Chief Economist & Political Strategist, CrossASEAN Research

Prasenjit K. Basu

PK Basu has 34 years experience covering Asia's economies and markets (equities, fixed income and currencies), including 20 years covering the global economy. He was Chief Economist (SE Asia & India) at Credit Suisse First Boston for 5 years, and Chief Asia (x-Jpn) Economist at Daiwa Securities for a similar period. Among other roles, he was global head of research at Maybank Kim Eng, Malaysia equity research head and chief ASEAN economist at Macquarie, Chief Economist at ICICI Securities, ASEAN economist at UBS and the first chief economist at Khazanah Nasional (where he was co-head of research, and led all agri-business initiatives). PK Basu started his career in the Asia Service of WEFA (Wharton Econometrics) in Philadelphia in 1990, rising to be Director of their Asia Service in June 1994. 
PK's book, "Asia Reborn: A continent rises from the ravages of Colonialism and War to a New Dynamism" won the Tata Literature First Book Award (non-fiction) for 2018. It is the first single chronicle of the modern economic and political history of the whole of Asia (from Iraq and Turkey to Korea and Japan, and everything in between), told from an Asian perspective.

Chief Economist & Political Strategist

China Can't Afford the Widening Conflict with the US: RMB's Fall Is Thin End of a Strategic Wedge

EMs: Where Are the Contagion Risks from Argentina?

China and the Secular Stagnation of the West -- The Eventual Blowback Isn't Far Away

REAL-Economics.com

Thematic (Sector/Industry)

The renewed RMB weakness this week demonstrates that it will not be possible for China to run expansionary monetary policy without threatening financial stability. China's strategy of easing liquidity conditions (through 150bp of RRR cuts in the past 3 months) is causing substantial capital flight -- but the PBOC is masking this by selling US dollars in the forward rather than spot market (akin to what the BoT and BoK did in 1997). This is not yet 1997 Redux. But the threatened imposition of US…

The renewed RMB weakness this week demonstrates that it will not be possible for China to run expansionary monetary policy without threatening financial stability. China's strategy of easing liquidity conditions (through 150bp of RRR cuts in the past 3 months) is causing substantial capital flight -- but the PBOC is masking this by selling US dollars in the forward rather than spot market (akin to what the BoT and BoK did in 1997). This is not yet 1997 Redux. But the threatened imposition of US…

China: Barely Staying Afloat with New Money and Fiddled Data