The world is divided into two, according to Shachindra Nath, chief operating officer of Religare Enterprises, an Indian financial firm. On one side of the divide is a world with "cash but no opportunities"; on the other, a world with "no money, just opportunities." In October Religare announced its ambition to shepherd money across this divide, by creating an "emerging-market investment bank". The bank will be run from London by Martin Newson, a former head of global equities at Dresdner Kleinwort.

Religare will start small, attaching itself to growing companies and expanding with them. As India's companies go global, finding customers and buying companies abroad, they will want their banks to be global too, Mr Newson argues. His bank may still lack manpower (it has about 80 bankers) and experience (last year, it completed only two deals in its home market), but Mr Newson applauds India's "get-up-and-go, 'let's attack' attitude".

He would find a quite different mindset at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country's central bank, which polices the flow of money across India's borders and keeps tabs on the foreign adventures of the country's financial firms. The RBI has a defensive approach to financial globalisation. The laws of economic gravity suggest capital should flow from where it is abundant to where it is scarce. But, the RBI fears, that flow can overwhelm an economy.

In 2007, for example, it tried to restrain a vigorous inflow of capital by making it harder for foreigners to play India's booming stockmarket and by tightening limits on corporate borrowing abroad. When capital flows abruptly reversed in 2008, it eased these limits. Now that foreigners are again flocking to India's stockmarket (see chart), capital inflows are once more playing on the RBI's mind. At the IMF's annual meetings in October, the RBI's governor worried that if he had to raise interest rates earlier than other economies, the gap in returns might attract more foreign money. At the RBI's latest meeting on October 27th, he kept rates on hold.

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