Govindraj Ethiraj: Why Price Controls Are Bad
Govindraj Ethiraj / Mumbai July 22, 2008, 0:34 IST Last week, I caught up with the head of a large steel company. "We are losing a few hundred crores every month because of the government's anti-inflationary move to hold steel prices," he told me. I asked him how demand was doing, particularly from sectors like auto. "We've cut our production of cold rolled steel by almost half," he said, adding that global steel prices were ruling at a premium of roughly 30 per cent to domestic. And there was no way to pass on their own input price increases.