India Inc says credit still tight, see more steps

MUMBAI: Companies are still finding liquidity conditions tight despite some aggressive moves by policy makers over the past two months, and more steps might be needed to keep credit flowing, senior executives said on Tuesday. Analysts increasingly expect economic growth could slow to below 7 per cent in the 2008/09 year ending March 2009, with forecasts being downgraded as fears of a global recession grow, from rates of 9 per cent or higher in the past three years. "We have not seen any sharp slowdown in business so far, but there are issues of funding and there are issues of interest rates," K Chandrashekar, senior vice-president of corporate finance at Mahindra and Mahindra, India's top utility vehicle and tractor maker, told reporters at a corporate treasury conference in Mumbai.

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World economies to decline in 2009: IMF

WASHINGTON: Barely 10 days ahead of the Summit of the Group-20 here called by President George Bush, IMF has revised its global economic outlook and forecast that advanced economies would slip into recession
next year, while the growth rate of Asian nations would come down. In its World Outlook Report published today, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that the global growth would slow down by 0.2 per cent in 2008 and 0.9 per cent in 2009, thus leaving the revised growth figures at 3.7 per cent for this year and 2.2 per cent for the next. The outlook is not too different for India as well, since IMF sees the country's economic growth going down to 6.3 per cent, 0.6 per cent less than what it had projected last month, as the financial meltdown envelops the globe.

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