Arun Devnath

The journey begins in the dust. Fine, red ochre dust that plumes behind our safari vehicle, coating everything in a thin film that smells of ancient earth. It’s the dust of the Maasai Mara, the pulse of Kenya’s wildlife.

Finance Adviser Salehuddin Ahmed has offered both empathy and arithmetic in his budget speech, laying out a vision that puts people, not just projects, at the heart of economic policy.

In a year stripped of spectacle, interim govt set to deliver an outlay shaped by restraint, realism and possibly, reform

If you’ve been to a grocery store in Bangladesh lately, you’ve probably felt the sting of rising prices.

Finance ministers don’t possess crystal balls to captivate the audience with mystical allure. They don’t have magical foresight. They are real-world agents of economic policy. In times of crisis, which often repeats itself in modern capitalism, they chart a path out of the dark abyss. Sometimes they prove to be successful, sometimes not.

It’s not the best of times. It’s not the season of light. The future will tell whether it’s the period of Dickensian despair on the economic front. But this is not the moment for business as usual, for sure.

Southern rivers in Bangladesh were already swelling with waters on May 23 due to the full moon’s gravitational dance with the Earth.

The crawling peg system for the taka is a delayed and, perhaps, inadequate response to the bleeding of forex reserves. Some economists suggest the central bank should go beyond this formula and open the exchange rate to market forces to stop the continuous erosion of reserves. Either way, exporters and remitters will celebrate more flexibility in the exchange rate.