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Arvind Panagriya, Prof. of Economics at Columbia University, points out the key initiatives of the Modi government in its first four years which will show results in future years for development of the country.  He mentions the Swachh Bharat Mission and cites results that show rural households with toilets are now 84% up from 38%.  By 2019 the whole country will be defecation zone free on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. The Dhan Jan Yojana DJY accounts opened for rural households are up to 316 million. Aadhar cards for identification are up from 650 million to 1.2 billion. The Aadhar and DJY work together to enable direct transfer of benefits to poor households, eliminating the leaks in benefits transfer and ghost accounts of the period since independence in 1947. Not mentioned by Panagriya is the Health Insurance scheme for lower income households that enable families to survive a sudden medical expense that could put them in dire straits.  These efforts work in a way to change India from the ground up from its villages and rural areas as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for independence. The land acquisition law amendments were put on hold till farmers concerns could be better accomodated, an area of concern for industrial development cited in an editorial in the Hindu newspaper. Fiscal consolidation and inflation targeting have resulted in an average inflation rate of 4.3% for the 4 years of the Modi government. Inflation was over 9% in the last 2 years of the previous Congress UPA government with GDP growth dropping to 5.9% for the last two years. Average GDP growth for four years for the Modi government is 7.3%, even after the changes to implement GST taxation for one national tax eliminating state barriers in interstate commerce and demonetization to fight corruption and black money. Rate of GDP growth should be higher after the gains from the initiatives and the new GST integration of the country are felt, with increase in investment and FDI, after infrastructure improvements and land acquisition arrangements are made. Transportation infrastructure modernization initiative pushes ahead with the first bullet train in the pilot project for Ahmedabad- Mumbai set to start in 2022. This is a $17 billion project financed for $13 billion by the Japanese government at 0.1% loan for 50 years, moratorium on repayments for 20 years, using E5 Shinkansen series technology. Implementation of this project on a sound financial basis should lead to transformation of the Indian rail network, raising the level of technology implementation across the entire Indian rail system. Such an achievement would rival the first introduction of railways into India in the nineteenth century under the British. A new bankruptcy law is intended to free up capital for investment by putting behind the large number of non performing loans in the Indian banking system. Changes made by the central bank RBI are designed to speed up this process so that loss making enterprises are absorbed, consolidated or shut down, a legacy from the earlier period.     ...

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S. Gurumurthy of the Hindu points out the dangers of economic growth without job creation in a country like India. He points out that demonetization- removal of high denomination currency notes- came at a critical time when the economic growth was not creating enough jobs. He points to the five year period till 2010 as having created 2.7 million jobs with 8.5% growth. Even though with lower growth of 5.4% in the period 1999-2004 the job growth was for 60 million jobs created. Had demonetization not happened he says, the economy could have seen the problems the U.S. faced in 2008 with a bubble developing in the real estate market. The fundamental shift of the economy to digitization of payments, increase in tax receipts brings more of the informal economy- with a size of 50% of the economy generating 128 million jobs ten times the formal sector - into the formal economy. A step that is key for India to see rapid growth in the decade ahead. The slackening of the economy for a year is part of  a needed long term plan, says Prof. Gurumurthy, visiting IIT faculty in Bombay, just as liberalization was in the 1990's.  Some errors were made in implementation and flow of credit to the informal economy, including by the RBI, yet the fundamental shift through demonetization served a good purpose. Gurumurthy says, sadly this is missing in the current politicized debate.  ...

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Unorthodox cabinet nominees- Kash Patel at FBI, Tulsi Gabbard at Intelligence get nominated. Others where the nominee is supported broadly by moms and parents, and many senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson who are highly enthusiastic, are RFK Jr. for Health Secretary who still faced questioning from Republican Kennedy and other Republicans. All of them get nominated by Feb 15, 2025. Republicans in Congress stay together, Democrats do the same strangely opposing everything on the other side, including action on obesity and chemicals in food, drug industry practices they have been railing against for years that are RFK's agenda.  By tapping into different ideas just because they are good, make common sense, and not worrying too much about whether it is from the opposing Kennedy clan, and willing to take some risk with Patel and Gabbard, try youngsters such as Pam Bondi at Justice Department, Elise Stefanik at the UN and Kate Leavitt as Press Secretary, a woman Kristi Noem in the toughest job there is today at Homeland Security, DJT and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have put forward a different set of people highly motivated, more than a bit rambunctious and boisterous, to get things done on immigration zero illegal migrants, zero fentanyl deaths, and zero deindustrializing technology transfers to the Nation's competitors, and zero play except on a level playing field in trade and business. ...

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The FBI and the IRS were working on the same investigation of FIFA from different directions and began working together since Dec. 2011, as they found that the same people were involved. Richard Weber of the IRS, says another round of indictments can be expected. The IRS case starts with investigation into tax fraud and one discovery leads to another in the case. By 2013 Chuck Blazer had pleaded guilty to tax and corruption charges and agreed to cooperate with the IRS and the FBI, leading to the breakthroughs that followed. Enhanced cooperation between the Justice Department and international banks since the indictments against banks for illicit operations has made banks willing to cooperate with investigations fully. Once the case was built up getting FIFA officials at one place for the meeting in Zurich made it easier to make the arrests.

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S&P said it will maintain India's credit rating of triple B minus, the lowest investment grade rating, yet it may downgrade it to "junk status" in the next 2 years. S&P said this could happen "if the external position continues to deteriorate, growth prospects diminish, or progress on fiscal reforms remains slow in a weakened political setting. India's growth rate declined to 6.9% in the year ending March 31, 2012, down from 8.4% the prior year. The problem is that India's current account deficit is growing rapidly with the high import bill for energy supplies. The current account deficit is now at 4% of GDP. The trade deficit increased to $185 billion in this fiscal year, up 56% over the prior year. Additional problems are finding ways to finance the deficit with foreign capital, as European banks are pulling back during the current eurozone crisis. Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar says this could be a big problem. Net foreign capital investment is declining rapidly from $72 billion in February 2012 to $387 million in March, with a net outflow of $27 million in the April 1-25 period. The budget deficit, which has drawn the attention of the RBI, India's central bank, and of S&P, is at 5.9% of GDP for fiscal year ending March 31, 2012. This is larger than the government target of 4.6%. The government has set a deficit target of 5.1% of GDP for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013....

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The publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Co., is working to overturn a court injunction that prevents the public from seeing the Medicare billing records of individual doctors. Dow Jones & Co., filed court papers in January 2011, to overturn the court injunction. The American Medical Association has fought to keep secret the amounts of money individual doctors get paid by Medicare. The AMA filed a lawsuit against the government to keep secret these Medicare records, on the grounds of privacy rights, and won a court ruling in 1979. This court ruling still stands. The position of Dow Jones in its efforts to change this situation, is that giving the public access to the records is essential to the monitoring of so large a public expense as Medicare. These records would then be available to state medical boards, nonprofit organizations, universities and newspapers who can act as watchdogs over the $500 billion Medicare program. Such transparency and monitoring is an essential feature for the proper functioning of such programs and to prevent misuse of public money. For a program like Medicare, fraud and waste has enormous implications, as it adds to the spiralling cost of healthcare and to the unsustainable budget deficits. In one of the largest cases so far, the FBI, Justice Department, 700 state, federal and local agents, worked together to charge 114 defendents nationwide with Medicare fraud in February 2011. A senior law enforcemet official says Medicare fraud is so rampant, "there's no way in hell you can prosecute your way out of this problem, no way." He says the the answer is more effective monitoring of the money that goes out. And a key part of that is transparency and public access to how the money in Medicare is spent, what individual doctors and healthcare providers are getting paid by Medicare. The lack of this transparency for a program the size of Medicare can only lead to a lack of monitoring as the Dow Jones suit asserts, and make it difficult for the government to check abuses in the way money goes out. At a time when teachers and public workers and seniors are expected to make their share of the sacrifices to fix the budget deficits, it is incomprehensible that money should then be allowed to go out of the Medicare system through fraud and waste, because of a lack of transparency....

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Gretchen Morgenson of the Times distills key insights from 633 page report by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Morgenson points to the role of the Federal Reserve in Washington and New York in being as she describes it, defiantly inert and uninterested in controlling the mortgage bubble even when it had grown to enormous proportions.The problem now is that the same Fed has received more regulatory powers under the Dodd-Frank law. The same Fed repeatedly did not exert its authority on predatory lending. Page 94 of the report cites a total of only three institutions referred to prosecutors by the Fed from 2000 to 2006. Page 164 shows why there have been so few prosecutions for mortgage fraud from the bursting of the mortgage bubble. William Black, a former fraud investigator and professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, says the FBI has received virtually no assistance from the regulators, the banking regulators and the thrift regulators. The report contains some outrageous comments by one of the key players in fueling the mortgage bubble, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial. Morgenson describes him as a lender that roped unsuspecting borrowers into poisonous loans. Mozilo says in an interview on page 105 that his company prevented "social unrest" by providing loans to 25 million borrowers, many from minority groups. Never mind that this wave of poisonous loans has clogged the arteries of the nation's financial system, and resulted in foreclosures for millions of homeowners, creating a troubled housing market that hobbles the economy. Neil Barofsky, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, sees further bailouts ahead. He said in a report to Congress in late January 2011: "Unless and until an institution like Citigroup is either broken up, so that it is no longer a threat to the financial system, or a structure put in place that it will be left to suffer the full consequences of its own folly, the prospect of more bailouts willl potentially fuel more bad behaviour with potentially disastrous results." ...

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This NYT report by Thrush, Shear and Sullivan, looks at retired Marine general John Kelly, the head of Homeland Security till he was made the new chief of staff at the White House. He replaces Vince Priebus, who was the Republican National Party chairman during the 2016 election, becoming the new White House chief of Staff in January 2017. Priebus lasted only 6 months. This report points out that presidential family members Kushner and Ivanka Trump now report to Kelly, as part of the new discipline imposed by Kelly in an effort to reverse the chaotic situation in the White House with different quarreling factions. Kelly made this a condition for his taking the position, which Trump accepted as he was keen on firing Vince Priebus and had asked Kelly to take the job since May. Kelly is shown here as monitoring the contacts of Cabinet secretaries with the president. Who sees the president and for how long is now determined by Kelly to impose rigorous discipline. Kelly supported McMaster in the dismissal of a National Security Council member supported by Bannon and Kushner, in an effort to bring discipline. There is one area Kelly does not get into- the tweeting and personal affairs of the president. His job as he sees it is to put some bureaucratic competence around the president. In doing this he takes a tough approach that so far is respected by president Trump, as the presidency suffered from repeated setbacks from infighting and leaks. Will Kelly last where others have failed is a question posed in this report. Two people who were superiors of Kelly give their opinions. Kelly reported to Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff under Bill Clinton who was Defense Secretary, and to Robert Gates,  a Republican who was Defense Secretary. Panetta may know him closely as Kelly was his chief military aide as Defense Secretary. Panetta says of Kelly, that Kelly never minced words, said what he thought looking at you in the eye- if he thought a proposal was nuts he would say it right out. The big question Panetta says is whether president Trump will give him the authority for long. Also stated in this report is that Kelly called Comey when he was fired as FBI Director, and that Kelly even considered resigning in protest.  Less noticed even in this report is the way in which a team of experienced politicians and the senior most officials in defense and national security are working together in August 2017. In an interview with Washington Post editor Ignatius broadcast on PBS, Republican Senator Corker described how he works closely with them, and how the key people in defense and national security work together before they see the president. The appointment of Kelly helps to create a core independent group of advisors around the president, which is positive in the event the U.S. has to respond to a crisis. ...

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The RBI, India's central bank, raised its interest rate by half a percentage point moving it up to 7.25% to fight inflation. The RBI's inflation target is 6%. Inflation is currently running at a headline inflation rate of 8.98% for March 2011. The RBI governor, Duvvuri Subbarao, says the bank's policy is for giving precedence to controlling inflation even if this means lowering the growth rate. RBI estimates are for the economy to grow at 8% in the current fiscal year compared to 8.6% in the last fiscal year.

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India's central bank, the RBI plans to cut interest rates to stimulate growth in the economy in April 2012. Interest rates are at 8.5% and a cut of a quarter to half percentage point is expected. Inflation data shows year over year wholesale price increase of 6.89% in March 2012.

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India's central bank, the RBI, lowered interest rates by a half percentage point to 8% in April 2012.

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Countrywide and Mozilo, Raj Rajaratnam and Galleon hedge fund, and the Madoff prosecutions. Nocera says the Galleon hedge fund prosecutions do not extend to others who benefitted or had knowledge of what was happening, as has happened in the Madoff case. In the case of Mozilo and Countrywide little has happened to deter future behaviour.

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This WSJ editorial says the Indian government will have to do more to increase the growth rate. Rising inflationary pressures at 5% for core inflation are still present, with inflation in food prices running higher at 10%. Which may be the reason after a cut of 0.5%, Reserve Bank of India Governor Subbarao stated this would be all the country should expect for some time.

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The inflation rate of 8% in India limits the new Modi government's ability to increase the growth rate without creating price pressures. The current account deficit was brought down to 1.7% in the last fiscal year from 4.7% for the prior year, by curbing imports of gold and reducing imports of manufactured goods. It is being financed by uncertain portfolio inflows in the second quarter for 2014.

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The Indian government reports the benchmark wholesale price index for April 2012 was at 7.23%, up from 6.89% in March. The wholesale price index measures bulk sales between corporations and is considered a better measure than the old consumer price index, which lacks representative data from all regions. The wholesale price index does not include services, which make up half of the economic output. A new CPI has been introduced, but more data has to be gathered for it to become a dependable measure of inflation. Core inflation excluding food and energy, which focusses on the manufacturing sector, increased 5.1%.