A time for cliches.

It is a time for cliches in India. It doesn't rain but it pours, trouble always comes in threes, don't trouble trouble till trouble troubles you and so on. After a few days of rain along the western coast the monsoon has stalled. In the east it is raining heavily in Burma and Bangladesh but is not spreading to Orissa, Bengal and further inland. The trouble in Iraq has already increased oil prices to 9 month high. The reason it has not jumped higher is because the fighting is in Sunni areas whereas Iraqi oil wells are in the north around Kirkuk, controlled by the Kurds, and in the south near Basra, controlled by the Shias. Libyan oil supplies are improving and the US has huge stockpiles of oil and is exporting gas from fracking. But if the fighting gets worse, especially involving Iran and the Gulf states, oil prices would rocket. Although retail price inflation fell to 8.28% the wholesale price index rose to 6.01%, mainly due to increasing food prices. The rupee has fallen to 60 to the dollar after climbing to 58 which adds to the cost of imported oil. Thus, there is no need to go looking for trouble, it is raining on us already. The biggest trouble is that previous governments have used public money for short term gains rather than building for the long term. The government has no business running banks, an airline and manufacturing companies. Ministers direct banks to lend money to projects to increase votes and not for public gain. Air India is heavily in debt because it is used as personal carrier by politicians and civil servants and many public sector companies are surviving on life support, wasting taxpayer money. Extortionate taxes and inflation have squeezed middle class spending reducing both the service and manufacturing sectors, reducing growth to 4.7%. But trouble maybe brewing elsewhere as well. According to some economists the loose monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England are producing asset price bubbles which will surely burst in the near future, causing an even bigger collapse than 2008. A senior official at the IMF has warned of a housing bubble. House prices in India maybe declining slightly but that is because we are sitting on a humongous bubble already which is ready to explode. House prices have risen so fiercely in Britain that there are fears that only the very rich will be able to buy properties, leaving others in poverty because of rising rents. Other cliches come to mind. When the going gets tough the tough get going and cometh the hour, cometh the man. Is Mr Modi that man? We can only pray.