RBI Overheating India’s Economy: On Materialist Greed Fueling Ceaseless Consumerism

A phenomenon as massive as the global coronavirus pandemic, which ran from 2020 to 2022, is bound to have major economic ripple, or wave, effects in its wake. India’s record high 9.2% growth of GNP in the 2023-2024 fiscal year illustrates the robust thrust of pent-up demand met with increased supply. To the extent that consumption over savings is the norm in any economy, a couple years off can subtly recalibrate economic mentalities to a more prudent economic mindset wherein saving money is not so dwarfed by spending it. Moreover, putting the brakes on a consumerist routine and societal norm can theoretically lead to putting the underlying materialism in a relative rather than an absolute position and thus in perspective. Yet such a “resetting” must overcome the knee-jerk instinct of any habit to restart as if there had been no change. Coming back to college, for example, after a summer away, students tend to pick up their respective routines right away as if the recent summer were a distant memory. India’s astonishing rate of economic growth just after the pandemic demonstrates that the penchant for consumerism and economic growth as a maximizing rather than satisficing variable returned as if the steeds in Socrates’ Symposium—only those horses represent garden-variety eros sublimated to love of eternal moral verities, to which Augustine substituted “God.”

India’s central bank sought to spur economic growth in early June, 2025, by again lowering interest rates so as to increase the supply of money in the economy amid lower economic growth and inflation than anticipated. “The repo rate—the level at which the central bank lends money to commercial banks, influencing borrowing costs for home and car loans—[stood] at 5.5%, the lowest in three years.”[1] Even though India’s economy had grown by only 6.5% in the fiscal year ending in March—enough for India to still have “the world’s fastest expanding major economy”—RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra said the central bankers believes it was “imperative to stimulate domestic consumption and investment.”[2] Imperative? Such urgency and intensity point to a consumption-led approach to economics on steroids.

Although 6.5% is less than 9.2%, the economy was obviously larger in 2025 than it had been in 2022 and 2023 so the comparison is misleading in regard whether the incremental amount of GNP is sufficient cause for worry and a legitimate reason to stimulate the economy by lowering interest rates yet again. I submit that both 9.2% and 6.5% are artificially high as economic growth figures in that both occurred in reaction to the slowdown of the economy during the pandemic. It was unrealistic in 2025 to expect such growth rates to continue through the remainder of the 2020s. Furthermore, stimulating from the 6.5% growth-rate risked overheating the economy, which could easily spark inflation above the central bank’s threshold, especially as inflation was so close to RBI’s 4% target—retail inflation having been 3.16% in April, 2025. The prudence of Titanic’s captain in resisting pressure from the White Star company to light the fourth boiler in order to speed up even at night with iceberg warnings having already been received seems to have eluded the bankers in India in 2025, more than a century after the floundering of the ship that could not sink.

The lack of prudence stemmed in part from a maximizing rather than a homeostatic paradigm regarding an economy. Maximizing consumption rather than holding it steady, such that surplus earnings could go into savings for a rainy day, is bound to run out of steam at some point. Lighting the fourth boiler because economic growth has dropped to a mere 6.5% is ultimately fueled by greed, which, as the desire for more, is inherently maximizing. Government in general, and a central bank in particular, functions in the public interest by channeling or resisting the excesses of greed, rather than by incessantly facilitating it. Managing a soft landing from the effects of pent-up demand from a global pandemic rather than pretending that annual growth rates of 9% are and should be sustainable reveals the great difference that exists between maturity and being oriented to instant gratification. The latter, after all, is responsible for climate change in the age of Man, and overheating an already-growing economy adds appreciably to pollution.

In short, the habit of maximizing consumption established even as a paradigm is in need of transparency and modification, lest our species go extinct from its own socio-economic mentality. Economizing need not pierce the semi-permeable, over-arching net of ecologizing forces that can protect us from ourselves if we will to exercise control over our economizing instinct. Besides doing so ourselves, governmental institutions can do so if they are not populated by the hyperextended mentality that treats increasing consumption as a perpetual end in itself.

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1, Nikhil Inamdar, “India Central Bank Delivers Sharp Rate Cut as Growth and Inflation Fall,” BBC.com, June 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.

On the Social Psychology of Rising Credit-Card Debt: A Reflection of American Society?

It is perhaps too easy to point to economic reasons for an increase in debt within a society. The Wall Street Journal reported during the first quarter of 2020 that credit-card debt in the U.S. “rose to a record in the final quarter of 2019 as Americans spent aggressively amid a strong economy and job market, and the proportion of people seriously behind on their payments increased.”[1] The record $930 billion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was “well above the previous peak seen before the 2008 financial crisis.”[2] After critiquing the economic explanation, I will suggest that a social-psychological mentality or attitude may be behind not only the rising debt, but also other disappointing manifestations in the contemporaneous American society more broadly speaking.

The U.S. economy between 2001 and the third quarter of 2007 had been “weaker, overall, than its performance in the equivalent years of the 1990s.”[3] So if spending aggressively (a rather strange expression) amid a strong economy and job market in 2019 led to the record in credit-card debt, why was the debt level higher in the 2001-2007 period than during the 1990s? Furthermore, why wouldn’t a weaker economy result in more buying on credit and a jump particularly in serious credit delinquencies? In actuality, the fourth quarter of 2019 saw only moderate growth of 2.1 percent, a full percentage point below the comparable figure from the year’s first quarter. The softening of domestic consumer spending and the low unemployment rate of 3.5% should result in more credit-card debt being paid off rather than added. Going on economic factors alone takes on the look of a twisted pretzel.

I submit that a creeping pathological mentality in the some segments of American society, or perhaps outside of society, may be another, steadier trending factor. Specifically an attitude toward money and personal responsibility may have been spreading during the 2010s among the working poor. I cannot offer any empirical evidence, so my theorizing can only be considered as an initial sketch. Even so, the rough sketches of the attitude itself can be revealing with respect to personal responsibility and other people.

The attitude, which I have observed on number of occasions, includes the decision not to utilize self-discipline in the face of instant-gratification, which in turn may be felt as coming all-at-once as if overwhelming once a paycheck is received. Self-discipline may simply be dismissed as if it were an exogenous bad odor. In actuality, that odor comes from the attitude itself. The ensuing behavior is to spend too much of the paycheck without concern for money that will be needed before the next paycheck arrives (not to mention any concern to put some money aside in case of unemployment or an emergency).

In 2019, I listened more to the jobless poor who received government checks. I found that in many cases, they most or almost all of a check all at once. In many cases, they would turn to selling drugs and going to food-banks (and selling food stamps) to have money well into the month. That the mentality in spending virtually all of a check can point to an underlying mental illness suggests just how problematic the underlying mentality is. In retrospect, the consequent increase in serious delinquencies of credit-card debt can be viewed as a symptom rather than as the problem. Another “red flag” concerning the seriousness of the mentality occurred to me when I realized that the non-working poor are so very poor they are the most vulnerable financially, and a significant number, at least from my observations, displayed such flawed judgment in spending recklessly, as if they could offer no resistance to the instinct for immediate gratification. The mentality may thus be oblivious to external context and even the internal context of the mentality’s own bad judgment.

Regarding the working poor, people who display a failure of judgment concerning how much credit-card debt to add or have given the amount of the pay may also 1) have an implicit assumption that money is rightly for free (the extreme being conducive to theft), 2) believe that society owes them so they can rightly assume debt without any intent to pay it back, and 3) feel little or no responsibility to people they don’t know, including the owners of the credit-card companies and others. This extremely narcissistic attitude is entirely comfortable in violating Kant’s ethical notion of the Kingdom of Ends, by which other people are to be treated not only as a person’s means, but also as ends in themselves. Accumulating credit-card debt as if the companies’ concerns were of no significance turns the rational beings running and owning the companies into mere means to the person’s flawed decision that such money is and should be free, without obligation on the person’s part. If the counterparty is hurt, it is easily dismissible as “not my concern.” The mentality is thus not conformable to society and its implicit social contract.

I submit that the impact of the sordid mentality is evinced in not only the taking on of credit-card debt either recklessly or without any intention of repaying it, but also the increase in prison populations and drug use, and the general declining trend of civility toward strangers in public. In other words, the records in credit-card debt may be a few data points that together with other data may suggest the underlying mentality whose baleful manifestations running through American society are broader than generally thought.

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1. Yuka Hayashi, “Credit-Card Debt in U.S. Rises to Record $930 Billion,” The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2020.

2. Ibid.

3. Aviva Aron-Dine, Richard Kogan, and Chad Stone, “How Robust Was the 2001-2007 Economic Expansion?,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 29, 2008. (accessed February 11, 2020)

Does Opportunity Justify Economic Inequality?

From 1993 to 2010, the incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew 58 percent while the rest had a 6.4 percent increase.  In 2010, the first year of an economic recovery, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 93% of the income gains. Beyond the danger to the American republics in there being an economic elite so far removed from the vast majority of the population is the question of whether the trend is baleful, economically speaking. It is not clear that even such an income gain being snagged by so few registered in the minds of the general populous as a problem. The key to any concern would seem to be whether opportunity for the many is compromised as a result of extreme economic inequality.

In 2011, inequality was not exactly the top priority of American voters: only 17 percent thought it is extremely important for the government to try to reduce income and wealth inequality, according to a Gallup survey. That is about half the percent who said reigniting economic growth was crucial. However, 29 percent said it was extremely important for the government to increase equality of opportunity. More significant, 41 percent said that there was not much opportunity in America, up from 17 percent in 1998. The question is whether the concurrent increase in economic inequality was viewed as causing the decrease in opportunity. According to David Hume’s naturalist fallacy, a correlation does not itself mean a causal relationship exists. The fact that economic inequality was increasing as opportunity was decreasing does not in itself mean that the increasing inequality was reducing opportunity. There might be a causal relationship, but more is needed to support it than a correlation.

According to the New York Times, comparisons across countries “suggest a fairly strong, negative link between the level of inequality and the odds of advancement across the generations. The link makes sense: a big income gap is likely to open up other social breaches that make it tougher for those lower down the rungs to get ahead. And that is exactly what appears to be happening in the United States, where a narrow elite is peeling off from the rest of society by a chasm of wealth, power and experience.” Additionally, that elite can use its wealth as power to reserve the opportunities itself. For instance, donations to universities (and lobbying government officials) could be used to keep financial-aid-based admissions down to a certain level such that there are plenty of spots available for children of the well-off. Appeals seemingly in the interest of the masses can even be utilized, as in wanting to reduce subsidized student loan programs because students are suffering from too much debt.

In my view, the business-government dynamic is crucial to why increasing economic inequality is harmful both politically and economically. Minimizing the harm to reduced opportunity ignores the injustice that comes with the inequality itself. Wealth can easily be made into power, which in turn can be used in political, economic and societal realms in self-serving ways. The primacy of opportunity assumes that anyone can be rich if he or she just works hard enough. Both on account of the way the system is designed and the differences between people, not everyone will succeed even if given the opportunity.

Furthermore, conditioning one’s objection to economic inequality in society on whether one’s opportunity is affected can be viewed as self-centered as well as rather narrow because one is indifferent to the negative effects of the inequality on others apart from any decreased opportunity as long as one believes that one’s own opportunity is not adversely affected. Put another way, too many Americans are willing to look the other way on how the elite can unfairly use their advantage aside from restricting opportunity. The right of the elite to so much wealth is tacitly acknowledged as long as opportunity is still thought to exist.  As long as it does, society has no right to take from the rich even if they compromise the republics themselves. This is a very minimalist notion of social contract—one that the 1% benefit from. This is hardly an accident—political ideology established in society being in the interest of the relatively few beneficiaries of the vast majority of income gain.

Therefore, whether increasing economic inequality causes less opportunity for the masses is a question that can be relegated to the more important question of whether the inequality itself is inherently unfair and/or a threat to the republics, the economy, and even society. How the wealth has been and is gained as well as used are relevant to the ethical question of fairness, and thus to whether the concentration of wealth is legitimate. Crucially, a focus on opportunity misses this point. Besides its ethical dimension, absolute or relative economic inequality could be harmful in building up pressure of resentment and even revolution, as evinced in the Occupy Wall Street Movement (which has been safely marginalized—with its own complicity). As the interests of the elite and the masses diverge and the elite (e.g., Goldman Sachs) gains more and more power, the strangling of the lower and lower-middle classes may ensue—a development that could not be good for a society’s stability. A focus on opportunity recalibrated in terms of being promoted to manage a McDonalds’ restaurant misses this point. In short, we are missing the iceberg coming up in front of our ship because we are satisfied if we can still get a deck chair.

Source:

Eduardo Porter, “Inequality Undermines Democracy,” The New York Times, March 21, 2012. 

Deficiencies in the E.U. Capital Markets: A Silver Lining

With the IMF reducing its forecast of E.U.[1] economic growth for 2015 by 0.2% to 1.2 percent, E.C.B. officials still intent to go ahead with the much-anticipated “quantitative easing” program (i.e., buying state bonds), and, the euro having recently fallen 12% against the U.S. dollar since peaking, and crude oil prices below $60 a barrel in January, the limited scale of the E.U.’s capital markets relative to their American counterparts exacerbated the E.U.’s blight. Most directly, the lack of diversification on the types of capital markets meant that the focus on the bonds issued by state governments would continue.[2] With an upcoming election in the state of Greece making stock markets jittery due to the risk that the state might default on its bonds, the precarious condition of a relatively undiversified capital market added, albeit subtly, to the sense of risk in the air. Having had years to develop alternative markets since the financial crisis, E.U. policy makers had no one to blame but themselves—it would seem. However, a bright spot in European culture or society may be responsible for the lack of development.

The size of the corporate bond market was at the time just 34% of the American counterpart as a proportion of GDP, according to New Financial, a think tank in London.[3] The E.U.’s leveraged loan and securitization markets were 19% and 17% the size of their U.S. counterparts, and the venture capital market was just 15 percent, again all in terms relative to GDP.[4] Because the respective U.S. counterparts dwarf the E.U. markets by such an amazing extent in terms of GDP, part of the explanation may involve different business cultures with respect to debt.

With the U.S. federal debt at nearly $18 trillion and the previous year still showing a deficit of over $400 billion, and almost a third of student loans in default, it is easy to view Europeans as relatively debt-averse even if the post-financial-crisis years of debt-weary states (i.e, the “PIGS”) present an image to the contrary. I suspect that the relative skepticism on debt is in turn a manifestation of European society being less infatuated with business and thus less reflective of its culture. Put another way, the positive connotation that leverage (i.e., using borrowing in productive investment to hopefully capture more of the returns than is possible in the case of stock-issuance capital financing) has in the business world has been more salient in American society than in its European counterpart. Considering the misuse of debt-financing in the American and European housing markets that led to the financial crisis in 2008, the relative size of the European capital markets as of 2015 has a silver lining.

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[1] Specifically, for the part of the E.U. that uses the euro currency.

[2] Simon Nixon, “A Continent in Need of Greater Capital Markets,” The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2015.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.