U.S. govt whimsical; not difficult for India to handle tariff crisis: Ashish Chauhan

Calling the U.S. government “whimsical”, National Stock Exchange (NSE) MD and CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan said on Saturday that the current tariff situation is “not that difficult” for India, which has come out exceedingly well from the crisis of the century—the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid-19 was the worst period that humankind witnessed in the last one hundred years. But still, India did exceedingly well. For me, the current situation is not that difficult to pass by. Naturally, everyone in the game will realise their weakness and will come back to the table,” Chauhan said during a fireside chat at the Fortune India 40under40 awards in Mumbai on Saturday.

“When Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, India had around 1.67 crore unique investors. And the market capitalisation was around 67 lakh crore. Today, there are 11.8 crore unique investors, and the market capitalisation has gone up to almost ₹450 lakh crore,” Chauhan added.  

“So, you have seen a tremendous amount of jump in the last eleven years due to rapid growth. The middle class—almost 20% of the Indian households—are now investing through NSE. Many have seen very tough times of Covid, when the market went down by 40% suddenly. When Covid progressed, we realised that it was not going to be as bad as it was being made out to be,” Chauhan added.

Chauhan pointed out that the U.S. is facing a combination of challenges simultaneously. While the U.S. society is getting older and poorer, the U.S. government is increasingly getting uncomfortable with a multi-polar world.

“Currency (dollar), defence and IP have been the only focus of the US. They tried to remove manufacturing, which was polluting. China took it up. The same happened in Europe, too. Now, the middle America, the one which is not on the east coast, or the west coast, has no job and has been living on the government dole for the last thirty to forty years. All those jobs have gone, and now those guys are frustrated because there is no more social security money coming in,” Chauhan added.

Chauhan said America’s journey upwards started post-World War II, and institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN were created and run on the U.S. largesse. “The U.S. always had a veto. They were fighting other people’s wars. They were also fighting their whimsical wars. The U.S. has a tendency to be whimsical. They have removed many governments in Panama, Brazil and Argentina on a whim,” Chauhan said, adding that now the hegemony is slowly going to go down. “The upsurge is broadly done, and other countries are going to come up. The U.S. was the only unipolar power in the world; now there are four different groups—the U.S., the EU, China and India,” Chauhan added.