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Shahab Jafry

Shahab Jafry

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Mrs Watanabe rides again

There’s disarray, and then there’s 2025. But even by this year’s standards of financial bedlam, the last few days managed to leave most desks...

yesterday 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Shutdown in Washington, setup in Beijing?

Shutdown in Washington, setup in Beijing?

Comrade Xi must’ve chuckled watching the Capitol shutdown from Beijing. What better advert for yuan-denominated stability than a Washington...

03.10.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Trump tilts, again, and markets reload, again

It didn’t take a war speech. Just a social media post. And before anyone could double-check if the words were deliberate or just another digital...

26.09.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The trade of our time

Wednesday’s the worst day for an op-ed deadline if you like to write about Wall Street. For some reason, that’s when most of the most...

19.09.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Cowards in the gallery

It’s almost comic how quickly Arab leaders rush to call Israel a “coward” the moment another red line is crossed, as if a few press statements...

12.09.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Global finance: fault line in architecture

Markets are still pricing calm, but could they be ignoring a storm. The attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook has become more than just another...

29.08.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Exorbitant privilege, Trump style

Last week it was Putin. This week it’s all of Europe. Ever since Donald Trump’s sit-down with the Russian president in Alaska, that icy stage for...

22.08.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Two grandmasters meet in Alaska

I’ve always wondered why NATO, a Cold War relic built to contain communism, not only survived the collapse of the very empire it was created to...

15.08.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

India’s global test has arrived

The world must look very different to Narendra Modi today than it did just a few months ago. When Donald Trump roared back into the White House, the...

08.08.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Tariff truce or trade shock?

The tariff-truce clock is ticking – and global markets are grinding their teeth. In less than two weeks, President Trump will decide whether to...

01.08.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Tariff truce or trade shock?

The tariff-truce clock is ticking – and global markets are grinding their teeth. In less than two weeks, President Trump will decide whether to...

01.08.2025 5

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The throne atop a thousand fault lines

Old timers in the Levantine press are not surprised at all that Israel chose this time to strike deep inside Syria. They warned – while the rest of...

25.07.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The ‘TACO’ trade’s expiry date?

Markets have spent months assuming Trump would never go through with his tariff threats. That’s the trade: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” But when...

18.07.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Punching above our weight — on an IV drip

Diplomatic optics don’t usually favour countries still dancing around the possibility of sovereign default. And yet here we are — on an IMF...

11.07.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Was that all, folks?

I’m not surprised that financial markets were the first to call Iran’s retaliation “de-escalatory” (Bloomberg) – oil fell, equities and...

27.06.2025 40

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

‘Israel’s wet dream’

One of the many enduring paradoxes of American democracy is that a businessman-president—soon to return to his real estate empire and million-dollar...

20.06.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Pressure without clarity breeds market volatility

With the tariff reprieve deadline behind us and the long-promised Trump-Xi phone call still nowhere on the calendar, global markets are once again...

06.06.2025 40

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Mispricing the volatility regime?

It’s hard to price in the unpredictable. That’s the market’s dilemma with Trump’s second coming. While some optimistic investors may still...

30.05.2025 10

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Market’s red flag

Notice Mr Market’s reaction to the sudden spike in geopolitical risk premium as war clouds gather over Iran once again; especially in traditional...

23.05.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Trump’s biggest surprise yet

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the world braced itself for the customary shockwaves of his presidency. From his notorious...

16.05.2025 40

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Hostage to narrative

It’s interesting and instructive how modern communication technologies – twitter feed, real time video – just fail to cut through the fog that...

09.05.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Temper, tantrums, trust and gold

Gold has been mankind’s ultimate financial refuge since Biblical times. From the treasure vaults of Pharaohs to portfolios of modern ‘masters of...

25.04.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Not your garden-variety FX wobble

King Dollar’s crown has weathered countless storms – but the recent market whirlwind has people asking if this time is different. Over the past...

18.04.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

So much for the ‘Trump put’

Nobody’s surprised anymore that financial markets are throwing such a fit over Donald Trump’s tariffs. If you think about it, this is the most...

11.04.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Smart money runs first

Even by the turbulent standards of emerging markets, the past week was a master class in how quickly capital can vanish in the face of political...

28.03.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Textbook Trump uncertainty

Sounds crazy, but at first markets really thought Trump was bluffing about upending the global trade and tariff structure even as that, and more...

14.03.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Trump Trade in retreat?

It’s still early days, of course, but it seems the so-called Trump Trade is already unraveling, and with it, many of the assumptions that shaped...

07.03.2025 30

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Too late to buy gold?

Gold’s relentless climb toward record highs is no mystery for Mr Market. In a world where financial markets are dictated as much by fear as by...

28.02.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Power abhors vacuum

Everybody expected Trump’s obsession with tariffs to rattle international financial markets, no doubt, yet few figured it would quickly trigger...

14.02.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

‘Whom the gods would destroy…’

So, what’s more ridiculous? A properly senile relic in charge of the sole superpower (read Biden), or a deliberately insane megalomaniac bent upon...

07.02.2025 50

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

China does more with less

The sudden rise of DeepSeek has been fascinating and instructive on so many levels. Just like that, it forced US-China headlines away from Trump’s...

31.01.2025 20

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

What more could Bibi have done?

EDITORIAL: Turns out that Donald Trump’s warning, that “all hell would break out in the Middle East” if a deal wasn’t reached by the time he...

24.01.2025 40

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

New century, new Great Game?

The fact that Pakistan’s intelligence chief went on a rare visit to Tajikistan in the last days of 2024 means rumours that the Pakistani military...

10.01.2025 100

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The complicated web we weave

A former Afghan journalist I once ran into in China – one who gave up a comfortable life in the Gulf to return to Afghanistan when the Taliban were...

03.01.2025 30

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Cui bono?

It didn’t take long for headlines out of Syria to turn, did it? Locals that set fire to Hafez al Assad’s grave and celebrated the “dawn of freedom”...

20.12.2024 4

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Who won, who lost in Syria?

Who cares about learning a lesson when a really big prize is in sight? So, from the point of view of the US whose dollars, arms and intel no doubt...

13.12.2024 7

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

No surprise in the surprise visit

The only surprise in the IMF team’s surprise visit to Pakistan this week was that it took the trouble to jolt the government in person instead of...

14.11.2024 40

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Iran’s daring gambit

Far from making Israel’s northern Galilee region inhabitable again – Netanyahu’s rationale for expanding the war into Lebanon – the...

24.10.2024 6

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The clock ticks to Israel’s reply

The panic attack in the crude oil market must have lit up Sleepy Joe’s phone with frantic calls from the Treasury as well as the Pentagon. The...

10.10.2024 2

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Bibi gets the war he wanted

I said and I said, even sneaked it into editorials where the editor has the last say, that Iran would most definitely retaliate even as experts and...

03.10.2024 1

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

We, ‘those’ people

Now I’m told that this ugly executive-judiciary fight threatens to unravel the sacrosanct “balance between institutions” and even violate my...

26.09.2024 1

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

‘Action is approaching’?

You know you’re following the right journalists, amid all the noise and international media hijack of the Gaza genocide, when their reading of the...

19.09.2024 1

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

The wait-and-wait novelty

So, another week has passed and there’s still no update about the fate of the IMF bailout programme – except that the finance minister has shifted...

05.09.2024 1

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Moody’s says so

If Moody’s says so, then it’s got to be true. Delivering Pakistan a precious feather-in-the-cap upgrade at this fragile time, the ratings agency...

29.08.2024 2

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Poverty trap – ‘terrible thing’ or ...?

You don’t have to be a finance professor at Princeton to understand that Pakistan is indeed “stuck in a poverty trap”. Yet noted economist and lost...

22.08.2024 6

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Middle class is in deep recession

What good is a 3.2 percent GDP growth rate next year and inflation dropping below 10 percent in FY25 to someone who’ll be bankrupted by his...

15.08.2024 3

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry

Gods of finance and the ‘great unwind’

Nobody puts it all together quite like Bloomberg columnist John Authers, who described the recent financial market bloodbath, in the wider...

08.08.2024 3

Business Recorder

Shahab Jafry