Mamun Rashid

I perused the 2024 audited financials of Citibank, N.A., Bank Alfalah, Habib Bank, and Commercial Bank of Ceylon in the newspapers last week.

Non-performing loans (NPLs) in Bangladesh soared by Tk 1.34 lakh crore in the second half of 2024, reaching Tk 3.45 lakh crore by December.

While Bangladesh’s move toward graduating from the Least Developed Country (LDC) status is a testament to decades of perseverance and growth, it will be time to take on the weight that comes with it once the celebration dies down.

Bangladesh’s higher education system faces a critical issue: While universities are expanding rapidly, an increasing number of degree-holding graduates are struggling to find meaningful employment because employers cannot find graduates with the necessary skills.

Bangladesh has mostly failed to achieve its targeted level of foreign direct investments (FDIs), with investment inflow amounting to only 0.75 percent of GDP in 2023, according to UNCTAD.

As we have been talking about enhanced transparency and accountability recently, it’s important to have forensic audits, including specialised examinations of financial records which can uncover fraud, corruption or mismanagement.

Bangladesh is trying to cope with a challenging economic situation.

There seems to be much confusion among the citizenry regarding how our economy is being managed, and challenges are addressed.

Classified loans in Bangladesh have exceeded Tk 284,000 crore. Various agencies are even talking of Tk 4 lakh to Tk 7 lakh crores of stressed assets in the banking sector, which tends to be 25-45 percent of the total loans.

If you ask any multinational, regional, or large local corporate CEOs what keeps them awake at night, the most common reply is likely to be—employee retention. Be it Standard Chartered, Citibank, or PwC, many potential CEO candidates have been lost to first-world countries, and this exodus continues. They were mostly from reputed business schools or engineering universities. Their exit interviews revealed almost a common thread of answers.

Despite some episodic spikes here and there, the economy of Bangladesh is still struggling, and the government isn’t sure what the top priority should be.

Since our independence, 53 years have gone by and the country has already become a quasi-dominant player in the global supply chain. Y

Banks and banking seniors across the global or regional banking arena are being faced with one very important issue -- which market(s) to enter, which product to offer and which clients to choose and onboard.

Cyber-attacks are on the rise in Bangladesh, highlighting the need for robust security.

Climate change has emerged as a significant risk to sovereign debt sustainability, impacting fiscal stability and growth prospects.

Asia forms the backbone of the world economy, powering vital supply chains from electronics hubs in Taiwan and South Korea to garment factories in Bangladesh.

When two related entities enter a cross-border transaction, the price at which they undertake the transaction is the “transfer price.” Due to the special relationship between related entities, the transfer price may be different than the price that would have been agreed upon by unrelated parties. The price between unrelated parties in an uncontrolled condition is known as the “arm’s length price” (ALP).

As the world faces pressing environmental and social issues while the business world continues to evolve, sustainability management has become an essential concept in modern business strategies.

Despite various challenges, the financial sector in Bangladesh is undergoing a rapid digital transformation, driven by economic development and the increasing adoption of new technologies.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to British-Americans Simon Johnson and James Robinson and Turkish-American Daron Acemoglu, whose work and research in economics have been to explain how some countries manage to stay ahead of the curve while others fail to do so.