While several American billionaires and politicians were named in the files, Pan Bondi said, if we were to go after all the people who are named in the files, the entire system would collapse.

The reaction of the American people was ‘Meh’. Late-night hosts made fun of it. The women who came forward felt stupid. Life moved on.

Incidentally, Donald Trump was named 5300 times in the files and as someone usefully pointed out on Twitter, Harry Potter is named fewer times in all of the 7 books put together.

Across the Atlantic, there was far more enthusiasm to do something about the people named in the file. At one point, it even seemed like the British government would collapse not because the current Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, was named in the files, but because he had appointed Peter Mandelson as the Ambassador to the US, and his name figured prominently.

The former Norwegian PM Thorbjørn Jagland was rushed to the hospital since he attempted suicide because his name surfaced in the files and triggered corruption charges.

Thomas Pritzker, the Chairman of Hyatt Hotels, stepped down from his role.

Kathy Reummler, the Chief Legal Officer of Goldman Sachs, who had previously served as the White House Counsel during the Obama Administration, stepped down.

Peter Attia, the Logetivity influencer, had his CBS show cancelled.

Richard Axel, a Nobel laureate and Professor at Columbia University, said he would be stepping down from his position.

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University who served as treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and head of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration, said he would step away from teaching at Harvard.

The list is long, but the highlight is that Former Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles, was arrested in England.

The Harry Potter of this saga was beginning to feel the heat. Hence, the bombing began in Iran.

Israel and the US had bombed Iran in 2025. Iranians had launched missiles towards Qatar and then informed the US that retaliation was on the way. Damages were avoided, but so was contagion. Iran did not want an escalation, unlike Israel. Turned out, Iran was the country with greater statesmanship and forbearance.

Iran had strategically ensured that it had put its country right next to all the US bases, expecting a situation like this.

Source: Al Jazeera

Israel and the US were aware, if they attacked, all the countries around Iran with US bases would be attacked. With absolutely no concern for their bases but also for the people living in all of those smaller nations, an attack was launched with no clarity of purpose or an end goal. This has to be perhaps the dumbest CIA operation.

Without a legitimate replacement in the country, they assassinated the Ayatollah. A regime change is either effected by sending troops to decapitate the state completely, as they did in the case of Iraq or by supporting an actor who has the respect of the masses and the military, like they did in Bangladesh when Sheikh Hasina was ousted.

So now what?

The Epstein story is buried, and all of the attention has shifted to Iran.

With no clarity of purpose or goal, the bombing of Iran continues. The economies of the Gulf nations will suffer as this bombing endures. For one thing, three of the largest airlines in the region - Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways are not able to fly.

They have given a huge jet and invested heavily in Trump’s businesses. The pressure is going to be on Trump to end this soon.

The real question is, what is the exit ramp? After having engaged in this escapade, when they stop bombing, what will be justified as victory?

Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples

Source: Wikipedia

By this definition, anti-semitism seems to be a euphemism for Islamophobia. It is a twisted interpretation that implies anti-semitism is hatred of the Jews.

Since we are on the subject of hatred of the jews, the people who hate them the most are British. The current Jewish population in Britain is estimated at 0.5%. When Britain occupied Palestine during the Second World War, there was a restriction on the number of Jews who could migrate to Palestine. The British did not want anything to do with the jews. Probably why they started by trying to appease Hitler until the war came home. They created the state of Israel because they wanted to play no part in accommodating any jews after the war was over.

The European “semites” went on to occupy Palestine after the Second World War, and their demand for a Jewish state was a cornerstone of Zionism.

Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century.

Source: Wikipedia

It speaks volumes that even the document that envisioned the founding of Israel was not even written in a Semitic language. It was written in a language of the Zionists, a European language.

The first government of Israel was full of Europeans.

David Ben-Gurion - Born in Poland

Dov Yosef - Born in Canada

Zalman Shazar - Born in Belarus

Moshe Sharett - Born in Ukraine

Eliezer Kaplan - Born in Belarus

Haim-Moshe Shapira - Born in Belarus

Pinchas Rosen - Born in Germany

Gloda Meir - Born in Ukraine

Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit - Born in Tiberias

Yehuda Leib Maimon - Born in Moldova

David Remez - Born in Belarus

Yitzhak-Meir Levin - Born in Poland

There was a grand total of one person on the cabinet who was born in semitic land.

Paternal Country of Origin - Present-day Israel

Source: Wikipedia

Even today, two-thirds of the jews in Israel trace their origins to non-Semitic lands. Israel is a collection of a bunch of Eastern European people.

Given the genocide in Gaza. If at all, any country that can be deemed anti-semitic, it is Israel. The G7 are active participants in the anti-semitism perpetrated by Israel.

Referring to the people of Israel as Semitic is like saying ‘Trump is pro-European’, because all the white people in the US descend from Europeans.

I was travelling to the US towards the end of January and did not want to post anything fresh that would result in my deportation. At the time, the hottest thing in the news was the ICE raids in Minneapolis.

The other piece I had written was about the most anti-semite nation in the world - Israel.

I chose to keep my mouth shut.

My choice was not irrational either. I knew an American citizen, who just happened to be brown, who was stopped at immigration and had their phones and laptops checked by the officials.

Censor is a word derived from the Latin word Cēnsēre, which means to appraise or to judge. But when that appraisal is done in the context of political acceptability, one is already on a slippery slope.

During the Nuremberg Trials, the reasoning offered by the Nazis for their actions was - it was the right thing to do at the time. Joseph Goebbels ran propaganda for Hitler the way he did because otherwise, he would have been fired.

It was the “politically acceptable” thing to do.

Pam Bondi is defending the people named in the Epstein files the way she does because otherwise, she might be fired.

Across the world, the state reserves the monopoly on violence. They inflict that violence through the police. The system that controls that violence determines behaviour. When that control slips into the hands of one all objectivity is lost. Polical acceptance becomes a proxy for self-preservation.

Not every German was a Nazi, every German did what was politically acceptable.

Doing the politically acceptable thing results in self-censorship. That kind of censorship enables the few at the top.

It got me thinking.

A few days later, my maid, whose earnings would put her comfortably in the top 15% of Indians, informed me that she was taking leave because she had to go to her village and buy land - 20 Acres of it!

In 1950, just after independence, 75% of the workforce in India was engaged in farming. Agriculture was the biggest contributor both to employment and to the GDP. Over the years, it has been declining, and today, only about 45% of the workforce is employed in farming.

Having said that, India’s population in 1950 was 358 million; today it stands at 1.45 billion. Therefore, if you look at it in absolute terms, the number of farmers in India has gone up from 268 million to 652 million. This, in turn, implies that the land that was being tilled by fewer people is now being tilled by a larger number of people, and proportionately, the land holding per farmer has charted a downward trajectory.

85% of the farmers in India are smallholder farmers with less than 2 hectares (5 Acres) of land.

With such small farms, it is not possible to eke out a living for an entire family. This has created a flood of migrants who are moving away from their villages to the cities in search of work. They live in urban slums and perform menial and daily wage labour in cities to earn a living. That this income is higher than what they would earn at their farm should cause us to pause and think.

The very same people were left stranded and walked back to their villages when the lockdowns were put in place during the pandemic. Some of them were forced to walk hundreds and thousands of kilometres to get back home. Nevertheless, they came back.

Farming is becoming more and more unviable at smaller scales. Not only that, but it is also no longer aspirational amongst those living in villages. The youth in the village want to leave for the cities. Part of the reason there is a fertility collapse in South India is that most rural households wish to educate their children so that they can find respectable jobs in the cities away from the villages. Most cannot afford to put together the resources to educate even one child.

It is getting to a point where there are no ”youth” to be found in villages.

Then, there is another India.

Techies who work 16-hour days in glass prisons to earn obscene sums of money. They burn themselves out following these insane work routines.

While the evidence is anecdotal, I have started to see many such people who are burnt out and investing their money to buy a plot of land to start farming. They can buy a fairly large plot (>30 acres) of land for a sum which would get them a small three-bedroom apartment in the city. They are educated, well-to-do, aware and have the patience to learn organic agriculture. Not only that, they have the ability to connect with the market and get themselves the right price for their produce. They want a simple life which can also provide them with a means for a steady and stable income while producing something real. Something that connects them to land and people.

These individuals buy large parcels of land. 10 hectares or upwards and cultivate several crops, and vegetables that they either package and sell on their own or, in certain cases, even process the produce to deliver an end product.

Is this how India moves or transitions to large holder farms? Will this be the way we make farming a more viable engagement?

Are all the rural folks going to end up in cities, and city folks going to end up in the rural belt?

With CDs and cassettes, you would listen to one album a time, or if you had mixed it yourself, you would have a few albums at most.

By the 2010s, internet speeds had improved wildly, and thus came streaming. Suddenly, the entire music library of the work was available at your fingertips. This broke music even further, and we are moved to consuming music piecemeal. One track at a time.

Last week, I was working from home, and I decided to just revisit an album by Michael Learns to Rock and play the entire album. One thing was that I seemed to remember was which track followed just because I had listened to the entire album so many times. But more importantly, there was a flow to the album. There was a story that they were trying to tell with the album, and all the songs were connected.

The other being that every album has good tracks and the not-so-good ones, and when you listen to the entire album, you learn to appreciate both. Songs do not have to be breakout hits for them to be worth listening to. There are so many that were not hits but are really enjoyable.

The ability to enjoy creativity in its entirety is being lost.

Everyone across the world has heard Gangnam Style by Psy, but cannot name another song by him.

It leads to the degradation of creativity as well. Everyone is chasing that one hit. They are not extending any thought into their work. They just want a quick hit. One big hit and they can call it a career.

I had written about this almost a decade ago in February 2016.

Songs have been a means through which emotions and stories were communicated. What makes a song beautiful is the poetry and the metaphors, which make several interpretations possible. It automatically implies that you must give it time to grow on you, for the interpretations to set in and for the songs to get internalised.

With the lack of time and attention, musicians are forced to produce music that is catchy and will hook you up soon. This also means that most songs do not have a soul. Most songs use a particular word repeatedly to get you to like the song.

Source

Since I started this blog with albums, I want to know do any of you know the album that Gangnam Style was from?

Thanks to Trump, the year felt like a decade.

The year began with the impending ascension of Trump to the presidency. He entered office and put Elon Musk in power of DOG-E, and American government Workers faced uncertainties, the likes of which they had not since the Second World War. He promised to reverse all of the policies that Biden had put in place and declared “Drill baby drill”.

The Climate

This year we had wildfires in Russia, Turkey, Syria, South Korea, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom. In addition to that, 25 US states recorded wildfires burning 5 million acres and taking a lot of celebrity homes in LA. Canada remained the unrivalled champion with 160 fires burning through 21 million acres.

In addition to that, there was flooding in Milwaukee and Texas in the US. Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. Bolivia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, United Kingdom, South Africa, Botswana, and Bolivia.

Then a bunch of world leaders flew into the Amazon to agree on doing nothing, for now, about the climate. They all have, at most, a decade or a bit more to live and that time would be better used creating “shareholder value” rather than taking decisions which will cause inconvenience and disruption to their “economic models”.

Shifting Sands

The tariff wars that were unleashed in April drove the panic purchase of more goods across the world. Markets gyrated at first and then just disregarded any talk of tariffs. The Financial Express wrote, “like a dog to a bone, Donald Trump seems to run back to Tariffs”. He alienated friends while foes rejoiced. Europe and Japan were made to accept one-sided deals, which they happily did. At the same time, Indian and China defied the US and did not accept any deal. These economies that like to call themselves the global North could not stand up to bullying!

2025 was an important year to unveil the new world order. Whatever the motivation Trump may have had, he exposed the weakness of the G7. The erstwhile colonial powers do not have any.

Killing Fields

To add insult to injury, the US has put the burden of bankrolling the Ukraine war on the Europeans. Trump was making changes to the immigration policy that would destroy the pipeline of talent that flows into the US using the H1B visa. For a brief moment, the Europeans thought they could roll out plans to attract that talent. Now that money will be spent buying arms to keep the war in Ukraine alive.

India attacked Pakistan to avenge the civilians killed in Pahalgam. For a period of time in India, it seemed like war. Cell phone networks were being jammed in India. A lot of “information” was being provided from the areas of conflict. Then both sides declared victory, and the war was over.

Israel, in the meantime, bombed half a dozen Middle Eastern countries. Israel attacked Iran unnecessarily. Iran turned out to be far more restrained and calculated than it is given credit for. They launched a bunch of missiles towards the US base in Qatar to demonstrate what contagion in that region could look like. The US made Israel immediately back down.

AI

In 2022, ChatGPT was released, and it captivated the imagination of many. Riding on the back of the “imagination”, OpenAI pushed for incredible amounts of capital to be committed towards the build-out of infrastructure to support AI expansion. The year was dominated by trillion-dollar investment talk and trillion-dollar scale, while the reality stayed far away.

Oracle leveraged its Balance Sheet to build capacity for OpenAI. Nvidia started investing in OpenAI. Even the house of the mouse, Disney, committed capital to OpenAI. All the money is being spent on creating data centres and building power capacity to meet the needs of AI. On paper, yes, they are building out infrastructure.

The wrinkle in the story - chips do not last as long as other infrastructure does. Spending trillions on building roads, rail, ports, or airports is fine. It gives you returns over decades. Chips are finished in 5 - 7 years. Imagine building an entire road network all over again every 7 years!

Is AI economically viable?

As the year draws to a close, an uneasy question about a small number of companies making circular payments to each other is beginning to rear its head. In the meantime, China is releasing models of comparative capabilities working at a fraction of the cost. America’s decision to ban Nvidia from shipping chips to China forced them to adapt.

The rise of China during the early part of this century was powered by cheap steel that it dumped into global markets. It seems like the US ensured that it would do the equivalent by dumping cheap AI models into the market and destroying the US AI industry.

Looking forward to 2026 -

The AI thesis will really be put to the test, and there will be a crash or a correction depending on who writes the headlines.

European governmental budgets will buckle under the load of defence spending on behalf of Ukraine. Will they call Zelensky corrupt and cut him loose, handing over territory to Russia? Will they risk fomenting unrest in their countries to continue a war for purely ideological purposes?

The Insurance industry will come under pressure both from Climate and Trump policies in both health and trade. Already, an insurance industry CEO was shot. Rising premiums will result in hard questions.

Enter Sam Altman.

Perhaps because of his name, he wanted to create the alternate man, which he dubbed Artificial General Intelligence.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.

Source: Wikipedia

Most code is written to operate in a specific area. Photoshop can do everything relating to images, but it can’t even work on videos, let alone write prose. Software packages have been great at doing specific pieces of work, but there is no software package that can do it all. By contrast, a human can learn to code and manage HR. A human can work across contexts and understand the specific requirements of that area and excel at it.

The moment GPTs were able to regurgitate words across a variety of areas, Sam Altman became obsessed with the idea of creating AI that could work like a human. Buoyant from the hype he was receiving after the release of ChatGPT, he claimed AGI would be possible by 2025. Much like Elon Musk, that date has become a moving target.

Why AGI?

In his mind, that was the best way to usurp the incomes of many people and corner that money for himself.

His focus turned from pushing the boundaries of research to turning OpenAI into a for-profit entity. He estranged and got rid of all of the research minds that produced everything at the company. Ilya Sutskever had a falling out after trying to push Sam Altman out of the company and left thereafter to start his own venture. Mira Murati and John Shulman left to start Thinking Machines Lab. Andrej Karpathy, who at Stanford played a critical role alongside Fei Fei Li to usher in visual recognition, left to start his own venture.

The vision has broadened while the bench strength has narrowed.

When you set out to please everybody, you please nobody. The pursuit of AGI has delivered precisely that.

I used Gemini last week, and it smokes OpenAI. Google is really flexing it with their search and Docs integration. Anthropic has become the gold standard for coding. OpenAI, in the meantime, has turned into a bullet machine.

Ask anything, and it will deliver 35 bullet points, which has given birth to a new term, AI Slop.

Why the cancellation?

A new directive from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) came into effect regarding Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL), which directed airlines to provide rest to flight crew, specifically -

Further,

The minimum in-flight rest period shall be a consecutive 90 minutes period for each crew member and 2 consecutive hours for the flight crew members at control during landing.

Source: DGCA

There were clear limitations placed on how long the pilot and the crew could be asked to work, and further, the duration of rest that needs to be provided thereafter. The document is pretty coherent and well thought out; you can check the link in the source quoted above.

All the people working inside a plane have to be ready to jump into action in the event of any mishap. Their alertness is subject to their mind and bodies being well-rested. The revised document was published on the 8th January 2024.

The leadership did not care what the circular said and assumed that everything would be fine. Worst-case, they would not comply, pay a fine and move on.

In some ways, they have managed not to even pay the fine by manufacturing this chaos! *Slow-Clap*

Indigo the Efficiency Machine

Indigo has been one of the consistently profitable airlines in the Indian aviation industry. It has made money by running its operations like a machine.

It achieved this by doing a number of things. Till a few years ago, it ran a fleet that was exclusively Airbus 320s, which enabled standardisation as well as speedy solutions to any maintenance problems. The ground staff did not have to deal with different types of planes. They also flew the Airbus like a bus.

The plane lands, it is turned around in 45 minutes, passengers start boarding, and it takes off. The plane rarely spends more than 75 minutes on the ground. I would argue that most buses get more downtime. This was a model that was perfected into an art by Southwest Airlines in the US, which allowed them to rise incredibly fast.

On Flightradar, you can see how any aircraft is run around the country.

This equipment (VT-NCX), for instance, is expected to fly 7 flights on the 6th Dec.

Every company aspires to achieve 100% utilisation since a lower utilisation is seen as inefficiency.

Poor people do not have any slack in their finances; this is what keeps them poor. Their utilisation rate of money earned borders on 100%.

When your operations are aspiring for the highest levels of utilisation, a slight deviation from that can cause the entire operation to fall apart. We saw this happen during COVID when shipping lanes went into a tizzy.

But when that operation involves people, even those people have to run like machines. Here enters the FDTL.

In the case of Indigo, that sword was utilisation.

The point to ponder here is that Indigo’s consistent profits were a result of staff who worked 12-hour shifts without fail. The government asked the airline to provide them with slightly more rest, and the company is falling apart.

We rarely acknowledge that what every company calls profits is essentially the accumulation of all the negative externalities that they dish out to the world. In this case, the externalities were being borne by their flight staff.

It seems like the profits of every company are their net debt to society.

It was in this context that I was reminiscing about the winters in Delhi during my childhood. Not the toxic gas chambers of today, but Delhi in the 80s. Delhi would reach 2 degrees Celsius and would see thick fog, not smog. The fog used to be so dense that taking a walk outside could leave your clothes with a thin layer of moisture on them.

If you grew up in North India during the 80s, there were some stupid things that were a part of life. I sometimes imagine why we made it so hard on ourselves.

(Not) Woollen Gloves - Jobless grandmothers could be seen sitting in the sun in the afternoon, knitting all over town. They used to knit useful things like sweaters, but also really useless things like gloves. Those nearly porous things never ever kept my hands warm. Their only value addition being the loss of dexterity. But all kids would wear it, hoping against hope that it would keep their fingers from freezing over. The fact that not a single adult wore one should have been a tell.

The great travesty is that it was not even wool. It was made of acrylic pretending to be wool. There was this company called Vardhaman, which used to sell knitting yarn with not one whit of wool in it.

Razai - A Persian word that came to India and was adopted into Urdu. This is the Indian version of the quilt. It’s essentially 25 kgs of cotton inside a stitched-up cloth bag. The razai used to weigh a ton and was always deadly cold to get into. You had to expend a lot of body heat to warm it up, and it would feel like your feet were perennially cold. Not to mention, folding it was a 3 people job, and it would occupy half of the bed once folded and look like one shapeless mound.

Upside, it was great to jump on.

Layers - The solution to any clothing being ineffective at defying the cold was to wear more of the same. You would wear a full sweater on top of a half sweater and top that off with a jacket. It was stitched such that neither would you be able to raise your hands higher than your ears nor drop them fully. The same would repeat itself with socks. One sock over another over another, and then wear canvas shoes. Like why?

Bus stops - Everything in Delhi was made of Iron. I suppose that was to ensure longevity. Bus stops would have iron railings that you could sit on while waiting for a bus. Of course, it used to be freezing cold and if it was foggy, bound to be slightly wet as well. Sitting on it would mean your ass would be wet. Pre-warmed railings were an asset! If someone was getting off to board a bus, you made sure you got that spot.

I survived all that and sometimes wish I could have it back!

A GPU, which stands for graphical processing unit, renders images such as graphics on the computer screen. It needs to process all the pixels simultaneously so that it can render every pixel on the screen. They were an accessory 25 years ago for those who wished to play games on their computers.

The way AI algorithms work, they throw a ton of spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. This implies the need for parallel processing, which GPUs excel at. CPUs which run your computers are better at sequential tasks.

Since Nvidia was the market leader in the space, it became the preferred supplier of GPUs to most companies that were building AI models. In some ways, Nvidia has become a proxy for the entire AI industry in the world. They have the fastest, most-preferred and well-tested GPUs in the world.

OpenAI announced ChatGPT, and the war for GPUs began. Companies are raising ever larger funding rounds to buy more and more GPUs to run larger and larger models all the pursuit of something called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is about producing the sort of intelligence that can cut across subjects, much like humans do.

The agreed thesis is that if companies double down on the models and keep increasing the number of parameters, it would automatically deliver AGI.

For the past 2 years, companies have been doubling and doubling their orders to Nvidia. It reflects in their revenue.

There has been an even greater rise in their share prices. Their revenues have grown 5-fold, their share price 10-fold. That implies that investors are assuming that there is more growth to be secured.

Given all this, there is some strange dealmaking going on.

The profit machine, Nvidia, has been investing its profits into its customers!

NVIDIA and OpenAI today announced a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence. To support this deployment including datacenter and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.

Source: OpenAI

OpenAI will buy goods from Nvidia and give it paper in return.

Today, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announced new strategic partnerships. Anthropic is scaling its rapidly growing Claude AI model on Microsoft Azure, powered by NVIDIA, which will broaden access to Claude and provide Azure enterprise customers with expanded model choice and new capabilities. Anthropic has committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to 1 gigawatt.

Source: Nvidia

NVIDIA and Nokia today announced a strategic partnership to add NVIDIA-powered, commercial-grade AI-RAN products to Nokia’s industry-leading RAN portfolio, enabling communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on NVIDIA platforms. NVIDIA will also invest $1 billion in Nokia at a subscription price of $6.01 per share. The investment is subject to customary closing conditions.

Source: Nvidia

Why would Nvidia invest its cash into its customers? Maybe its customers are not going to be able to afford its products any longer? Its customers are unable to make the kind of money that they should be able to and are about to fail? This is one way of keeping that from happening. By kicking the can down the road, Nvidia could be hoping that these companies would be able to find the kind of revenues that they hope to find.

When everyone is looking for gold, sell them spades. But the spades will continue to sell only if there is gold to be found.

You could loan them the money to buy the spades, hoping that at some point they will indeed find gold. What if they don’t?

People who would know more than we would,

A viral AI-driven analysis of US SEC filings has resurfaced the scale and frequency of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s stock sales this year, showing the chipmaker’s founder executed near-daily liquidation of shares worth roughly USD 13 million per day for several months.

Source: Moneycontrol

This would translate to $286 million in shares sold per month, assuming 22 trading days. Why only $13 million? If he did sell more aggressively, it would get alarm bells ringing.

Thiel Macro LLC fund’s Form 13F filing indicated that the investor no longer had any shared in Nvidia as of September 30. As a result, his staggering departure fuelled the sale of more than 537,000 shares in the company from July to September. According to Investing.com’s analysis of the firm’s average stock price during this period, the shares’ sale price is estimated to be nearly $100 million.

Given the full-fledged Nvidia exit’s status, this shift has shrunk his fund’s equity book by nearly two-thirds. His holdings in the firm reportedly accounted for nearly 40% of his portfolio.

Source: Financial Express

Peter Thiel is selling all of his holdings in Nvidia.

The market was abuzz last week with the news that Michael Burry, who became famous for shorting the stock market during the 2008 mortgage crisis, was betting against Nvidia and Palantir Technologies. Both stocks fell recently, and the revelation of Burry’s position may have contributed to that.

Source: Motley Fool

There are several people making bets against Nvidia, and its own CEO is reducing his stake in the company. Why?

Unless the AI party is about to come to an end…

Quite frankly, Donald Trump has done everything in his power to crash the US stock market. Stupidly played with the tariffs globally. Antagonised allies. Played around with the largest trading partners, holding the relationship on a knife-edge. Kept flip-flopping on policies. The final straw in this stupid Olympics has been the government shutdown. It does not even seem like anyone in the US government is remotely bothered about keeping the federal government open.

Through all of this melee, the US stock exchange has persisted. It is up nearly 10% this year. But all of that evaporates very quickly when you take the AI trades out of it.

Source: Reuters

The tech stocks with an AI narrative are up 50% and that is the bulwark that is holding up the US Stock Exchange. Except that the AI story is what investors like to call unrealised potential.

AI has yet to translate into real value on the balance sheets of various companies. There is a rush to create infrastructure and solutions that would use that infrastructure, but who will be using these solutions at scale is not really something we know.

The Price to Equity Ratio, which is a measure of how much investors expect earnings to grow, reflects this. All of the tech major, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, have their P/E ratios in the mid-30s. The chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD are in the 70s. Data centre suppliers such as Amazon are valued in the 40s.

Just for contrast, businesses that form the backbone of the American economy, such as ExxonMobil and FedEx, are valued at a P/E ratio of 14.

The entire US stock market is a big bet on AI at the moment. If you were to remove all the tech stocks, the market would be at best flat.

If the AI story comes apart, then what?

In India, there has been a great deal of consternation about the fact that we have not been building foundational AI models. We have not innovated much in this area and are net consumers of this technology. On the flip side…

The NIFTY100 is up 9% this year.

Source: Groww

Do you know the number of companies on the Indian exchanges that are up based on their AI narrative? Zip.

The Indian markets are free of the AI contagion, and if the AI train turns out to be a wreck, India is the anti-AI trade. It has survived Trump’s trade wars. It has been consistently growing, and it is mostly fuelled by domestic consumption.

So India offers the best hedge against the American markets!

Over the last decade, this law has opened up vast pools of capital for the organisations working in the development sector. HDFC Bank has the largest CSR Pool, which sits at close to Rs 1000 Crores (~$110 Million), which it gives away each year to various Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

Source: CSR.GOV

The government publishes the stats every year, and these numbers can be analysed.

The interesting thing that I found in the stats is the steady growth of the outlay year on year. No company enjoys giving away money, and they would avoid it if they could. Despite the efforts of the best accountants, the CSR expenditure is rising at over 10% year on year.

To me, this is the strongest proxy for the India growth story. It also shows the strength of the underlying profit machines. Consistent and growing profits year after year.

If you are investing in an index fund in India, you need not be worried at all.

Any of you who have ever been in a negotiation knows that you need to try and guess what the other person is thinking. It takes intelligence to do that. The truly intelligent can do this not because they have a lot of data, but because they do it in the absence of it.

Most of the people engaged at the leadership levels of any organisation spend their time making decisions. Often their decisions are made in the absence of perfect information. The fact that they are not constrained by the lack of information and can function is what enables them to make a lot of money.

The current state of AI takes the opposite track and throws as much information as possible into a model and expects it to produce the right answer. Wherever knowledge gaps appear, the system hallucinates because it does not know how to reason in the absence of information.

Intelligence would be having the ability to reason and arrive at answers in the absence of information. Honestly, nobody seems to be building it.

In the name of religion, I can block entire roads, ambulances can find another route.

In the name of religion, I can create noise pollution and play stuff on infinite repeat; your brain turning to mush is not my problem.

In the name of religion, I can hang streamers all over the street even though it can be a physical hazard to someone.

In the name of religion, I can burst crackers in the middle of the road even when traffic is moving there.

In the name of religion, I can lynch someone for eating beef.

In the name of religion, I can pour milk on a stone and call it an offering while poor children struggle to get any.

In the name of religion, I can segregate people.

Indians will do everything in the name of religion except for the one thing that religion teaches you - be kind.

Credit rating for each nation is predicated on its banking system, amount of debt, etc. Western credit rating is top-notch, even if it precipitates a global banking collapse.

Credit rating agencies exist not to rate bonds, but to crash them when it suits the US. The US businesses then move in to buy the assets in those nations which have adopted free market principles. Once the plunder is complete, the ratings agencies change the rating.

Every developing nation needs to embark on austerity measures to set its economy on the right path, but the West sets it right by issuing more debt.

A 100% Debt to GDP ratio is only bad for a “developing nation” in the “global south”.

When a non-Western country does it, it is protectionism. When the West does it, it is national security.

To my knowledge, the burden of penetration is being borne by only one company, and it is called the State Bank of India.

The so-called fintech companies, in the meantime, have gone after the cream of India, penetrating the urban and peri-urban markets to saturation. Payments is an unforgiving business, and the margins are razor-thin. If you process about $1 billion in India, you would net about $10 -20 million in margins. Imagine the technology infrastructure one needs to process those kinds of volumes. That revenue would only suffice to pay for the technology one would be running.

The only means for these companies to turn profitable is through lending. A relatively high-margin business. For most lenders, the cost of recovery can be rather high and mitigating this cost can make a company valuable.

Indians do not normally borrow a lot.

It said, “At 42.9 per cent of GDP (at current market prices) in June 2024, India’s household debt is relatively low compared to other EMEs, however, it has increased over the past three years”.

According to the report, household debt stood at 42.9 per cent of GDP at current market prices in June 2024. The report underlined that the rise in household debt is primarily driven by an increase in the number of borrowers, rather than a rise in the average indebtedness per individual.

Borrowing by individuals in the household sector accounted for 91 per cent of the total household financial liabilities as of March 2024.

The data revealed that individuals primarily borrow for three main purposes, consumption which includes personal loans, credit card debt, and loans for consumer durables.

Source: Times of India

At 42.9%, the total household borrowing in India stands at about $1.7 trillion through formal channels. The per capita household debt in India is a little more than $1000. Contrast this with the US

Total household debt increased by $185 billion to hit $18.39 trillion in the second quarter, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit. Mortgage balances grew by $131 billion and totaled $12.94 trillion at the end of June. Auto loan balances also increased, rising by $13 billion to reach $1.66 trillion.

Source - New York Fed

The $18.39 trillion represents about 60% of GDP. But in absolute terms, it is 37 times that of India. This is with a population that is one-quarter that of India. The per capita household debt in the US is a little more than $38000.

Commissions are based on volumes. Of course, the fintech companies would love to turn over more money.

For lending to take place, you need to know the right candidate for the debt. Enter Unified Lending Interface (ULI).

The RBI announced the introduction of ULI last month. The platform is supposed to act as a data broker which provides account aggregators with all the information pertaining to the financial position of individuals so they can make decisions about processing loans. Ostensibly, the authorisation is consent-based, but given the number of dark designs tech companies use, they will either fool you or force you into consent.

ULI can provide access to all sorts of information, including land records.

To me, this entire platform seems like the product of intense lobbying.

Account Aggregators (AA) are non-banking financial companies, licensed by RBI, that act like a bridge, to deliver data from Financial Information Providers (FIP) that hold your personal or corporate financial data to Financial Information Users (FIU) that are providing financial services to you.

Source: Sahamati

Most of the Account Aggregators in India are tech companies that have been built within the last 2 decades. Almost all of them have been heavily reliant on affluent consumers in urban India for their growth. It does not seem to me that this technology layer, which will be used to penetrate deeper into the population that does not possess a credit score yet. Instead, it will be put to use to mine data about the affluent lot so they can be sold more lending products.

So get ready for unsolicited loan offers against your property, fixed deposits and mutual funds.

Every one of those states except for Yemen adopted a monarchy. Yemen was the only state to become a semi-presidential Democratic Republic. Their current economic predicament says a lot about which system served the region better.

On the other side of India, Singapore adopted what can only be described as a democratic dictatorship. Lee Kuan Yew was in office for 31 years.

When countries are poor, democracy is a bane. It forces leaders into short-termism and puts them in a position of constant squabbles where they must pull each other down. What is needed at that time is a benevolent dictator who will drive with a vision and deliver long-term outcomes.

In the book, ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’ Przeworski et al. offer this fascinating insight – ‘a democracy can be expected to last an average of about 8.5 years in a country with a per capita income under US$1,000 per annum, 16 years in one with income between US$1,000 and US $2,000, 33 years between US$2,000 and US$4,000 and 100 years between US$4,000 and US$6,000 … Above US$6,000, democracies are impregnable … [they are] certain to survive, come hell or high water.’

One only has to look at the history of Asian economies (China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand) to see how this is borne out. And even beyond Asia, Pinochet’s Chile and Fujimori’s Peru are examples of economic success in lands bereft of democracy.

The reason for this ‘anomaly’ is that each of these dictators, whatever their faults (and there were many), was able to ensure some semblance of property rights, functioning institutions, growth-promoting economic policies (for example, in fiscal and monetary management) and an investment climate that buttressed growth – the things that democracy promises to do.

In India, there is a sharp Urban vs Rural divide in the per capita income.

The government of India does not supply statistics on Rural Per Capita Income Vs Urban Per Capita Income, so I am forced to use proxies and anecdotal evidence to determine this.

According to the Chief Economic Advisor, the per capita income of India is Rs 2.12 Lacs. (~ $2400).

As per a survey undertaken by the NSSO, the percentage distribution of agricultural households owning less than two hectares of land is 89.4%. 90% of the households in rural India have less than 5 acres of land. I would be willing to further make an argument that half of them would probably own about 2 acres of farm land.

An acre of paddy yields profits of about Rs 25,000 per season. Assuming one plants for a couple of seasons a year, this number would yield Rs 50,000 in annual income. Say, one were to plant a crop such as peanut or potato, the profits from an acre would be about Rs 50,000 per season. Again, two seasons of cropping would yield Rs. 1,00,000 in income. A farmer might not plant the same crop for both seasons, and let us split the difference and say they earn about Rs 75,000 per acre.

My assumption is that a good 50% of smallholder farmers have about 2 acres of land, which would give them Rs 1,50,000 (~ $1800) per year in income. This is not neatly spread like butter on your toast but comes in lump sums at the time of harvesting, which causes them to go into a debt trap and eventual poverty, but that is for another time.

Now coming to the anecdotes, my maid earns about Rs 30,000 per month working multiple houses. That translates to about Rs 3,60,000 (~ $3800) per year. Let me state, unlike the farmer, this is not household income but individual income. Her household income would at least be twice as much, if not more. Thus, the migration to cities.

But going back to the per capita income story, one can posit that the per capita income of Rural India is less than half of that of Urban India. While I did not plan this, if you take the average of Rs. 1,50,000 and Rs. 3,60,000, we arrive at Rs. 2,55,000, which is not too far from the per capita income touted by the Chief Economic Advisor.

If we go back to the assertion made by Przeworski mentioned above, it is plain to see that the Urban Indian is operating in a different system from rural India.

It is unequivocally true that democracy is not working for rural India, while it is just sort of, kind of working for Urban India. In some ways, Urban India is foisting democracy on Rural India. This has played out in the form of armed rebellions in certain places known as the Naxal movement; in the form of demands for statehood; and in the form of farmers’ protests in the capital.

Unfortunately, the rural Indian has no real recourse. Their protests have not yielded much. Why?

Revolutions rarely start on the street; they often start in the courtyards of palaces when an elite who could not make it to the top decides to tear apart the very system that would not allow him (it is usually a him) to rise.

The promise was free and easy goods movement. This, people assumed, would lead to more business for the railways and result in huge profits. Ores from mines and goods from factories had to be moved through canals or horse-drawn carriages before the railways. This promised to revolutionise the movement of goods and thus change the nature of business and where businesses could be set up.

Today, that investment boom is known as the British Railway Mania of the 1840s.

As the 1840s progressed, the Bank of England tightened interest rates and which burst the bubble. Shares of the railroad companies fell 50% overnight, and money left the market in a hurry.

The build-out nevertheless had a silver lining. Huge infrastructure was created, which would go on to be used to build out the rest of the network across the UK. It helped grow the economy and accelerate trade. The economy grew, but the beneficiaries were not the railroad companies; they were the businesses that took advantage of the railroads.

A train does not have any value in and of itself. They are merely a more expensive version of their toy rail set, which my nephew plays with. It is the goods within the train that provide it a semblance of value.

Large Language Models are expensive, power-guzzling and foundational infrastructure, which in and of themselves are playthings for the curious. They cannot solve any problem. It is the agents that get built on top of the foundation, which will provide them a semblance of value.

Railway companies became especially forceful promoters. They marketed shares as nearly risk-free and lured buyers with easy terms. Many offers required only a 10 percent deposit while reserving the right to call the remaining 90 percent at any time (Camplin, 2010). Enthusiasm for growth echoed the early stages of the 1990s tech boom.

Government oversight was minimal. Companies needed a Bill to pass Parliament to authorize new lines, but there were no limits on how many companies could form, and virtually anyone could submit a scheme. Financial viability was not required for approval, and many MPs held railway shares, a clear conflict of interest (The Science Museum, 2004).

Source: The Bubble Bubble

You can take the second paragraph and reword it in the context of AI. Very little rewording would be required.

Something similar is going on with the companies building foundational models. They have an incentive to say that they are carrying the arm of god.

Since 2012, large tech corporations in America have been sitting on cash piles with nothing better to do than buy back shares.

Microsoft has already spent over $100 billion on share buybacks since 2015, and recently announced another $60 billion

Microsoft Shares Outstanding 2011 - 2025

Source: Macrotrends

On the other hand, through the peak of the share buybacks, from 2015 - 2018, the stock price remained depressed. Then the AI story mill started to kick in, and the share prices started to rise.

Source: Yahoo Finance

I don’t want to turn this into a white paper, but you will see the same trend repeat itself with Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Oracle, and every other company that is throwing cash at Nvidia and OpenAI. Nvidia is the only company that has seen an expansion in its share base during this time. We cannot find data for OpenAI since it is still privately held, but rest assured, it is undergoing a monumental expansion of its share base.

The foundational models have value, but only so far as enabling the agent ecosystem. This bubble will burst, and much like most bubbles, it is never possible to know when it will happen. If I did, I would short Nvidia shares at the right time.

We will come out the other side, and much like the railway mania, there will be a lot of infrastructure that we will walk away with. In the meantime, there are several agentic opportunities sitting there to be exploited. The only catch is that you have to be willing to play the long game.

I wonder why manias are not called as such when they are playing out.

Cats will rub up against you and purr when they are happy around you. There is no complex interpretation required. Cats won’t purr for cheap thrills, nor will they purr just to make you feel good.

Hence, you will not find a Lion sitting and wondering, “Does she really like me?”

By contrast, humans depend heavily on verbal communications. Further, that communication can often be unclear and uncertain. The fact that the French expression “Double Entendre” exists as proof that what is said and what is meant, is often different. This makes it rather difficult to know what a human is really thinking or feeling about a situation. Do they really mean what they are saying, or are they saying it to just make someone happy or not to hurt them?

That, in turn, contributes to the thinking and overthinking about the motivations and the feelings of others. On the one hand, this is highly unproductive, but on the other hand, it also gives rise to a lot of insecurity.

In our pursuit of verbal communication, we have completely lost any form of non-verbal communication we may have, except for rolling our eyes. Society and “civil” existence have ensured that we do not say what we mean, which further exacerbates the scenario.

The modern ‘civil’ society is also the most insecure. Some people overcome that insecurity by marrying money, some by marrying violence, but most people just want to overcome their insecurity by abdicating all agency to someone who can tell them what to do.

Hence, the rise of strongman leaders.

The Constitution of every country had to be written and ratified by many. They all had a stake in how the government would be run, and a fair amount of compromise was made in the ratification of every Constitution.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are both referred to as the founding fathers of the United States. When John Adams lost the election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, he was on a train, on the way to Massachusetts, on the day of the inauguration. Adams thought Jefferson was going to ruin the country and could not bear to be in Philadelphia to hand over power.

There were real differences between the men who signed the American Constitution, and consequently, there would have been a lot of bargaining between them as well. These differences were settled based on the political exigencies of the times. While amendments have been introduced since, these amendments are very hard to pass.

This is a problem that afflicts all democracies. Almost every constitution in the world was written for a different time, and they are being adhered to decades, even centuries later and being treated almost like religious doctrine.

In the book Range, the author talks about simple problems and wicked problems. Chess is a simple problem; it has a limited rule set, although seemingly large, and as the game progresses, there are only so many moves that can be made. The stock market is wicked and hard to predict. A large number of players are capable of making a large number of moves based on information asymmetry.

Having an ossified constitution makes the game of politics simple. The permutations and combinations have been well understood, and it helps the cause of political operators who have figured out how to play the game. This leaves them even fewer incentives to amend or change it.

We update everything, all the time, sometimes completely. Then why not the constitution?

The difficulty in modifying the constitution leaves us in a place where we are being governed by the dead and their compromises.