Weekend reading links

1. Beneficiaries of George Soros and his Open Foundation.

Among the beneficiaries is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán whose Oxford scholarship was paid by Soros in 1989. Talk about no good deed going unpunished. Another kind of beneficiary is Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, who ran Soros’s hedge fund for many years. Soros was the anchor $2bn investor in Bessent’s own hedge fund, Key Square Group, in 2015.

2. Chinese companies produce many AI tech components.

3. Yogendra Yadav reviews Partha Chatterjee's new book, For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State. 

4. The US tariffs latest update.

5. India's IT industry facts of the day

The top five Indian IT firms had free cash flows of nearly $13bn in the 2023-24 financial year, according to HFS Research. And Infosys said on September 11 it had approved a $2bn share buyback offer — a week before the Trump order. Yet the R&D to sales ratio for India’s IT industry is abysmal: 0.88 per cent on average, according to a 2024 report by India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

6. China moves to restrict Ericsson and Nokia equipment in their telecom networks. 

Chinese state-backed buyers of IT equipment — which include mobile network operators, utilities and other industries — have begun more closely analysing and policing foreign bids. That process has required contracts by Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia to be submitted for “black box” national security reviews by the Cyberspace Administration of China where the companies are not told how their gear is assessed. The reviews by the powerful tech watchdog can stretch three months or longer. Even in cases where the European groups ultimately secure approval, the lengthy and uncertain audits often leave them at a disadvantage to Chinese rivals that face no such scrutiny, the people said... Beijing’s growing sales restrictions have collapsed Ericsson’s and Nokia’s combined market share in China’s mobile telecoms networks to about 4 per cent last year from 12 per cent in 2020.

Amidst these moves, Europeans have been half-hearted in their efforts to restrict Huawei and ZTE. 

Huawei and ZTE have retained 30 to 35 per cent of the European mobile infrastructure market, down only 5 to 10 percentage points from 2020, data from Dell’Oro Group shows. Germany has 59 per cent of installed 5G gear sourced from Chinese groups, according to John Strand of Strand Consult, even though the country plans to phase out high risk Chinese vendors by 2029.

7. FT writes on the wealth of the super-rich

When Forbes magazine released its first global billionaires list in 1987, just 140 names appeared on it. The 2025 version featured more than 3,000 people, worth a collective $16tn. Even allowing for factors such as the rise of China and over three decades of inflation, it is a staggering increase in both numbers and values; the net worth of Elon Musk, judged the world’s richest person in April 2025, was estimated at $342bn — compared with $295bn for the entire class of 1987. Globally, the average wealth of the top 0.0001 per cent of the population grew on average 7.1 per cent a year between 1987 and 2024, compared to 3.2 per cent for the average adult, according to Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and at the University of California, Berkeley... The top 400 wealthiest Americans had a total effective tax rate of 23.8 per cent of income in the years from 2018 to 2020, including individual income taxes, estate and gift taxes, and corporate taxes. In comparison, the rate for the wider US population was 30 per cent, rising to 45 per cent for the highest-earning workers.

Historically, asset-based taxes were the main revenue source for governments. Taxes on income in the UK, for example, were a mid to late-20th century phenomenon closely tied to the emergence of a welfare state. Now, as demographics worsen (with fewer worker and more retired people), the case for wealth taxes is becoming more compelling. 

8. How housing prices in the UK have changed over the last 35 years. 

9. GCCs are cannibalising the business of India's IT services firms.

As GCCs grow, they are eating into the pie of IT services majors, both in terms of business and skilled talent... Out of the 200,000 tech roles in India in FY25, approximately 120,000 were in GCCs, with a 10–15% year-on-year growth, said Vikram Ahuja, co-founder of ANSR, a GCC solutions platform... The real evolution started with traditional companies coming in to set up true capability centres, like [department-store chain] JCPenney, [luxury-superstore chain] Saks Fifth Avenue, [lingerie retailer] Victoria’s Secret…They have no business to be experimenting with this concept. All airlines, hotel chains, car-rental companies are coming. So, it’s become industry agnostic. On the contrary, the more low-tech and the more traditional you are, the more the need [for a GCC]... Lloyds has hired over 2,500 engineers in Hyderabad within 14 months, with 95% focused on tech. At Barclays’ India operations, two–thirds of its tech workforce is now in-house—a stark jump from just about 33% a decade ago. Even Indian lenders are following suit. Just six months ago, RBL Bank achieved a 60:40 split between in-house and outsourced tech talent—a significant leap from the 35:65 ratio of a few years ago.

A major reason for the exit is the low and stagnant wages paid by IT services firms, even as the scope of work expands. 

9. Private equity is taking over India's IB and IGCSE school chains. And results are not good.

Private equity firms are betting big on Indian education, and their playbook mirrors a Western model—optimised for cost control, standardised for scale-up, and centralised for effective management... Both CBSE and state-board campuses face tighter fee caps and myriad state-level approvals. International boards like International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge have a wider fee latitude and can levy “development” charges, creating room for upgrades and margins. The model makes money within India’s nonprofit rulebook. The school usually sits in a Section-8 entity to satisfy K–12 regulations. A for-profit services arm—typically charging 10–15% of school revenue through the likes of management fees, royalties, and infrastructure leases—operates on the side... 

Investors like GSF fall back on the same approach with each school: centralise leadership, trim excess, introduce standardised systems, and make visible infrastructure upgrades. But beneath the surface, the effects of this strategy vary sharply... While fee hikes have remained within the standard 5–10% range at premium schools like Sancta Maria (Rs 7–8 lakh in annual fees)—already operating near permissible ceilings—some lower-fee campuses could see steeper increases... Infrastructure investment varies significantly by operator and campus... The international school Manthan in Hyderabad saw 60–70% staff attrition after a 100% ISP acquisition... At TIPS Coimbatore, acquired by Globeducate, 20% of the staff left after the founder exited... Student numbers, too, fell by nearly a fifth at Glendale and Oakridge in the years after their acquisition... Pre-acquisition pay rises of 8–15% have been slashed to 2–7% under new management—standard practice in the West, but a sharp adjustment in Indian schools... The result: well-trained, experienced teachers leave, and classroom quality drops... The same Western-school playbook that made these operators successful abroad doesn’t map cleanly onto India’s hyper-competitive, founder-led education landscape.