Best of BS Opinion: Playing by instinct when the board is barely visible

Business Standard

13-06-2025

It starts like a harmless game. Ludo on the floor, dice in hand, but the lights go out. You keep playing anyway, guessing your way forward, mistaking red for green, rolling sixes that don't save you, and sliding into traps you never saw coming. That's what global decision-making looks like currently: leaders and investors tossing dice in the dark, banking on instinct, memory, or bravado. No rulebook, no clarity. Just blind moves on a colourful board smeared by shadows. Let's dive in.
Take Donald Trump's latest signal. He's willing to extend the July 9 trade deadline. But as our first editorial points out, that's not clarity, it's a dim torch in a fogged-up tent. Only the UK has reached a finalised deal. The US-China 'provisional' pact is laced with tariffs. Even the OECD's dim outlook shows that even with extended time on the clock, the players barely know where they're headed. Other nations, watching from the sidelines, now fear a post-deal spike in tariffs. The board's reset, but the fog remains.
Meanwhile, silver is streaking ahead like a lucky pawn. With prices up 25 per cent this year after a 21 per cent jump in 2024, and Indian silver ETF assets surging 125 per cent, precious metals are gleaming in the dark. But as our second editorial cautions, even the brightest path can be a trap. The gold-silver ratio has crossed 90, far above its historic average, suggesting silver may be overvalued. Diversification, not dazzlement, is the safer move.
T T Ram Mohan sees a more systemic risk hiding off the board. While everyone watches central banks, the real danger may be creeping through the Non-Bank Financial Institutions with hedge funds and private credit pools swelling with risk. US banks' exposure to these entities has tripled since 2010, and while post-2008 regulations offer some buffer, recent rollbacks of Basel III norms threaten to snap those threads.
In a different arena of chaos, Ajay Kumar traces how information wars now run on stories, not stats. Operation Sindoor proves that falsehoods told with emotion sprint ahead of truth wrapped in spreadsheets. Misinformation thrives in echo chambers, while official fact-checkers, constrained by dull 'true/false' binaries, fall behind. In a game where the loudest lie wins, truth must learn to shout back in verse, not bullet points.
And Neha Kirpal brings us a review of R.D. Karve: The Champion of Individual Liberty by Anant Deshmukh, a story of someone who rolled the dice when no one else dared. Karve was a sexologist, reformer, and rebel who talked about birth control and autonomy in 1920s India. His nudity-laced magazine Samaj Swasthya fought shame with science, facing bans and trials. Karve was ridiculed, but never silenced.
Stay tuned!