India hails...

After their summit at the Capella Singapore hotel on Sentosa Island,trump and Kim signed a comprehensive document, with the US president saying the process of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula will begin “very soon.” Kim promised to leave behind an often bitter past.

India, like Singapore, the venue of the historic meeting, enjoys good ties with both the US and North Korea. New Delhi has held that it wouldn’t either prune or close its mission in North Korea, resisting US pressure to slash its diplomatic presence in Pyongyang.

“The Trump-kim summit was no doubt an epochal event. The joint statement implicitly links denuclearisation to ‘new US-DPRK relations’ and to mutual confidence building (that) can promote the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. So the summit begins a long process of bargaining,” said strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellany.

Bharat Karnad, a national security expert and a member of the first National Security Advisory Board of India’s National Security Council, where he participated in the Nuclear Doctrine Drafting Group, doesn’t agree. “The summit showed Kim as a shrewd negotiator on the world stage. It wouldn’t be easy to expect that North Korea would give up its nuclear programme and stockpiles. They will string the US along till the year-end,” he said.

Trump’s declaration that the US would stop war games with South Korea is the first step in the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, said Chellaney. “Trump and Kim have committed to denuclearisation of the entire Korean Peninsula. Such a nuclear-weapons-free zone will demand concessions by the US, Seoul, Beijing and Moscow. Trump’s suspension of war games is a first step,” said Chellany.

After the summit, Trump announced that he was putting an end to the annual Us-south Korean military drills and that he wants to remove the 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea as a deterrent against a potential North Korean attack.

“Trump has pulled off something that could make him a man of history and strengthen his America First project -- howsoever unpalatable the thought is that Trump might become a winner in the overall bargain,” said MK Bhadrakumar, a former diplomat and commentator. week, and we think that the rise in inflation last month as well as the outlook for underlying price pressures will pave the way for further modest policy tightening over the next six months or so.”

One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.

May was the seventh straight month in which inflation was higher than the RBI’S mediumterm target. The RBI has revised up its inflation forecast to 4.7% for the second half of the current fiscal year ending in March 2019, from 4.4% seen earlier.

It is crucial for the government that inflation remains benign ahead of a string of state elections leading up to general elections in 2019. Opposition parties have flagged concerns about rising fuel prices, which tend to have a cascading effect on the entire economy because of their impact on the cost of transport of goods.

“Inflationary pressures are building up in the economy,” said Tushar Arora, senior economist at HDFC Bank. “The possibility of one more rate hike cannot be ruled out this year.”

Oil is India’s biggest import and an increase in oil prices pushes up inflation up and widens the trade deficit, putting pressure on the rupee.

Annual retail food inflation, which contributes about half of the weight in the CPI, remained muted, helped by forecast of normal monsoon rains this year. It increased 3.1% in May compared with a 2.8% rise in the previous month.

“The uptick in the headline and core CPI inflation is in line with our forecast, reflecting an unfavourable base effect for food prices and higher inflation for fuel and light as well as transport and communication, mirroring the hardening of crude oil prices. Headline inflation remains on track to cross 5% in June 2018,” said Aditi Nayar, principal economist at Icra Ltd, a credit rating agency.

At the stock markets, the euphoria of the Singapore summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who pledged to work for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, overshadowed local concerns .

The BSE Sensex rose 209 points to close at 35,692.524 and the broader National Stock Exchange Nifty gained 55.90 points, or 0.52%,to end at 10,842.85. The are the highest closes for the two indices since February.