News about Nirmala Sitharaman

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said excess liquidity and easy exits have contributed to the underperformance of India's equity market and may continue to do so, though she described the economy's fundamentals as “fine.” Benchmark indexes have fallen nearly 12% since January, and foreign portfolio investors have sold over $33 billion of direct Indian equities this year. Goldman Sachs data show India's weighting in the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan index has dropped from 19% a few years ago to 10%, while Taiwan (29%) and Korea (22%) have attracted flows tied to AI. Sitharaman said India would not be hurt if the AI bubble bursts, that the country is “no longer a laggard” in frontier tech, and that investment is going into semiconductor manufacturing.