The rise of bigotry
A religiously motivated violent mob in Jaranwala, Faisalabad attacked, vandalized and set houses and churches of the Christian community on fire on August 16. According to the initial official assessment,…
LSM sector travails
Large-scale manufacturing (LSM) sector, as per data released by the Finance Division, registered negative 8.1 percent July-March 2023 and peaked at negative 25 percent in March 2023. By April this…
Call a spade a spade
The refrain from the Prime Minister’s office prior to 23 June 2023 that all International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions pertaining to the stalled ninth Extended Fund Facility (EFF) review have…
What are the French protesting?
Last week saw France in the grip of another wave of mass protests which swept across the country following the killing of 19-year-old Algerian-French teenager Nahel. The boy was a…
‘Plan B’: not an alternate to ‘Plan A’
‘Plan B’ was announced amid much fanfare, backed by the civilian administration (federal and provincial) and military leadership this Tuesday past premised on a one-window operation tried and failed in…
Seeds of accord
On March 15th, 44 BCE, Roman emperor Julius Caesar was assassinated, and thence came the term Ides Of March, which has historically come to connote and be associated with bad…
Let next elected govt present budget
Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, unconditionally backed by Nawaz Sharif, the party supremo, as well as by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif (a man known to repeatedly defer to his brother’s decisions…
Dwindling forex reserves and bravado
Consumer Price Index rose to 36.4 percent in April - a rise of one percent from March 2023, 23.7 percent from March 2022 and if one takes away the economically…
The budget 2023-24
The government’s negotiators are citing the pending International Monetary Fund (IMF) ninth review as well as the need to table the budget for 2023-24 and get its approval from parliament…
Resilience, helplessness or loss of trust?–I
The Pakistanis are battling an inflation rate of over 35 percent, a policy rate of 21 percent, depletion in value of their currency (PkR) by over 40 percent in the…
