By Karishma Vaswani

“Be Prepared”. It’s the motto of every good Girl Guide. And it should have been the mantra of every major Asian central bank too, over the last few months. In the words of my Guide leader (admittedly a few years ago), being prepared means being ready to cope with anything that might come your way. […]

Calling China a currency manipulator. Ripping up trade alliances and deals. Slapping tariffs on Chinese goods. Punishing American companies that outsource their jobs to Asia. These promises got Trump elected – but how many of them will turn into policies? Whatever you might make of his personality or political ideologies, Mr Trump’s victory is an […]

  On the eve of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to India, the country’s finance minister Arun Jaitley has told the BBC that in a post-Brexit world, “it’s extremely important that both India and the United Kingdom are looking at the world after Brexit”. And he hopes this will mean India and the UK […]

  Remember this last year? Ghost towns – the global shorthand for the economic slowdown in China – filled with millions of empty apartment blocks, towering eerily in cities all over the mainland. But only 12 months later, property prices in some parts of China are up by between 30 and 40%. In one incident, […]

So I just spent my whole morning waiting for the Bank of Japan to make its mind up about what it should do to jump-start Japan’s economy. Looks like I wasn’t the only one, as many traders took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the delay. But after all the faffing and fussing, did […]

A full blown banking crisis in three years’ time. The warning from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) certainly sounds dire, and it should be taken seriously – but don’t forget China’s banking system is still relatively well protected because it is largely state controlled. That means that in the event that some Chinese banks […]

The Chinese internet space is littered with the corpses of failed US internet firms, one industry source told me this morning, as reports of the Didi-Uber deal emerged. “Everybody’s just tired of the bloodletting. Uber’s investors probably just wanted out.” No surprise there. Losing a billion dollars a year – as Uber was doing in […]

  Imagine a future where your fridge, your washing machine, even your hairbrush, is a computer. Everyday appliances, all of a sudden transformed into intelligent, thinking and analytical machines. And then think – how much would you pay to own the technology behind those devices? That might help to explain why Softbank’s eccentric chief executive […]

If it feels you wake up every day to more bad news, spare a thought for the Brits. As the Economist described in its rather scathing report of the current situation in the UK: “Britain is sailing into a storm with no-one at the wheel.” The latest news out of the UK – the two […]

  Asian banks are taking a hard look at the political and economic uncertainty in the UK – and some of them don’t like what they see. Singapore’s UOB has taken urgent action: it is temporarily suspending its loans programme for London properties as a result of what it called uncertainties post the UK referendum. […]