I always doubted about Asad. Whenever I heard him talking, he was talking in very general terms, which showed he has no preparations and grasp of the topic he was talking. Anyway, forget about the past, it is time to deliver.
I am very disappointed. He should have done two three things on the war footing, to stop the leak of Dollars and decrease the trade deficit.
Stop the outflow of the dollars, which is happening on daily basis, millions are money laundered from Pakistan.
Stop non-essential imports immediately.
Request of remittance is spot on. With imports going down and remittance increasing, the pressure on dollar reserves would have eased and if we were lucky we may have build up some foreign reserves in 6 months time to use for the coming payments of installments. As it is now, we have 3 options for making the loan and interest payments.
1- Saudi Arabia and China boosting our foreign exchange reserves, enabling us to make payments.
2- Going to IMF, which I think PM doesn't want to do.
3- Register defaults, which is not a very good idea.
I am sure, he is working on slapping tariffs on imports to make them more harder. There is an opportunity to bring more people in the tax net. But I was surprised to hear the tax limits and taxes imposed on certain level of annual income. We in the UK don't pay such low level of taxes. Hearing the tax bands and tax imposed, I was wishing I live in Pakistan. This month I have paid over £1800 in tax and NI. Pakistanis are lucky.
