Ishaan

| Business | Technology | Energy | Governance |

[Uday Kotak @udaykotak]

Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.
Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.
It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe.
Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

Bond markets are flashing red.

Today, the US 30Y Note Yield officially hit its highest level since July 2007, at 5.19%.

This will soon become Americans’ biggest problem, yet the vast majority do not even know it is happening.

What is happening? Let us explain.

(a thread)

[Suhasini Haidar @suhasinih]

Had India not complied with US sanctions against buying Iranian oil, and against the Chabahar port; built rail and road infrastructure in Iran, and not curtailed its plans for the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) through Iran’s Bandar Abbas, it may have had connectivity in place that would have circumvented the Strait of Hormuz today.

[Engelsberg Ideas @EngelsbergIdeas]

Behind Washington’s failure to predict the Iranian Revolution of 1979 lay a long history of hubris, strategic miscalculations and delusional thinking.

How the United States lost Iran | @DrRadchenko

https://t.co/4RDNmG72hi

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Curzon described a strategic map. But he also revealed a mindset of empire that independent India deliberately walked away from.
The real question for India today is different. Not how to dominate its neighbourhood, but how to anchor stability across a very turbulent arc from the Gulf to the Pacific
Power in the twenty first century is less about commanding buffers and more about shaping systems.
Curzon’s idea never truly belonged to India. It belonged to the British Empire. India was the stage, not the actor.

[Joy Bhattacharjya @joybhattacharj]

The pragmatism of the NZ board is what has really helped them maximize their results on a very small population base.
NZ Cricket are fine with players not signing national contracts and coming in just for big tournaments because these players play in T20 leagues around the world and get top level match exposure and experience in different conditions.
NZ would never be able to offer them the same on just bilateral cricket series. From Boult and Williamson, to Santner and Mitchell and now Lockie, Allen, Siefert and Ravindra, these players are really seasoned by their international league experience.
And then they come back for the big ones like the World Cup and bring all that experience to bear.
It may not make sense for all countries, but it definitely works for NZ!

[Helena Villar @HelenaVillarO]

Education. That’s the Portuguese flag sir.

[NDTV Profit @NDTVProfitIndia]

"Please listen to this carefully…", says HSBC’s Pranjul Bhandari

@pranjulb breaks down the missing link in India’s growth story, why tax cuts, public capex and stimulus didn’t lift private investment, and how to change the cycle. @niraj_shah

[Ira Dugal @dugalira]

India is in talks with linking UPI with Alipay+ , perhaps the most significant cross-border linkage for the instant payment system.

Scoop by Reuters @Nikunj_Ohri https://t.co/u6PUVPl3ZG

[Nirupama Menon Rao 🇮🇳 @NMenonRao]

Midnight is a fiction, yes. But fictions are how humans steady themselves against the void. We don’t mark time because the cosmos cares. We do it because we do. Ritual is our way of choosing hope, again and again. Here’s to the next chapter—fragile, improvised, and worth writing. Happy New Year.

[Ishaan @chronicseye]

RT @GitaGopinath: The exposure of the world to US equities is at record levels. A stock market correction would have more severe and global…

[Dr. Brahma Chellaney @Chellaney]

Trump is turning up the heat on India to ditch Russian oil in favor of American crude. Yet, in a twist of Trumpian logic, his 25% tariff on Indian goods conveniently spares Indian exports of refined fuels like diesel and jet fuel to the U.S. — even though these very fuels are increasingly made from Russian crude. So apparently, Russian oil is toxic — unless it's been run through an Indian refinery and pumped into American planes.

[Ishaan @chronicseye]

@HDFCBank_Cares @HDFC_Bank #SOs Please check your inbox

[Dr. Brahma Chellaney @Chellaney]

My column: By trying to preserve its nuclear monopoly through force, Israel risks fueling the very proliferation spiral it has sought to prevent. Operation Rising Lion could go down as the moment when its preemption policy made an Iranian bomb inevitable. https://t.co/lKjlS7dvMq

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

India and Pakistan both make Russia look like amateurs when it comes to war narrative management. With Russia, every single tank they lost was immediately photographed and ID'd; with Indo-Pak, OSINT people were still wondering whether the war had started by the time it ended.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

An NYU professor AI-proofed his assignments.

The students complained they were too hard and that “he was interfering with their ‘learning styles.’”

[Tanvi Madan @tanvi_madan]

NYT had an interesting graphic about where India and Pakistan get their imported arms from (link to article below).

And there's even more complexity: Pakistan-China JF-17s have Russian engines; India's Tejas has American ones.

[RT @RT_com]

Back in 2007 Putin asked to stop NATO expansion at this very Security Conference in Munich — Jeffrey Sachs recollects how Putin has been right about everything back in the day

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

“geography has made us neighbors. history has made us friends. economics has made us partners. and necessity has made us allies.”

- president john f kennedy, speaking to the canadian parliament

[Fareed Zakaria @FareedZakaria]

Could Trump reverse Biden’s progress on climate change? My conversation w/ outgoing US Energy @SecGranholm: