In 2015 alone, the IMF estimated that GCC countries lost oil revenue worth USD 300 billion. To balance their budgets, the GCC and Algeria would need to cut current public spending by about a third, it said.Raghuram Rajan, India’s banking czar, will be history by September 2016. He enjoys unprecedented popularity and near cult status as Reserve bank governor. While some of this has to do with his youthful looks and fresh demeanour — very unusual in a profession peopled by dour old men, much of his appeal is related to the confidence and skill he brings to the job, which he plunged into in weeks rather than months, that is the usual learning curve.Industry — Y ring for sale usually taciturn about rooting for bureaucrats, came out openly in support of his conservative strategy to keep the rupee stable, build foreign reserves, check inflation and keep the interest rates at levels that give real returns to the large mass of middle-class savers.

International capital flows are as much about fundamentals as about the rutba — the credibility and charisma — of the Central bank. Dr Rajan is the first RBI governor who came to the job with considerable experience in international finance (in the IMF) and even more significantly, a long spell in American academia, working in the same area. To the billionaires who make the markets move, Dr Rajan is a familiar face, with a track record of original thinking and practical foresight. He is best known for disagreeing with mainstream economists and foretelling the 2008 financial meltdown.In India, his legacy is the exquisite symphony, he wrote, of caution mixed with big-bang reforms.

 On interest rates, he was consistently cautious. His mantra was that flooding the economy with cheap money is not a quick-fix for growth. Instead, it can spark off high inflation, as in Brazil.To the common man, this resonates well with the millennium’s conundrum of jobless, inequitable, high growth. Given these flaws in today’s post-industrial, service-oriented growth, Dr Rajan preferred to focus on keeping inflation low, preserving the real incomes of the disadvantaged who don’t have the luxury of inflation-indexed incomes.His historic big reform was to publicly finger banks that had lent inefficiently, destroyed capital and most likely enhanced corruption — given the magnitude of bad loans accumulated by them since 2011.He shone a bright light on the bad loans overburden rather than keeping them hidden under furtive refinance Ponzi schemes.