e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.July 25, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:history, politics, sri-lanka

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 19-25 July 2026

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‘Why did no one see it coming?’

– England’s Queen Elizabeth asked

the London School of Economics (LSE)

about the 2008 capitalist meltdown

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‘The Government is preparing to restore criminal sanctions

for serious foreign exchange offences after investigations

into approximately $715mn remitted overseas through

fraudulent import transactions exposed a gap

in Sri Lanka’s legal framework.’ – ee Finance,

Govt to Bring Back Criminal Sanctions for FX Violations

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Headline news this week about an apparent ‘leakage’ or legal ‘gap’, which actually amounts to far more than admitted, was written to read like a detective novel, with the CID hounds sniffing at the Colombo Fort’s always fishy seaside airs more deeply:

     The Criminal Investigation Department’s (CID) is said to be investigating ‘approximately $715million transferred overseas between January 2023 & March 2026 [a curious timeframe] through 105 shell companies using import documentation that did not result in actual goods brought into Sri Lanka. The CID has identified 55 individuals, 227 bank accounts, & approximately 24,300 telegraphic transfers (TTs) processed through 13 State & private banks as part of the alleged scheme.’ The blame is also placed on the proverbial Dubai drug traffickers…

     Meanwhile Central Bank scammer, footnote fetishist & favorite media go-to, the Ceylon Tobacco Co’s main parliamentary lobbyist & SJB MP, Harsha de Silva is desperately trying to divert blame on to ‘failing to enforce existing laws & poor technical coordination, rather than a lack of legislation’. And CBSL officials rushed to assure financial finaglers & ‘laundry’ owners that any legislative ‘changes would not reverse the liberalization of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange regime’.

     The Asian Development Bank (ADB) was also thanked for, albeit belatedly, alerting the government to such criminality even as ‘the abuse of advance import payments may have begun much earlier. The ‘leakage’, which feels like a flood, followed the enactment of the Foreign Exchange Act of 2017, which decriminalised foreign exchange offences & replaced the previous enforcement regime with a predominantly civil framework; that is: allowed criminals accused of such frauds to escape jail. Moral hazard, anyone? So, what’s going on? 2017 suggests the presently ruling JVP was also part of the then ruling coalition that passed this leaky Foreign Exchange Act.

     Serendipitously, we came across ee September 2023 Part 3, which offers a treasure trove of information that makes clear that such legislative changes to capital controls, ie, permitted leakages, were demanded from ‘up high’, possibly reaching beyond, to the gods themselves but more related to the everyday accounting practices of multinational corporations (MNCs):

     ‘Unnamed ‘senior officials of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG)‘ were in Colombo [in September 2023], just before the IMF arrived. The APG is permanently located in Australia. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka was a rotating APG co-chairperson, 2016-18, when Indrajit Coomaraswamy was CB Governor. It was during his charge in July-Aug 2017 that the Exchange Control Act of 1953 was scrapped, leading to the haemorrhage of billions of dollars out of the country, & bankruptcy in 2022’:

Coomaraswamy says he did not draft the bill,

it was done by ‘outside’ forces:

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 ‘The Parliamentary Select Committee, assigned to investigate the 2019 Easter Sunday carnage, raised the Foreign Exchange Control Act of 2017, with the Central Bank, on 26 July 2019.’ Then Power, Energy & Business Development Minister Ravi Karunanayake (later implicated in the 2015 bondscam) strongly countered CBSL condemnation of the new Foreign Exchange Act. Commenting on funds received from Saudi Arabia on 21 occasions, the CBSL stressed that the new Act weakened the CBSL regulatory role, vis-a-vis illegal transactions by institutions linked with those blamed for the attacks. The CBSL took an unwavering stand that the new law impeded its regulatory powers, thereby facilitating illegal transactions.

Ravi Karunanayake (RK): Where does it say such transactions cannot be inquired into in terms of the new Act?

     CBSL: In accordance with 2017 Exchange Control Act, Section 30, action cannot be taken.

RK: You prepared that Act. Why are you pretending as if you don’t know anything about it? CBSL amended it several times & sent it back.

     Coomaraswamy: No Sir. The Act actually was not drafted by us.

     RK: Why not?

Coomaraswamy: No Sir. It was done outside. We were actually very upset about it. We were not included. That was drafted without the CBSL being involved.’  (see ee September 2023, Part 2)

So, who drafted the new Act? The Island report does not say. Let us recall that Suresh Kumar Shah, chair of British American Tobacco’s Ceylon Tobacco Co (BAT-CTC) was appointed chair of the SoE Restructuring Agency in September 2022. ‘A separate agency to restructure state enterprises’ had been announced rather quietly by President Ranil Wickremesinghe in US media outlet EconomyNext. These SoEs are ‘eating up people’s taxes’, Ranil wailed.

      Shah was Chair of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC, 2013-15) and was replaced by Rajendra Theagarajah, who backed by ‘independent economists’, pushed the infamous Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), which removed capital controls:

     ‘Foreign investors wooed to invest in Sri Lanka, gain & take profits away at whim‘ – an excited CCC headline announced after the new Foreign Exchange Act No12 was imposed in July 2017, during the US-funded Yahapalana regimen: 

     ‘The concept of foreign-exchange control has now disappeared from our dialogue’, Rajendra Theagarajah, Ceylon Chamber chair told a visiting New Zealand business delegation in Colombo. ‘That 5-decades-old Act has been repealed & replaced by a much more investor-friendly FEMA’, announced the ‘Veteran Banker’. ‘FEMA allows you to invest your money in your chosen ventures, make gains & take your profit away as & when you wish, without having to obtain any formal, regulatory approval from the authorities.’ Theagarajah, once CEO of 3 private commercial banks, is also a ‘Senior Visiting Fellow’ of Milinda Moragoda’s Rockefeller-funded Pathfinder Foundation. 

‘Rajendra Theagarajah has chaired the Sri Lanka Banks Association, the Asian Banks Association and Lanka Financial Services Bureau, and served on the boards of Lanka Clear and Colombo Stock Exchange, USA Chamber of Commerce (Ancham), Sri Lanka Institute of Directors and Chairman of Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (2017-19). He is now also on the Boards of Siam City, Sri Lanka, Professional Insurance Corporation of Zambia, Chairman of First Capital Holdings, Janashakti Finance, Payable, and the Board of Trustees of Colours of Courage. In 2022, he was titled Chairman Emeritus” of The Asian Banks Association…and has ‘made significant contributions towards policy advocacy issues such as the Corporate Governance Framework for Banks, Basel III adoption and Fair Value Accounting by Banks, Financial Inclusion and more recently development of Fintec Sand Box-framework for Banks.’

     By January 2022, Theagarajah’s pal Shah was complaining about a ‘foreign currency crisis’ making it difficult for corporates to open Letters of Credit (LCs): ‘The path ahead of us is to restructure debt, set out a credible plan to improve our financial position, use this plan for an IMF program, get affordable bridging finance from multilaterals & implement the plan vigorously.’

     So, will the APF investigated the Theagarajahs & Shahs? No way. They are faithful servants of empire: The APG Secretariat is permanently located in Sydney, Australia. The permanent Co-Chair is Australia, now represented by Australian Federal Police’s Ian McCartney, and the current rotating Co-Chair is Julien Brazeau, Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance in Department of Finance Canada.

     The APG’s visit came a month after the SL Cabinet of Ministers approved the Anti-MoneyLaundering & Countering the Financing of Terrorism National Policy for 2023-28. 

     11 APG members are also members of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF): Australia, Canada, India, China, Hong Kong. APG observers include: Asian Development Bank, European Commission, FATF, IMF, UN Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC), & World Bank.’

     So, there it is! We have the word of that Royalist rugby player, former CBSL governor & present Japan Cement director, Indrajit Coomaraswamy, that it was ‘outside forces’, ‘up high’ who punctured the leak in the ship of state. Will the CID oblige and sniff them down? We won’t hold our breath, cos that may mean another fact-finding mission to London or New York, or…

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The government in Sri Lanka is sending troops to Haiti to join the UN’s ‘Gang Suppression Force’. This ‘force’ is commanded by the USA & Canada, etc. But… but, who are the real gangsters in Haiti? The USA, Canada, along with France, organized the kidnapping of Haiti’s sitting President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. They have continued to assassinate leaders who do not conform to their commands. Haiti President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, when Julie Chung was Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Chung was removed a few weeks after, perhaps due to the bloody messiness of the hit, and the dismal optics, and therefore posted to Sri Lanka, an ocean away, as envoy, in February 2022, to accelerate an almost bloodless coup against then-President Gotabaya Rajapakse.

Just over 200 years before the kidnapping of Aristide, in 1802 (just as England was unsuccessfully attacking the highland kingdom of Sinhalé) France kidnapped Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader who had expelled 3 European Armies, French, Spanish & English, from Haiti. France had invited L’Ouverture to talk ‘peace’ on a ship, then whisked him away. He was killed in a French prison. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was prompted to even pen a poem about L’Ouverture.

     The Europeans were befuddled by the ability of supposedly illiterate African ‘slaves’ to defeat the 3 armies. They blamed the Haitian victories on ‘Black Magic’, on the occult powers of superstitious savages – they called it ‘Voodoo’.

     The English expelled from Haiti then resorted to its own ‘voodoo’ in Sri Lanka by enacting a coup d’etat in 1815, opening the highlands, after murdering & expelling the Sinhala, to the ravages of coffee (& later, tea) plantations. The handbook, which was used to teach planters in Ceylon, and advocated torture & murder, was a text authored by a French coffee planter in Haiti, and republished in Colombo in 1842.

     ‘Voodoo Economics’ was the term used by the corporate media in Sri Lanka to describe the Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) administration’s massive tax cuts imposed in late 2019, to appease so-called entrepreneurs, which led to a drop in government revenue, that was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic (not to mention the legal ‘drain’ of dollars from the country that occured after 2017). The term was then extended to covering ‘money printing’ to discourage the government from directing Central Bank funds to invest in the country’s modern industrially productive energies.

     ‘Voodoo Economics’ is a term imported from the USA. Former CIA leader George Bush, when he ran in the 1980 US presidential primaries, taged his opponent Ronald Reagan’s proposed policies as ‘voodoo economics’ (aka Reaganomics based on supply-side economics or ‘trickle-down economics’). Reagan claimed a cut in tax rates would result in an increase in tax revenue, and thus not increase the government deficit. Regan called it ‘free-market economics’.

     Shiran Illanperuma feels the use of the term ‘voodoo economics’ by the ‘economic establishment’ in Sri Lanka to describe GR policies links more to its white supremacist origins, to add to the English Colombo’s denigration of (meaning to treat as a ‘Negro, to blacken’) the Rajapakse family as rustic rural rubes. He recalls that ‘plantations came to Sri Lanka after slavery was outlawed in the Caribbean’ and ‘labour practices in Sri Lankan & Caribbean plantations were not that different’ (see ee Focus).

     However, Illanperuma’s interest in his latest essay (‘Can Sri Lankans Do Economics’) is the miseducation promoted by ‘mainstream economics’ in Sri Lanka, which steadfastly ignores the ‘longer-term structural crisis’ of Sri Lanka’s colonial import-export plantation economy:

The spectre of ‘voodoo economics’ became a convenient way

to discredit anything that challenged the cookie-cutter prescriptions

of neoclassical economics. In a sense, it was the economics

establishment’s way of absolving itself from blame.

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Illanperuma also takes aim at the Ministry of Education & the Central Bank, which claim to be promoting ‘financial literacy’ blaming the state of the economy on people’s idiocy. Yet he points to United Nations Conference of Trade & Development (UNCTAD) reports where Sri Lanka’s situation is not at all different from most of the world – trapped in debt bondage. Yet, we are lectured:

You are in debt because you have misbehaved,

taxed too little, & printed too much money.

You have been corrupt – as if there is no corruption

in the USA, the European Union, & Japan.

It’s a strange assertion.

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He then traces the ‘75 years since the birth of modern Sri Lankan economics’. Most interesting is the recall that the Central Bank, at the moment of its birth in 1950 under the US economist John Exter, devalued the Sri Lankan rupee by 30% against the US Dollar. However, Illanperuma does not mention the devaluation helped the USA buy rubber inexpensively, for its war waged to divide Korea… nor that Exter promoted (not modern industrial production), but widespread conspicuous consumption in order to bribe the so-called middle class to remain tied to colonialism.

     Illanperuma suggests ‘voodoo economics’ could well translate as ‘Yaka Economics’ in Sri Lanka. Yaka, translated by the English as ‘devil’, actually relates to ancestral worship. We need a true Yaka Economics, that will not only finally expel the English (& their US & EU avatara) but also free us from the deadly embrace of their slave plantation & incessant ‘export’ prognoses.

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This week saw ‘tea smallholders’ accuse traders of stealing their foreign-exchanged dollars. Meanwhile, the Planters’ Association accused gangs of stealing crops (see ee Agriculture). They seek to divert from the backwardness of the plantation economy, and its need to rip off unfree workers, which immiserates the economy and all workers as a whole, in Sri Lanka.

     This low-wage economy remains the main focus of SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, as ee Focus continues his Chapter 12 on ‘Labour Relations in Plantations’. In this brilliant excerpt, SBD examines the ‘extra-market forces’ that conditioned the ‘wage levels and working conditions’ of Indian labour in plantations. And just as interestingly, he compares the relatively ‘better’ treatment of Chinese workers, due to the different ways in which workers were ‘recruited, organized & controlled.’ He provides a fascinating glimpse into the Chinese in Malaysia, who were much better organized, demanding, and receiving better wages & conditions.

     This week saw the merchant media in Sri Lanka excavate old colonial English tropes such as ‘triads’ to explain a dispute between 2 groups of Chinese people in Colombo. SBD traces the origins of such dubious terms, in the role played by ‘mutual aid societies’ in protecting workers, as well as the policies pursued by the English authorities to divide Malay, Chinese & Indian workers. He also describes the structured impediments to solidarity among Indian workers, sabotaging their ability to bargain with employers. He examines the curious role Christianity played among enslaved Africans, which made them assume an equality with the planters, whereas the retention of Hindu practices enabled the planter to promote deep divisions among workers.

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‘On 20 Jan 2025, a small Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek sent shockwaves

through Silicon Valley by releasing an AI model that matched the most advanced

US models built by Google, OpenAI, & Anthropic – systems that had required

$10billions & the most advanced chips… Within days, Nvidia’s stock began cratering,

wiping out $600bn in market capitalisation on 27 Jan,

the largest single-day loss in stock market history.’

This ee Focus also continues Bappa Sinha’s intriguing deep dive into ‘China’s rapid technological advances’, which he says offers ‘hope for the Global South to break the dominance & dependence imposed by the West’. Sinha’s ‘Breaking the Stranglehold: How China is Shattering US Technological Hegemony’ examines the sharp difference between the differing national approaches, between ‘Embodied Intelligence’ and ‘Algorithmic Rent-Seeking.’ He also outlines ‘competing AI visions’ midst the desperate efforts by the US & EU’s ruling classes to sabotage China’s & the rest of the world’s paths to economic advance.

‘China’s socialist planning system identified renewables

as strategic industries, directed massive subsidies &

cheap finance, absorbed early failures, & scaled up

successes. State enterprises, public banks, grid overhauls

& industrial policy allowed coordination on a national scale’

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Sinha provides a snapshot of the latest nodes in the tech wars, involving AI & data centers, robotics, renewables, nuclear reactors, & rare earths. He points out that the issue about rare earths is not its actual sparseness & extraction – it is available across the earth’s crust – but in its intricate processes of ‘separation & refinement’. The USA, sitting on its past laurels, closed its rare earth processing sites and instead, has chosen to make money from money, rather than invest in modern production. With an ageing infrastructure & outdated technologies, their main aim right now is to prevent China’s (& Cuba’s, etc.) threat of a good example.

Imperial control has historically operated

through energy scarcity – restricting

hydrocarbon access, controlling

shipping routes, & manipulating prices.

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The USA’s biggest fear is that other countries will adopt China’s model of growth, hence the resort to tariffs and export & import controls, while promoting ‘free trade’ for over a century! As numerous analysts point out, China’s economy & AI is rooted in ‘the material base’ of industrial production & application, using automation to lower costs, improve quality & increase capacity, while lifting their people’s quality of life.

     Many observers, however, see the USA’s massive investments in AI as suckering investors to create a bubble & burst it, so as to further monopolize the latest technologies, which it hopes, by hook or by crook, to take full control.

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Imperialism (or hyper-imperialism) has adopted a variety of strategies and tactics to prevent the coming together of the world majority to confront and overcome their repressive. ee Focus’s latest excerpt of ‘Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage’, looks at those countries (excluding Sri Lanka) that have played a current or historically progressive role in the world – ‘The relative degree to which they are targets of regime change and their role in publicly advancing international anti-imperialist stances.’ From Brazil to South Africa, Algeria to Nepal & Zimbabwe & Namibia, as well as many others, the Tricontinental Institute tabulates their role in independence struggles, and the countries that still seek to control them, via sanctions & military interventions (demanding bases, etc.), as well as their striving to form wider alliances to overcome subjugation.  

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• The media coverage of the killing of 5 workers by fire, in a safety helmet factory that apparently flouted environmental rules, lasted 2 days at most. It’s hard to avoid the exaggerated claims about environmental concerns (amid incessant conferences in air-conditioned rooms, wearing woolen suits & asphyxiating ties – who pays for them?) by the USA’s & EU’s lip services in Sri Lanka, like their Chambers of Commerce, their thinktanks & economists. They claim to be promoting ‘green’ & ‘sustainable alternatives’, but in truth they are efforts to prevent us from adopting the latest & more inexpensive techniques from China. The same goes for the promises to harness Sri Lanka’s mineral & energy resources. Companies are buying up access not to develop these resources like graphene, according to an industrial plan, but to hoard & prevent competitors from gaining control. The fire at the factory in the Katuwana Industrial Zone, ‘manufacturing’ safety helmets, reminds that the white man, and their honorary white allies, have only permitted labor-intensive & toxic-material-related production in our countries.

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• The resort to lawfare, constantly crying about corruption without naming the real thieves ‘up high’, arresting or threatening arrest of political opponents to keep them and the country off-balance, buzz like flies swarming around an open wound that is kept suppurating. While promoting the rule of rent-seeking merchants who are fronts for MNCs, this constant stream of accusations appears to be more about appeasing the white man’s hallucinatory demons, and a narrow minority’s thirst for revenge, than removing the merchant & moneylender mafia that block our road to industrialization.

     Meanwhile, the English media in Sri Lanka, seemingly written largely for white diplomats, who can order the removal of an editor or journalist, at the flick of a keyboard, is clogged with the telegraphed largesse about all the wonderful aid & goodies they keep promising. No media dares deconstruct this ‘aid’ – with no mention that it involves paying for services & parts to be obtained from the donor forever…

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• The imperial beast is holding (stalling) our development under its clawed paw. They know well about our abundant resources, diverting from our needed destiny by blabbering about our being a ‘small island’ etc.  It is unclear what the government’s actual plan is for industrialization, with no mention of supply chains, etc. Then again, consider the accomplishments of a TB Illangaratne, Philip Gunawardena, William Silva, G Ponnambalam, etc, in setting up industries with the USSR’s help. The present ‘rulers’ seem almost incompetent & incoherent, but perhaps we live in another more straitened time…yet…

     A recent Daily News story about China helping to build agricultural machinery, reminds that much of the media is written, especially headlines, in the future tense, using infinitives, i.e., the timeline for implementation, usually extending to infinity, like an Alabama jail sentence for African Americans, over several lifetimes, never to be served or seen to served within our own brief sojourn in samsara. The story does not elaborate on what if they do proceed, and what would the small private armies of finance companies, sales agents for Kubota & Massey Ferguson & Mahindra, do to sabotage its progress?

     The internet must be overflowing with the multitude of promises to ‘manufacture’ machines in Sri Lanka? Though of course, they mean assembly right? Handicraft & manufacture are not modern production. Our idiot media and related politicians can’t or won’t say exactly when such dreams will materialize? Which reminds, RW, who promised to manufacture Volkswagens, with the German envoy in tow, should be renamed VW?

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• Knock off Starlink – There are calls for Russia to ‘take out’, ie, blow the white supremacist Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites out of the sky, because they are being used to wage wars & guide missiles to bomb civilians & infrastructure from Palestine to Iran and from East & West Africa to Russia. The ‘celebrity’ Musk, playing the role of hyper individualist & uber man, is just a front man for the white supremacist military & media industrial complex. He qualifies as a terrorist. It is also becoming clearer that fascism & Nazism is not just restricted to Eastern & Western Europe – ‘capitalism puking out undigested barbarism’ – but is rooted in the history & practices of the settler colonial states beginning with the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, north & South Africa, and now most evident in the genocidal occupation of Palestine. The old dichotomy of Germans vs Jews can be laid to rest. There were Germans who fought Nazis, and Jews who promoted Nazis. Zionism has proved to be another version of Nazism. With the USA & EU goading Russia & China into open warfare, there are constant predictions the USA will use, or get their satrapies to use, nuclear weapons, spark a bigger fire to douse the growing small & big fires of resistance & revolution. Meanwhile, diplomats from the EU, Germany, Holland & France – all countries from a continent still afraid to offer reparations through industrial reconstruction, for horrors lasting over 500 years of forever colonial warfare, producing new bones every day – are traveling to Chemmani in the Jaffna peninsula, to rustle through even more new bones…

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• The sabotage of underwater cables, many of which surreptitiously slither data in & out of Sri Lanka, may soon also become permissible & admissible targets. With the USA, and its killer pitbulls & poodles, escalating their wars on Eastern Europe & West Asia, slouching towards possible nuclear war, making no distinction between military & civilian, all bets are off. Having sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline to block Europe’s access to Russian oil, the USA has proceeded to hijack Venezuela’s oil, block Cuba’s access to oil, get Panama to seize China’s legal assets there, demand Canada & Greenland prevent access to their seas by other countries – proclaiming the Western Hemisphere as their own, even as they demand a ‘free & open’ Indian Ocean, while blocking the Persian Gulf, stepping up attacks in the Black Sea, fighting open & covert wars in Africa, east & west, and Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia), pushing Japan & the Philippines, and the renegade province of Taiwan, to goad China… yes, all bets are off…

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• Memory Matter – When Memory Dies is the title of a novel about 20^th century Sri Lanka by London-based A Sivanandan, a novel which credits Kumari Jayawardena’s classic The Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon. But did memory ‘die’ or was it ‘killed’? England’s ‘Operation Legacy’ demanded that all files, held abroad, & related to England’s colonial depredations, be burned (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Legacy). Someone should write about how the English High Commission carried out ‘Operation Legacy’ in Sri Lanka, exactly how & where the files were burned, and the ensuing amnesia that made the past melt away…

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• Keeping the World Off-Balance – Meanwhile, oligarchies across the world whose moneys and assets are invested in the USA & Europe, keep blaming a single US President, whose flatulent tweets shift from day-to-day, not realizing that such vacillating reflects the strategies of a ruling class that is uncertain about which way or method to wield to maintain their hegemony. These same vested-interest oligarchies, particularly in Asia, like to blame Israel, for what are long-standing European & Anglo-American policies. Israel is an expendable white settler colonial satellite that would not last a day without US and EU funds and weapons. The USA’s so-called ‘Democratic Party’ would be just as bad as the Republicans for the rest of the world, if not worse, in the long run. Trump has stolen his cadences from earlier dictators like Mussolini, & comedians past. Just as Obama stole Malcolm X’s postures & spacing. Hollywood has an army of such coaches for the expensive theatre of fake electoral freedom & democracy. Democrat or Republican matters little, they are all wings of the US Capitalist Party (UCP). ‘If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress,’ quipped Malcolm X, when asked about any differences.

     Sri Lanka’s ruling merchants & related wannabes, and their media, also wallow in a dream world, decorated with imported fantasies & hallucinations. The rumours & threats and actual horrors seem not to deter their prognoses of progress or ‘growth’.

Sri Lanka foreign reserves fall to $6.4bn

amid higher imports, CB expects recovery

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‘Responding to questions on the decline in official reserves

during June, [CBSL governor] Weerasinghe rejected

suggestions that vehicle imports alone were responsible.

‘It was not only vehicle imports. Overall import demand

has been elevated across a broad range of categories’

(see ee Economists, CBSL sees demand cooling after

rate hike, expects inflation to return to 5% target)

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The USA’s IMF and related ‘capital market’ & economists, keep making predictions of ‘growth’, demanding Sri Lanka adhere to their prescriptions, even as the IMF’s paymasters, the USA, are desperately trying to prevent the rise of Asia, constantly threatening & waging wars, declared & undeclared, hot & cold. Their unswerving optimism in the face of their negative actions, undeterred by reality, suggests that they could easily be replaced by robots, which can conjure optimism as prompted.

     While foreigners are buying up properties in Sri Lanka, which for them are bought at fire-sale prices, our citizens are being forced to leave the country, with the ruling party even gaily announcing they have arranged for 100s if not 1,000s to go work in war-torn Israel, etc. Meanwhile Europe & Anglo-North America, are building more jails, detention centres and internment camps, to prepare for more war, signalling they will soon make military recruitment mandatory, and bring back the draft as the USA had during their war against Vietnam. So good luck with the reliance on remittances then… Corpses don’t tell tales or make money transfers, using undiyal, hawala, Western Express, or Unilever’s transfer-pricing mechanisms…

‘Outside Forces’ & ‘Up High’: Voodoo Economics, Yaka Economics & the Charade of Economists in Sri Lanka