What will 2025 bring?

IT has been a heady year that we are saying farewell to. A hard-fought stability was brought to the economy in 2024, but at a steep cost. Politics had to be ended, rights rolled back, and decision-making centralised in the hands of the establishment before any of the stability could be procured. It was done, and here we are. The most ferocious inflationary fire we have ever seen in our history has finally been extinguished, even if it took record-high interest for a prolonged period of time to bring this about. Foreign exchange reserves have begun to accumulate once again and the spectre of default has retreated, for now. An IMF programme is in place and Pakistan’s economy is backstopped by the Fund, for now. But now comes the hard part. 2025 will see how far the state can go in holding on to its stability, or being able to build upon it. Hopefully by then, it will be abundantly clear to our rulers that the age of friendly bailouts has ended. It was almost exactly a decade ago, in 2014, that Pakistan received its first bailout ‘from a friendly country’.