As Pakistani cricket fans, many of us are used to seeing calamity in slow motion. It’s usually when batters aren’t able to find gaps and the required run rate edges up, triggering a collapse of the batting order and the dream of winning fades as you helplessly stare into despair. This is what our economy also currently feels like: the disaster is right in front of us and it’s not possible to look away.
Like always, this crisis is also manifesting in the form of an extremely unstable external account, where the existing forex reserves aren’t sufficient to cover even a month of imports.
Meanwhile, exports and remittances have declined year-on-year for two months, and there is virtually no meaningful foreign direct investment in the near future, even if the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thinks otherwise.
Unsurprisingly, that has created panic everywhere, from average folks like you and me to those overlords idly sitting in government offices. Except apparently, Ishaq Dar, who finds it wise to jeopardise the IMF programme.
It’s like Rahat Ali sledged Shane Watson after dropping him, and with that, Pakistan’s possible ticket to the semifinal in the 2015 cricket world cup. Fortunately, the former left-arm medium pacer had more sense than the honourable finance minister on how to conduct himself, even if both were (are) fairly sloppy at their actual job.
Anyway, let’s not digress and turn back to the topic. In the past, whenever we had similar episodes, the blueprint was...
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