Movies show our confidence.

Delivering the OP Jindal Lecture at Brown University in the US, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Prof Raghuram Rajan said that "the government's economic performance is not sustainable and that there is a risk of the country going the Latin American way in terms of populist policies". Rajan does not mention which Latin American country we resemble. There is Argentina where former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner nationalized the energy company YPF  by forcibly taking over Repsol's share of the company. In India, fuel for automobiles and domestic cooking gas are exclusively supplied by government companies. Where a foreign firm Cairn Energy PLC of UK discovered and drilled for oil in Rajasthan it has been fighting a demand for retrospective taxes of Rs 102.47 billion since 2015. Cairn has already spent $22.9 million in administrative costs fighting the demand. de Kirchner forced the chief of the central bank Martin Redrado to step down so as to appropriate central bank reserves to pay off government debt. Here, the Governor of RBI Urjit Patel resigned over the government's insistence on using RBI reserves to reduce its fiscal deficit. He was replaced by a retired IAS officer who cheerfully transferred Rs 1.76 trillion from RBI reserves to the government. Deputy Governor of the RBI Viral Acharya did compare India with Argentina. Comparison with Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez nationalized agriculture, controlled the value of the currency and resorted to price control, would be too much. Agriculture is private in India but the government actively interferes in controlling prices when supplies fall and distributes handouts from public money when prices fall due to bumper crops. Prices of medical devices and a list of medicines are controlled. "Even when growth is slowing the government is pushing its welfare program, which gives it a lot of political capital among people," said Rajan. "But you cannot keep spending, something has got to give." Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked how the economy can be slowing when three movies raked in Rs 1.2 billion on 2 October. He withdrew his comments after being trolled online. Rajan said that our fiscal deficit figure 'conceals' a lot and the state of the economy is 'worrisome'. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has been pointing out the under-reporting the fiscal deficit and S Chinoy wrote that the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR) is at 8.5-9% of GDP. Movies are fiction, our fiscal deficit is fiction, economic growth is fiction. We are so confident in a world of fiction.