Kopi time is a podcast series on insights from markets and economies around the world, hosted by Taimur Baig, Ph.D., Chief Economist of DBS Bank Ltd.
For this podcast, it’s just yours truly. With 2H25 in mind, I go over trade wars, Middle East tension, and the US economy. Then I take a bunch of questions from clients and colleagues. We go over asset allocation, US debt outlook, attractiveness of Asian sovereign bonds, and a few non-market questions. Enjoy! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We dive into the presently shifting capital flow dynamic with David Skilling, Founding Director, Landfall Strategy Group. David’s firm provides insights on global economic, geopolitical, and policy developments to firms, investors, and governments, so we begin by getting a sense of the mood of his clients. We then discuss if the ongoing geoeconomic instability is creating room for Europe and Asia to come closer, even with the China-US complications in place. We then delve into his recent publica...
This is a recording from the DBS Asia Insights Conference 2025, held in Jakarta on May 21. I had the privilege of discussing Indonesia’s near and medium term outlook with Chatib Basri, former finance minister. In this conversation, Mr. Basri talks about Indonesia’s strategy during a time of geoeconomic fragmentation, the ability of the economy to absorb shocks, what it would take to reach 8% growth, the challenges to education, health, and infrastructure, sectoral development strategies in place...
Prof Danny Quah, Dean of LKY School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, returns to Kopi Time to share his insights on the dangers and opportunities stemming from the changing world order. We go over two of his recent pieces; first, an open letter to the US president (penned before the US elections last November, and second, a research paper on the correlation between global trade and geopolitics. Prof Quah dissects the great power rivalry through (i) the perception of win-w...
Dr. Krishna Srinivasan, IMF’s Director of the Asia and Pacific Department, takes us on a journey of Asia, which is facing a major challenge to its export-led growth model. With geoeconomic fragmentation intensifying, how do nations strike a balance between trade promotion and domestic demand support? From China to India, South Korea to Vietnam, what is the outlook for growth, interest rate, and exchange rate, and what are the IMF’s fiscal, monetary, and structural policy prescriptions? What are ...
Alicia Gregory, Managing Director at Blue Owl, an alternative asset manager, joins Kopi Time to walk us through private equity, a USD12trln asset class. Drawing on her extensive experience as a PE investor, Alicia begins by going over the genesis of the industry. We then go through a number of topics, including the structure of private equity investments, key investment strategies, PE’s track record relative to public equity markets, and the state of the PE cycle and the outlook for 2025. We als...
Kopi Time hits 5 years and 150 episodes! We celebrate the milestone with Piyush Gupta, outgoing CEO of DBS Bank Ltd. Piyush brings his remarkable intellectual breadth in this conversation, in which we touch upon various aspects of the present and future of banking. We begin by discussing how banks in Asia and the West have evolved since the 2008/09 global financial crisis, and their track record in embracing digital banking, financial inclusion, risk management, and relationship with regulators....
We welcome a foremost expert on the science of aging, lifespan, and healthspan, Professor Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology, National University of Singapore. In this fascinating conversation, we begin by understanding senescence, the process of functional decay of organisms. Prof Kennedy explores aging at physical and cognitive levels, and its linkage with genetics, diet, and exercise. We then delve into the scientific work going with several molecules that a...
We dive into the rapidly growing world of private credit. Meghan Neenan, managing director and the North America head of Non-Bank Financial Institutions at FitchRatings, walks us through the sector’s genesis, scale, depth, structure, participants, transparency of reporting, and regulatory dimension. What are the vulnerabilities around the economic cycle? Are there financial stability risks? What are the newest trends, from the spread of retail offerings to blended structures? Is this an inflecti...
We welcome back to Kopi Time Kishore Mahbubani, distinguished diplomat, academic, and writer on geopolitics. Our conversation, recorded in Mumbai, kicks off with India’s promise and challenges vis-à-vis the US and China, with the former turning increasingly protectionist and latter facing a myriad of domestic and external challenges. Mahbubani sees no room for emotion in geopolitics, expecting to see India follow its pragmatic instincts to pursue industrialisation with capital and technology fro...
We welcome back Dr. Deborah Elms, Head of Trade Policy at Heinrich Foundation, Singapore, for a timely discussion on intensifying trade wars. We set the context by looking at the past decade of rising protectionism and the impact on the global economy. Deborah points out that despite all the frictions, global trade volume has increased. But at the same time, industry lobbying for protection has also risen, and the dream of creating numerous manufacturing jobs has remained largely unfulfilled. Th...
Happy new year! We kick off the year with a discussion on the likely impact of Trump policies on US markets, starting with the 1890s McKinley tariff narrative. There are major lessons for the market outlook from that episode, in our view. Returning to the present, we think through the ways tariffs and immigration measures can complicate the inflation picture and the Fed easing narrative. From there, we consider implications for rates, credit, and FX. We then assess the Asian outlook in the conte...
We bring the year to an end with astute market strategist and Fed watcher Dr. Komal Sri-Kumar. Sri begins by taking stock of the US economy and markets, how they have been fuelled by fiscal stimulus and the Fed put. Sri is a strong critic of the Fed’s track record on price and financial stability, and he worries that inflation and market risks could be back on the horizon in 2025, even if they seem remote now. We talk about the balance sheet of US households, which look fine on aggregate, but Sr...
Are today’s policy challenges and market behaviour largely about post pandemic macro, or are they reflecting fiscal, monetary, and financial “dominance” that stem from two decades of interventions? Mustafa Chowdhury, a veteran of bond and credit market analysis, returns to Kopi Time to offer a nuanced but highly important perspective on the impact of policy distortion on market behaviour. Why did the long-end of the US yield curve sell-off after the September rate cut? Why haven’t banks reduced ...
Gaurav Keerthi, Head of Advisory and Emerging Business at Ensign InfoSecurity, joins Kopi Time to provide a fascinating overview of the current state of affairs in cybersecurity. We begin with the intersection of geopolitics and cyberattacks. From state sponsored defensive and offensive teams to independent actors with a range of motives, the number of agents attacking the integrity of national power grids, airports, water supply, along with healthcare and education systems, has proliferated at ...
All about India’s financial markets with Ashish Gupta, CIO of Axis Mutual Fund, one of the largest and fastest growing asset management companies in India. Ashish digs into his multi-decade experience on covering Indian banks and nonbank financial companies to lay out a comprehensive picture of the current state of affairs. We go over the factors underlying the buoyancy of India’s public and private capital markets, investor sentiment and behaviour on equities, RBI’s regulatory role, and bank ba...
We dive into the implications of Donald Trump’s emphatic win at the US presidential elections. Angela Mancini, partner at Control Risks, a global specialist risk consultancy, discusses the factors underlying the outcome, its implication for US policy, especially with regards to Asia. We talk about business strategies under Trump 2.0, and the key issue--risks around China-US relations. We also talk about where the Democratic Party goes from here. The podcast was recorded at our annual macro and m...
What is the current state of fintech? Varun Mittal, founder of Fintech Nation, returns to Kopi Time after nearly 100 episodes to comment on the changes in the last four years. We discuss the depth and breadth of the sector, its profitability and investor returns across geographies, and the competition/collaboration relationship between banks and nonbank financial companies. We discuss fintech’s role in wealth planning and financial inclusion, the proliferation of payments solutions, and the stat...
This podcast is an 11-minute reflection on the recently concluded IMF annual meetings, held at Washington DC. The meetings were characterised by relief over global economic resiliency, juxtaposed by heightened concerns about a variety of risks. Global growth is expected to remain stable between 2024 and 2025. Concerns about inflation have receded, but we caution against a victory lap. USD weaponisation and trade wars are causing investor strategies to shift. EM resilience would be tested by the ...
Shai Akabas, Executive Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Economic Policy Program, joins Kopi Time to discuss all things US fiscal. There is no silver lining in this conversation, the outlook is gloomy, period. We begin with the US fiscal position over the past 25 years, going from balanced budget to deficits of around 7% of GDP, from net debt/GDP of 35% to 100%. Shai walks us through the various unfunded tax cuts and emergency spending outlays, with no consensus on dealing with the ball...
Drew Thompson, Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, brings his deep China and Taiwan expertise to Kopi Time. Taiwan stands at the crossroads of tech manufacturing excellence and geopolitical tension. How does its recent political developments look from the perspective of its local population, mainland China, and the US administration? How will its politics and economic policies evolve in the coming years? Beyond the superpowers, ...
Writer and academic Alexander Capri returns to Kopi Time after nearly 5 years, but the issues we discussed then and now remain relevant, if not even more so. In this engaging chat, Alex walks us through the expanding notion of techno-nationalism, its impact on trade patterns and flows, and corporate strategies around geopolitical fragmentation. We touch upon the innovation race between China and the US, China’s digital belt-and-road strategy, and the trans-Atlantic tech alliance. We consider the...
Vasuki Shastry, Senior Advisor at Gatehouse Advisory Partners, returns to Kopi Time to talk about the decade-old “Make in India” initiative. From Production Linked Incentives (PLI) to splashy marketing campaigns, this has been a signature initiative by the Indian government under Prime Minister Modi. What has been the accomplishment of this effort to usher in a new era of manufacturing in India? Vasuki’s report card is blunt—"it has been a qualified failure.” We go through the data on investment...
Jennifer Sciubba, PhD, President and CEO of Population Reference Bureau, joins Kopi Time to discuss the science and policy dimensions of demographics. She begins by explaining the various ways of looking at population projections, pointing out that for most cases in recent decades, forecasts have ended up erring on the side of higher fertility. With fertility surprising on the downside and life expectancy rising, there is an overwhelming dynamic of rising median age the population around the wor...
Prakash Kannan, Chief Economist and Director of the Economics & Investment Strategy department at GIC, returns to Kopi Time to talk about evolving macro developments and implications for asset allocation. We cover it all in this discussion, from Fed outlook to EM resiliency, global liquidity to China policy, yen carry trade to gold, and how a portfolio suitable for the past decade is unlikely to bear similar fruit going forward. Lots of insights. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy infor...
This conversation is about a flagship report on Southeast Asia’s outlook. Earlier this year, researchers from DBS, Angsana Council (backed by Monk’s Hill Ventures), and Bain & Company came together to query the drivers of regional economic performance in recent decades and the outlook for the coming decade. The work was done taking into account ongoing disruption from geopolitics, technology, and climate change. Charles Ormiston, founding partner of Bain and Company’s Southeast Asia business...
Shekhar Aiyar, a Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel, on leave from the International Monetary Fund, joins Kopi Time to mount a substantive case for globalisation, a much-maligned word in some circles these days. Sharing his cutting edge research, Shekhar refers to considerable empirical evidence to establish the gains from trade for various parts of the global economy over the past half century. He then shares findings on the cost of reversing the course, a process termed as geoeconomic fragmentatio...
James Crabtree, distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Asia Society, returns to Kopi Time to shed light on this year of momentous elections. We delve right into the US, first by taking stock of the ongoing drama around Trump, Biden, and Harris. We then consider the scenario of a Trump re-election and the likely outcomes around a Trump defeat. James has thoughtful views on what a Trump 2.0 would mean for Asia, as well as the impact on...
We discuss global payment trends with David Mann, Chief Economist for Asia Pacific at Mastercard. From experiential travel to business events, there has been a dramatic change in consumer preferences since the pandemic, with the rise in cost of living playing a key factor. We talk about the patterns picked up from Mastercard’s extensive data on transactions around the world. From shopping trends in Japan to tourism in South East Asia and India, as well as new fintech platforms and payment rails,...
Mdm Kay Kuok, Chair of the Yale-NUS Governing Board Members of the Yale-NUS Governing Board Professor Aaron Thean, Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost of NUS Professor Joanne Roberts, President of Yale-NUS College Families, Yale-NUS community, and Friends And dear graduates, Most of you were the class of 2020 in high school, your graduations disrupted by a once in a century pandemic. Today, as the Yale-NUS graduating class of 2024, your lives are mercifully not disrupted. It would ho...
