Accelerate or Die
growth or death?
The Indian story begins and ends with growth. A combination of inflation and aspiration drives us forward. Even our “value” investors are GARPies under the sheets. So why not directly invest in the fastest growers? Some thoughts: Accelerate or Die.
Markets this Week
The South Korean stock market is absolutely bonkers.
It was one of the best performing stock markets last year and this year started the same. Locals got ultra-levered giga-long. And then, as if on cue…
… the market got cut in half.
How it started: 'Fear of missing out' pushes more people into stocks as markets break record highs (koreatimes).
How it ended: Margin Calls Surge as Korea Stocks Plunge, Forced Sales Hit 61 Billion Won in a Day (sedaily). Citi Estimates Korean Retail Investors' Leveraged ETF Losses at $38.81 billion (sedaily).
More here: country ETFs, fixed income, currencies and commodities.
Links
India
NRIs have poured $36.7 billion into Indian banks through FCNR deposits (livemint).
Swiss watch imports crossed ₹3,500 crore for the first time in 2025, up from nearly ₹2,600 crore in 2024, and industry executives expect that figure to be surpassed this year (livemint).
As AI grows more sophisticated, as the supply chains that power it become more contested, and as access to frontier models becomes geopolitically charged, India must begin to ask a different set of questions. Not what applications it can build on someone else’s infrastructure but what the world needs (carnegieindia).
Making Artificial Intelligence affordable and ubiquitous should become India’s next transformative public infrastructure revolution (thehindu).
AI data centre rush fuels India's next growth wave with infrastructure push (business-standard).
Over the past two decades, India’s industrial policy has focused overwhelmingly on frontier industries. Yet much of this manufacturing remains assembly-based because the domestic supplier ecosystem remains weak (business-standard).
Labour shortages are quietly crippling factory floors across India. “I told them to pay me more, but they didn’t agree, so I left the factory.” (livemint)
On Probation: Why Modi 3.0 Should Prepare For A Million Mutinies Now (swarajyamag).
The failing promise of higher education has left young Indians in a foreseeable state of disaffection (livemint).
row
South Korea’s ‘bipolar’ stock market (cnbc). Analysts react (reuters).
How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days (cnbc).
A mini-crisis in Spain. But first, a map:
60,000 migrants reach Ceuta from Morocco (bbc). Spain deploys military (cnn). Spain says it had largely reversed the surge (france24).
China is backing strategic businesses, like green tech, while the west props up old sectors with political clout, like agriculture (ft).
China has begun manufacturing domestically developed immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, a key chipmaking tool long dominated by Dutch supplier ASML (reuters).
China has an organized pipeline through which the Chinese Communist Party identifies American Marxists, brings them to China, immerses them in party doctrine, connects them with senior CCP officials, and sends them back into the United States, where they work inside unions, political coalitions, media outlets, and voter-mobilization operations (nataliegwinters).
The US is banning foreign robots (theverge) and that includes robot vacuum cleaners too (theverge).
A growing share of Americans die with nothing left after care (washingtonpost).
Meme of the Week
