Free wheelers

To be precise

“I cannot be unmindful of constitutional constraints... The party in power should not do anything that would be seen to be overstepping its brief ”
— Pranab Mukherjee, Acting Finance Minister, in an interview after presenting the interim Budget, in The Economic Times, on February 16, 2009

“It is another stimulus. I hope it will have its desired impact because we have given some concessions for the export sectors, particularly those which are employment-generating”
— Pranab Mukherjee, Acting Finance Minister, to Lok Sabha TV, on February 24, 2009

“I am quite struck by the most amateurish and uncoordinated interim Budget that I have ever seen in my 20 years of being associated with or monitoring these events”
— Shankar Acharya, Honorary Professor, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), and Member of Board of Governors, to CNBC-TV18

“While the cost of action will be great, I can assure you the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that splutters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade”
— Barack Obama, US President, in his first State of the Union Address

“Ask anyone in the US who’s in charge of the economy, they’ll look at each other; in India, it is the Reserve Bank of India; in the US, it is not the Federal Reserve”
— Ram Charan, cultural sociologist at IGNOU, New Delhi, in BusinessWeek online