1. Municipal bond issuance in India hit a record with nine issuances in FY26 till December, comapred with three and one in the previous two years.
The total municipal bonds outstanding as on 31st December 2025 was Rs 3,783.9 Cr, with Rs 1000 Cr issued in 2025.
First-time issuers in 2025 included Agra Nagar Nigam, Prayagraj Nagar Nigam, Varanasi Nagar Nigam and Bhavnagar Municipal Corporation, alongside repeat issuers such as Greater Chennai Corporation and Nashik Municipal Corporation. Market participants said the fiscal support under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation 2.0 (Amrut 2.0) was a key factor behind the rise in municipal bond issuances. Unlike earlier reform phases, where incentives were indirect or uncertain, the current framework provides quantified incentives that lower the cost of borrowing. First-time issuers are eligible for incentives of ₹13 crore per ₹100 crore of bonds issued, subject to caps, which reduce interest costs over long tenors. For repeat issuers, incentives are linked to green bonds, providing predictability while aligning with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives. This has made bond issuance a viable funding option for urban local bodies (ULBs).
2. Ruchir Sharma says that India must stop exporting human capital and increase its imports of financial capital.
3. India's oil import sources.
4. About malls in the US
“The good malls are doing better than ever. The bad malls are more challenged than ever,” says John O’Connor, head of acquisitions & development at O’Connor Capital Partners, a property owner. Annual sales per square foot at so-called class C malls are often below $400, while premier class A malls — the hosts of the Apple Store and Louis Vuitton — can bring in more than $1,000, according to Green Street, a real estate research group. The top 100 of America’s roughly 900 shopping malls represent about half of the sector’s asset value, according to Vince Tibone, Green Street’s mall research sector head. The bottom 350 account for just 10 per cent... Per person, mall square footage is more than 12 times higher in the US than in the UK, France or Germany, according to Moody’s Ratings.
5. India is at the lower-end of the ladder among developing countries in the adoption of electric vehicles.
7. India's rice stocks stood at 58 mt in December 2025, and incurs an annual carrying cost of $2 billion.
8. Fascinating account of how the West helped China come to control the global solar and wind power market.
China now controls more than 80 per cent of production for each key stage of solar panel manufacturing, from polysilicon ingots to wafers, cells and modules... research, technical knowhow and equipment spread from the west to China during the 1980s to 2000s. During this period US and European companies regularly sold production lines or other equipment to China and licensed or shared their technology in exchange for access to the Chinese market...Germany was a prolific exporter of solar production equipment to China... Similarly Poly Engineering, an Italian maker of polysilicon — the key ingredient in solar panels — transferred key production knowhow to China’s Daqo New Energy in 2008, helping China break the grip on polysilicon supply held by the US, Europe and Japan. That same year, Goldwind, now the world’s largest turbine manufacturer, bought a 70 per cent stake in Vensys, a German pioneer of gearless wind turbines. Goldwind had licensed Vensys’s technology for manufacture in China five years earlier. In the early days of the solar industry in the 1980s, there was “very little caution . . . No one had the fantasy to believe China would compete on an equal footing in 15 years’ time,” says Rasmus Lema, an expert on the spread of green technology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa...A turning point came towards the end of the 2000s, as China’s rapid development of factories, encouraged by the crucial development of its own polysilicon industry, helped push the industry into overcapacity.
9. Semiconductor chip prices are being squeezed upwards.
At the centre of the squeeze is DRAM, the memory used in smartphones, laptops and servers. Advanced AI processors, such as those made by Nvidia, depend on a specialised variant known as high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which stacks chips vertically to increase speed while reducing power use. The rapid construction of data-centres has sent demand for HBM soaring. Producing it is resource-intensive: HBM requires three to four times as many silicon wafers as standard DRAM. Supply is highly concentrated. Just three firms—SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics of South Korea, and Micron of America—rake in more than 90% of global DRAM revenue. All three are switching capacity to HBM, which will account for half of global DRAM revenue by the end of the decade, up from 8% in 2023, reckons Bloomberg Intelligence, a research group. HBM typically yields operating margins of 50% or more, compared with 35% for standard memory. Investors have rewarded the strategy... But the flip side is that more basic memory chips, which account for 15-40% of the cost of smartphones and PCs, are becoming scarcer and costlier. The price for the DRAM found in most consumer electronics, known as DDR4, has risen by 1,360% since April 2025 (see chart 2).
10. India's affordable housing market facts.
The recent data from Knight Frank and the National Real Estate Development Council (Naredco) underline the severity of the problem. Across India’s top eight cities, the supply-to-demand ratio for homes priced below ₹50 lakh went down to 0.36 in the first half of 2025 from 1.05 in 2019. Meanwhile, the share of affordable housing in new supply has hit 17 per cent, plunging from over 50 per cent in 2018, signalling a structural retreat by real-estate developers from the segment. The shortage in urban affordable housing is estimated at 9.4 million units, with cumulative demand from economically weaker sections (EWS), lower-income groups (LIGs), and middle-income households projected to reach 30 million units by 2030.
11. Tracxn data on startup funding in India.
India’s top 20 startups by valuation accounted for over half of the combined valuation of $69.3 billion of the top 100 startups in calendar year 2025 (CY25), according to an analysis of Tracxn data. The valuation of the top 20 startups stood at $35.7 billion in CY25... Also, the average fundraise for the top 20 startups stood at $195 million in CY25. The top five — Zepto, GreenLine, Uniphore, Infra Market, and Access Healthcare — together raised $1.26 billion last year, accounting for over 11 per cent of the total startup funding in CY25. Other startups in the top 20 list included Meril ($200 million), Spinny ($129 million), Jumbotail, and Raise ($100 million), among others... Total startup funding declined 12.5 per cent to $11.2 billion in CY25, from $12.6 billion in CY24. In CY23, the total startup funding stood at $11.1 billion...The top five startups by valuation now account for more than a third (34 per cent) of the total valuation of the top 100 startups and as much as 66 per cent of the top 20’s valuation. These companies, including Zepto, CRED, and Zetwerk, together command a valuation of $23.6 billion. Other startups in the top 20 by valuation include Udaan ($1.8 billion), Uniphore ($2.5 billion), Spinny ($1.0 billion), Jumbotail ($1.0 billion), and Raise ($1.2 billion), among others.
12. Eswar Prasad argues, rightly, that the rising Chinese trade surpluses are a bigger problem than the Trump tariffs. While the latter will possibly end when Trump leaves, the former will continue until addressed systemically.
13. Edward Luce writes that Ireland may be Ground Zero for MAGA to ignite right-wing populism in Europe, as Steve Bannon pursues an Irish Trump.
Ireland is rare among European democracies in not having a significant hard right party. Perhaps some of that oxygen is sucked up by Sinn Féin, Ireland’s leftwing nationalist party... Trump’s national security strategy highlighted Britain and Ireland as countries to which America was “sentimentally attached”. The US now officially wants to help these two “restore their former greatness”. Given Britain and Ireland’s fraught bilateral history, this is an eccentric twin ambition to announce. Ireland lacks its own Nigel Farage to play that country’s part in fighting what the document calls the west’s “civilisational erasure”. As the Irish writer and essayist Fintan O’Toole observed, “the catastrophic decline of Irish Catholicism is Exhibit A in this apocalyptic narrative”. If you add that Ireland is increasingly depicted as an antisemitic country by pro-Israel lobby groups, and the Irish economy’s heavy dependence on US corporate tax revenue, particularly from Big Tech, the country could be in for a stormy passage. Ireland would be taking a risk bigger than any of its EU partners in championing the bloc’s digital privacy and service laws.
14. Thomas Edsall has a fascinating psychoanalytical explanation of Donald Trump's actions.
It is possible to become addicted to power — particularly for certain character structures. Individuals with pronounced narcissistic, paranoid or psychopathic tendencies are especially vulnerable. For them, power does not merely enable action; it regulates inner states that would otherwise feel unmanageable.Donald Trump is an extreme illustration of this dynamic. From a psychoanalytic perspective, his narcissism is malignant in the sense that it is organized around a profound inner emptiness.Malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism and psychopathology. Because there is little internal capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation, he requires continuous external affirmation to feel real and intact. Power supplies that affirmation. Visibility, dominance and constant stimulation temporarily fill the void.
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