6th March

Think Ahead

The article advocates a forward looking monetary policy instead of a reactive one since rate cuts takes time to create an impact. The recent cut made by RBI is welcome but still a lot of work has to be done since the bankers expect more cuts in future to encourage lending.

The rate cut, announced by RBI, of 50 basis points make the repo rate and reverse repo rate stand at 5% and 3.5% respectively. The need for RBI to step in was evident since govt was running out of fiscal options, inflation stood at 3.03% with an anticipation of deflationary trend and the third quarter GDP growth of 5.3%. Apart from few nationalized banks like SBI, which announced reduced home and auto loan rates, lending rates remain at 12-13%; very high in present scenario. RBI justified delay in rate cuts by saying that it has injected enough liquidity in the economy. But this doesn’t help increasing in credit flow since bankers still expect more rate cuts and hold back lending which creates a vicious cycle. 

What is needed here is a proactive monetary policy instead of reactive one. As India gears up for G20 summit to seek to synchronize its growth boosting efforts with the rest of the world it cannot be out of sync in monetary policy. With govt shackled by EC poll code, it’s RBI who has to unleash the power India needs to sustain its growth.

Anybody Out There?

The article talks about the recent probe NASA is going to launch this month in order to search for extra terrestrial life. It also contemplates about the possibility of finding the life as the universe contains billions of galaxies and we are just searching in our own galaxy first.

The necessary condition for the life to exist on any planet is presence of water for which the planet has neither to be too far nor too near to its parent star. As the quest for extra-terrestrial life opens another chapter, NASA would launch its Kepler satellite to look for earth like object. With 95MP camera, it’ll survey about 100K stars in three years to capture their periodic dimming as they pass from it. It will help scientist determine how dense the universe is. Earlier probes have found that universe mostly contains Jupiter-like gas giants with no life at all but recent discoveries suggest that perhaps the lightweight rocky planets might just outnumber them. This will determine the probability of finding life in our galaxy and in turn the universe. Even if we find one life planet in our galaxy then also there are billions of galaxies all around which represents whole lot of living all around.

But then the question is that when the huge universe suggests that there ought to exists technologically advanced ETs somewhere then why they haven’t tried to contact us? One of the reasons can be the huge distance which is simply not conquerable. Or may be they didn’t find the need to search for us.