The shock quarterly loss announced by State Bank of India falls into this set pattern. The lender slipped into the red for the first time in 19 years as more bad loans showed up in the books while the bond portfolio recorded massive losses. This newspaper has often argued that the bad loans problem is as much a failure of corporate governance as it is of the economic cycle. The same question needs to be posed to corporate boards which signed off on massive leverage. Corporate governance reforms sometimes sound like a vacuous phrase used to impress conference audiences—but they lie at the heart of so many of our economic challenges.

Source: Mint February 11, 2018 18:22 UTC