Easy Money
Category: Economy
- Economists have opined that an easy monetary policy will be ineffective to push the sagging growth engine and that what is needed is more direct and quicker fiscal measures.
- RBI cut its key rates for the third time in 2019 and also changed the policy stance to accommodative last week to a nine-year low.
- Growth plummeted to a nearly five-year low at 5.8% for the March quarter, pulling down the full-year GDP for FY19 to a low 6.8%.
- Non-banking finance companies are undergoing crisis and constitute up to a fifth of the overall lending in the economy.
- Food Corporation’s massive borrowings from the National Small Savings Funds is already in excess of ₹2 lakh crore or 1 percent of GDP.
Plastic in our diet
Category: Environment
- People worldwide could be ingesting 5 g of microscopic plastic particles every week, equivalent in weight to a credit card.
- Coming mostly from tap and especially bottled water, nearly invisible bits of polymer were also found in shellfish, beer and salt.
- In the last two decades, the world has produced as much plastic as during the rest of history.
- More than 75% of all plastics winds up as waste. A third of that — some 100 million tonnes — is dumped or leaches into Nature, polluting land, rivers and the sea.
- On current trends, the ocean will contain one metric tonne of plastic for every three metric tonnes of fish by 2025.
- Plastic particles have recently been found inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean, and blanketing the most pristine snows in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain.
Internet clean-up
Category: International
- China has launched a campaign to clean up its Internet.
- It has blocked more foreign media websites and shut down domestic accounts on social media.
- The campaign will punish and expose websites for “illegal and criminal actions”, failing to “fulfil their obligation” to take safety measures or the theft of personal information.
