Kopi Time E152: IMF’s Asia head Krishna Srinivasan on tariffs and the region

Dr. Krishna Srinivasan, IMF’s Director of the Asia and Pacific Department, takes us on a journey of Asia, which is facing a major challenge to its export-led growth model. With geoeconomic fragmentation intensifying, how do nations strike a balance between trade promotion and domestic demand suppor…

Kopi Time E151 - Private Equity with Alicia Gregory, Blue Owl

Alicia Gregory, Managing Director at Blue Owl, an alternative asset manager, joins Kopi Time to walk us through private equity, a USD12trln asset class. Drawing on her extensive experience as a PE investor, Alicia begins by going over the genesis of the industry. We then go through a number of topi…

Kopi Time E150 - Piyush Gupta on the Present and Future of Banking

Kopi Time hits 5 years and 150 episodes! We celebrate the milestone with Piyush Gupta, outgoing CEO of DBS Bank Ltd. Piyush brings his remarkable intellectual breadth in this conversation, in which we touch upon various aspects of the present and future of banking. We begin by discussing how banks …

Kopi Time E149 - Longevity with Brian Kennedy

We welcome a foremost expert on the science of aging, lifespan, and healthspan, Professor Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology, National University of Singapore. In this fascinating conversation, we begin by understanding senescence, the process of functional decay …

Kopi Time E148 - Private Credit with Fitch’s Meghan Neenan

We dive into the rapidly growing world of private credit. Meghan Neenan, managing director and the North America head of Non-Bank Financial Institutions at FitchRatings, walks us through the sector’s genesis, scale, depth, structure, participants, transparency of reporting, and regulatory dimension…

Kopi Time E147 - Kishore Mahbubani on a Fragmenting World

We welcome back to Kopi Time Kishore Mahbubani, distinguished diplomat, academic, and writer on geopolitics. Our conversation, recorded in Mumbai, kicks off with India’s promise and challenges vis-à-vis the US and China, with the former turning increasingly protectionist and latter facing a myriad …

Kopi Time E146 - Trade War with Deborah Elms

We welcome back Dr. Deborah Elms, Head of Trade Policy at Heinrich Foundation, Singapore, for a timely discussion on intensifying trade wars. We set the context by looking at the past decade of rising protectionism and the impact on the global economy. Deborah points out that despite all the fricti…

Kopi Time E145 - Markets and Trump 2.0

Happy new year! We kick off the year with a discussion on the likely impact of Trump policies on US markets, starting with the 1890s McKinley tariff narrative. There are major lessons for the market outlook from that episode, in our view. Returning to the present, we think through the ways tariffs …

Kopi Time E144 - 2025 outlook with Dr. Komal Sri-Kumar

We bring the year to an end with astute market strategist and Fed watcher Dr. Komal Sri-Kumar. Sri begins by taking stock of the US economy and markets, how they have been fuelled by fiscal stimulus and the Fed put. Sri is a strong critic of the Fed’s track record on price and financial stability, …

Kopi Time E143 - Markets and Policy Path Dependence with Mustafa Chowdhury

Are today’s policy challenges and market behaviour largely about post pandemic macro, or are they reflecting fiscal, monetary, and financial “dominance” that stem from two decades of interventions? Mustafa Chowdhury, a veteran of bond and credit market analysis, returns to Kopi Time to offer a nuan…