Freedom Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It has been almost two decades since the late Shinzo Abe [former prime minister of Japan] stood in India’s parliament and told the assembled legislators that “it is incumbent upon us two democracies, Japan and India, to carry out the pursuit of freedom and prosperity in the region.” Abe defined their task as protecting freedom of navigation in what he was perhaps the first to call the Indo-Pacific. That task has gotten only more urgent as America withdraws—or, more recently, imposes blockades on crucial straits—and China pushes harder against the first island chain.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Cubans contending with widespread blackouts and growing desperation increasingly hope that a U.S. pressure campaign will lead to change on the island, even as the Communist government projects defiance.Many see a chance for greater freedom and economic transformation, even as others vow to resist any American military intervention.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Indian business rarely does exactly what the government wants it to. For the past decade or so, for example, it has obdurately refused to invest as much as officials think it should.Last week, chief economic advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran said that profits for the 500 largest publicly traded companies had grown by over 30% a year since the pandemic, “but still, our overall capital formation rates from the private sector have been disappointing.”Nageswaran is not the only one complaining.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In 1954, conductor Herbert von Karajan and the Philharmonia Orchestra released what was considered a definitive recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was meant to capture the grandeur of the Ode to Joy for home listeners.But when Amar Bose, then a brilliant graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an obsessive music lover, bought an expensive high-fidelity stereo to listen to it in 1956, he was deeply disappointed.The symphony, which should have felt like a tidal wave of sound, felt more like a trickle.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The Alliance Fairfax, a towering black and white car-carrier ship that had been stranded in the Persian Gulf for over two months, was finally making a break for it.“You are all set to go,” a U.S. military officer radioed as the ship glided through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and swung around the peninsula at the northern end of Oman. “Safe travels.”Soon after, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at commercial ships, at the U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.NEW DELHI: Next week, the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant will start hearing arguments for and against India’s first-ever data privacy law. After five separate public interest litigation petitions filed in February challenged the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, these hearings starting 13 May could determine the future of what companies and government bodies can do with the personal data of 1.4 billion people.Both the Centre and the litigators have deployed batteries of top lawyers.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Four angry women, in Bengali writer Kabita Singha’s eponymous novel, decide to go “out flying for a whole day” one winter in Calcutta (now Kolkata), most likely in the 1950s. Suman, Bulan, Renu and Chuni are fashionably bedecked as they walk from Dalhousie towards Park Street.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.WASHINGTON—Just weeks after President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS” only to see ship traffic stall, the administration is now asking other countries to join a new international coalition that would enable ships to navigate the waterway.The effort, called the “Maritime Freedom Construct,” was spelled out in an internal State Department cable sent to U.S. embassies on Tuesday that called on U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Visual: A narrow winding cobbled way in Paris. My voice: “It’s far worse to be poor in a rich country than to be poor in India. To be poor in the spectacular beauty of Paris is like Assamese art cinema trapped in a Wes Anderson scene.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.On 17th April Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, declared that commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open”. Shortly afterwards Donald Trump, America’s president, echoed his words: the conduit was “completely open and ready for business”.

TV shows, India lacks a dedicated regulatory framework for music. This, lawyers and industry experts say, creates legal and commercial uncertainty, undermining an artiste’s ability to monetise their work and make creative decisions with confidence.

While most Indian households meticulously track their primary loans and repayment schedules to avoid the fallout of a default, a different category of spending often goes unnoticed. These are the ‘silent EMIs’ — recurring monthly payments that are individually small and scattered. Because they lack the immediate weight of a major loan, they are easy to overlook, yet their cumulative impact on a household's financial health is immensely powerful.Silent EMIs are the monthly payments we commit to without much thought about their impact on our household income.

Mint examines how events in Iran will unfold and their implications for India and the rest of the world.Late on Saturday, the US and Israeli forces launched ‘Operation Epic Fury’—a massive military operation that not only killed Iran's supreme leader Khamenei but also 40 senior officials, disrupting the Islamic Republic’s command and control. The strikes happened across 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces. Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones into Israel and other Arab states in the region.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The banking regulator’s new rules to fund mergers and acquisitions will open the doors, but too many conditions could deter banks and borrowers, say experts. Stricter rules for lending to brokers for leveraged trading elicited a mixed response.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In July 1991, India dismantled the four-decade-old Licence Raj and embraced economic liberalization. Over the next few months, as unprecedented foreign capital poured in, a peculiar euphoria gripped the nation.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Retiring before age 65 is a dream for many workers. For Taylor Kovar, turning dream into reality made him anxious and depressed.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For India’s rising middle class—especially young professionals—a salary hike often brings a disproportionate rise in spending. This phenomenon, known as lifestyle inflation or lifestyle creep, quietly erodes financial security by allowing expenses to rise in lockstep with income, leaving little room for savings or long-term investments.

Mint review of usage practices and public policies across X, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT found that safeguards on such content are not uniform across companies.As MeitY’s notice put X under scrutiny, policy and AI experts pointed to a key policy gap that appears to have placed Grok in the government’s firing line even as other platforms have so far avoided similar action.On 2 January, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) issued a notice to X seeking details on how the platform acts against objectionable content and how it plans to address sexual content. The move followed concerns over how Grok, which is embedded within X (formerly Twitter), can be used to modify photographs into content that could be deemed sexual, obscene, or violative of a user’s privacy.Mint has seen a copy of the notice which had set time until Monday for X's reply.X has sought more time to respond to Meity's notice, meanwhile.

Pension System (NPS) to increase its wider acceptance among households, while the Employees Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) took some tough calls to plug complete withdrawals of the provident fund. Here are the headline events of 2025 in the space that you should take note of.NPS is a defined contribution plan. The original product required an investment for a certain number of years, and on vesting or maturity, which coincides with the traditional retirement age of 60, you annuitise at least 40% of that corpus to buy a pension for life.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Rather than pursue a conventional initial public offering, SpaceX could go public through a merger with wireless phone, TV and satellite company EchoStar. It’s an admittedly an unconventional and seemingly far-fetched idea, but SpaceX’s leader and controlling shareholder, Elon Musk, is a maverick who has succeeded by flouting conventional rules.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Imagine there was no other country but India. The subcontinent was all the landmass that there was on the planet, with oceans all around.