wednesday. Due to sticky inflation caused by tariffs and a resilient economy, the bank expects the Fed will cut interest rates by 100 basis points between December and spring 2026, later than the consensus among rates futures traders, who were betting on two 25-basis point rate cuts this year as of Wednesday. A recession or a sharper economic slowdown than anticipated, would trigger a more aggressive cutting cycle, the JPMorgan analysts said. Still, the bank remained bullish on U.S stocks, given continued consumer and economic resilience despite policy uncertainty. "Absent major policy and/or geopolitical surprises ... we believe the path of least resistance to new highs will be supported by Tech/AI-led strong fundamentals, a steady bid from systematic strategies, and flows from active investors on dips," it said.


The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
ECB joins forces with BCCI to thwart new Saudi Arabia-backed T20 competition
The England and Wales Cricket Board has joined forces with the Board of Control for Cricket in India to try to thwart a new global Twenty20 league backed by Saudi Arabia. Under plans that emerged in Australia this year, Saudi's SRJ Sports Investments has pledged to inject £400m to set up the new league, which would have eight teams playing four tournaments in different locations each year in a set-up that has been compared to tennis's grand slams. Cricket Australia is understood to have expressed interest in partnering with the new league and is willing to host one of the proposed tournaments. CA is yet to benefit from a major injection of private capital, with the Big Bash League franchises owned by the governing body and the states. The ECB in contrast is about to bank £520m from the sale of 49% of the eight Hundred franchises, while Cricket South Africa raised more than £100m by selling franchises in its SA20 competition to Indian Premier League owners three years ago. During discussions at the World Test Championship final at Lord's this month, the ECB and BCCI agreed to unite in opposing the new league. The boards agreed they will not issue No Objection Certificates to their players to sign up for the new competition, as well as lobbying the International Cricket Council to withhold their endorsement. The positive talks are also a boost for the ECB, which was concerned about alienating India after declining to release Jos Buttler, Jacob Bethell and Will Jacks for the rescheduled IPL playoffs last month due to a clash with England's white-ball series against West Indies. The absence of Indian and English players would be a major blow to the competition's hopes of getting off the ground, particularly given the congested nature of the global cricket calendar and the competition for players. There are more than 20 short-format leagues played over 10 or 20 overs taking place in men's cricket this year, plus the Hundred. The ICC has yet to come to a formal position on the new league, but history suggests it is unlikely to go against the wishes of India. The recently elected ICC chair, Jay Shah, was previously secretary of the BCCI and is the son of India's home affairs minister, Amit Shah. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion To complicate matters, however, the ICC has also developed close ties with Saudi Arabia in recent years. After an initial 18-month deal, the ICC has signed a four-year deal with the state-owned oil company Aramco as its global partner worth £70m a year. A more diplomatic option for the ICC would be to hinder the tournament's development after providing its endorsement, by declining to alter their regulations to help it flourish. Under their existing rules all new T20 leagues have a limit of four overseas players from full member nations, which would create challenges for a Saudi Arabian league given the country's limited domestic player base. The IPL, Big Bash and Hundred have been successful as the teams have attracted overseas players to supplement the best domestic talent. A new competition featuring seven players from Saudi Arabia or other ICC associate member nations outside the 12 Test playing countries would be far less attractive to sponsors and broadcasters.