1. On the origins of infrastructure financing in the UK.
In the summer of 1858, Britain’s parliamentarians soaked the curtains in the Palace of Westminster with lime chloride in an attempt to counter the “Great Stink” emanating from the river Thames. It failed. The prime minister demanded the Metropolitan Board of Works construct a sewerage system, legislating to allow the board to raise £3mn. This was to be repaid by a three-penny levy on all London households for 40 years. By 1900, the municipal bond market in England was about 50 per cent of the market for UK government debt. Today it is just 4.7 per cent. Back then, most infrastructure projects were not only financed by the private sector but also backed by hypothecated cash flows from money raised locally. For example, the debt for the 1892 Elan Valley Aqueduct to pipe water into Birmingham was funded by an increase in water rates on businesses and households there. So the residents of, say, Manchester were not funding infrastructure elsewhere.
2. India is marching ahead on adoption of electrotech.
3. Germany is the poster child for central bank independence.
4. Spurred by surging data centre loads, electricity demand is rising sharply in the US.
Data centre power demand will surge from 34.7 gigawatts in 2024 to 106GW by 2035, according to BloombergNEF, a research group, equivalent to more than 80mn homes. Overall US electricity demand is forecast to jump by a quarter by 2030 and by 78 per cent by 2050, compared with 2023, according to consulting firm ICF... Between January and November, the latest month for which data is available, the cost of electricity for residential customers in the US increased by 11.5 per cent.
5. Most Indian state boards focus on memory and conceptual understanding, as opposed to analysis and application.
7. Nick Bloom, Paul Mizen, Gregory Thwaites et al have an estimate of the costs of Brexit (HT: Adam Tooze)
These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.
8. Some data on students and migrants from Asia in the US. Even as enrolment of Chinese students has declined, that of Indian students has taken off since 2014. While Chinese students were mainly for the UG programs, Indian students have been mostly for PG studies. (HT: Adam Tooze)
10. Japan's public debt at 237% of GDP is way off the charts, and considerably constrains Sanae Takaichi's room to manoeuvre.
11. Tej Parikh writes that UK's biggest economic challenge is its political instability.
The UK doesn’t have a productivity puzzle. The causes of Britain’s weak underlying growth are well known and discussed ad nauseam. Why policymakers aren’t delivering is the bigger conundrum. Instability undermines business investment, hiring and planning decisions, and absorbs the political bandwidth that could be used to address lacklustre growth... Uncertainty and slow growth weaken the appeal of UK assets too. Pound sterling and British stocks have underperformed relative to peers over the past decade. Long-term UK government borrowing costs have remained elevated compared with other G7 nations, having come under frequent selling pressure thanks to fiscal mishaps... For all the turbulence, Britain remains attractive. London remains the leading European destination for foreign direct investment. The country’s strengths in finance, university research, tech and life sciences are draws. Cheap assets add to the allure.
12. Fascinating account of China's largest hotel chain, H World, with 12,700 hotels, adding 1700 hotels in 2025, aiming for 20,000 hotels by 2030, and took in 8.3 m guests during last year's Lunar New Year holiday. As a reference, Marriot has 10,000 hotels worldwide.
H World was launched in 2005 by Ji Qi, co-founder of online travel booking site Ctrip, after he took inspiration from the multi-brand French group Accor... Its Hanting Inn brand, a fixture of the streets of major Chinese cities, often charges well below Rmb300 ($43) a night, while mid-range Ji Hotels typically cost slightly more. H World has several other brands, while internationally it also operates German brand Steigenberger. Its franchise model mirrors an approach that other Chinese businesses have used to expand in consumer sectors from bubble tea to fast food. For the “vast majority” of its franchised hotels, H World retains a degree of control, sending in hotel managers on its own payroll under what it calls a “manachise” approach. In the US, “typically the franchisees decide almost everything . . . we think in China this would not work,” said He. “A lot of people would not abide by your rules.”
13. VC funding for India's tech startups has fallen 73% since 2021, which also coincided with the rise of Byjus.
14. Fascinating account of the Jeffrey Epstein world.
15. Shruti Rajagopalan has a good essay on India's AI ambitions, and more. This on regulation.
The EU went first and went heavy, a binding cross-sector AI Act with tiered risk categories, compliance obligations, and a governance apparatus that could employ a small city. China took the authoritarian-efficiency route. Regulate fast, regulate specifically, and make sure the state retains control over what models can say and do. The US, characteristically, has been light touch at the federal level, leaving governance to a patchwork of executive orders, state laws, and vibes. India, with these guidelines, has landed somewhere interesting, closer to the US in its instinct to avoid a standalone AI law, but far more deliberate in articulating why it is choosing not to regulate horizontally yet. The framework’s core bet is that India’s existing legal infrastructure (the IT Act, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, sectoral regulators like the RBI and SEBI) can handle most AI risks if enforced properly and updated where needed...Do not regulate the technology itself, govern its applications through the regulators who already understand those domains. Build incident databases so you learn from failures instead of pretending to prevent them through preemptive compliance theater. Use “techno-legal” mechanisms (standards, system-architecture-level controls, provenance tools) so that compliance scales without armies of auditors. Create sandboxes so regulators can see what actually goes wrong before writing rules. The explicit preference for “innovation over restraint,” listed as a core principle, rejecting the EU’s precautionary posture. Both committees looked at Brussels and decided that regulating AI the way you regulate pharmaceuticals, before you know what the side effects actually are, is a bad trade for a country where AI adoption is still nascent and unevenly distributed... The liability framework it recommended is graded. The regulated entity remains liable to consumers for any losses, but first-time failures where the entity followed prescribed safeguards and reported promptly would not automatically trigger full supervisory penalties. A rigid liability regime that punishes every probabilistic error will cause institutions to constrain AI capabilities to the point of uselessness.
16. Shyam Saran writes about Marco Rubio's speech at the Munich Security Conference, describing it as an "unabashed white, racist manifesto".
His remarks celebrated the history of conquest, exploitation, barbarity, and even ethnic cleansing, which has marked the history of Western imperialism and colonial empire-building across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He wants this to be a source of pride and inspiration, not something to “atone for purported sins of past generations”. What is perplexing is that the history of the world after the Second World War, which is often described as an American era, is instead seen as a period of Western decline:“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it [i.e. the West] was contracting. The great western empires had entered into terminal decline accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.” Anti-colonial uprisings, which would include our own against British colonialism, are not celebrated as struggles for freedom and human dignity but as evidence of the abdication of the Western will to rule. Strange that this should come from a representative of a country that is celebrating 250 years of its own successful war of independence against British colonialism.
17. AI is leading to changes in software industry business models, resulting in less predictability and more uncertainty.
Software companies have, for decades, sold their wares on a “per seat” basis, where an employee gets unlimited use of a package of tools. Think of the traditional Microsoft 365 licence... In a world of AI “agents” carrying out duties autonomously, that model makes less sense. The unit of account will no longer be users but tasks completed, queries undertaken, and data “tokens” used. Sticky, predictable, year-round software-as-a-service revenue — the kind of thing that private equity firms love because it makes companies easier to load up with debt — may become an endangered species. Some are already embracing the post-seat era. Snowflake, a data management software maker, charges based on consumption, as does Databricks, an unlisted hotshot valued at $134bn, according to Crunchbase. ServiceNow is one of many working on hybrid models, where monthly fees meet pay-as-you-use add-ons... consumption-based pricing... Software companies’ predictability was an asset that contributed to high valuations.
18. Europe telecom industry facts of the day
Europe has more than 44 mobile operators that each have more than 500,000 subscribers compared with eight in the US and just four in China, according to industry group Connect Europe’s State of Digital Communications 2026 report.
19. China high-speed railway facts.
China’s railways have in recent days been ferrying about 20mn passengers a day, with half a billion train trips expected over the 40-day lunar new year period... Nearly three-quarters of passengers will travel at speeds of greater than 200kph, streaking across the country in the white and silver high-speed trains that have become a defining symbol of China’s industrial might. In December, China reached 50,000km of high-speed rail, enough track to circle the globe, compared with 8,500km in the whole of the EU as of 2023. Just over two decades after it was launched, the network now links 97 per cent of cities with populations of more than half a million... China opened its first high-speed passenger line in 2003 between Qinhuangdao and Shenyang in the north-east, with speeds of 200kph. The World Bank estimated in 2019 that China spent about $17mn to $21mn per kilometre on high-speed rail... Another 20,000km of track is planned by 2035...China has benefited from a combination of relatively cheap land, enormous scale, standardised designs and a permissive regulatory environment, experts say. The country’s rail project is now overseen by China State Railway Group, a huge state-owned enterprise that operates the network and helps fund new line development. The group plans to invest Rmb520bn ($75bn) this year... The group’s total liabilities have mounted to Rmb6.4tn. China State Railway reported a modest profit of Rmb11.7bn in the first three quarters of 2025, following several years of losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Analysts said profits from the freight network helped offset losses from passenger high-speed rail. Local governments typically share the burden of building and operating the tracks. But many are struggling with their own shaky finances following the pandemic and the collapse of the property market.
20. Finally, the US Supreme Court has struck down the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. Also this.
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