1. Excellent essay by William Dalrymple about the East India Company, drawing parallels with Big Tech today.
By the end of the 18th century, the East India Company had created a vast and sophisticated administration in India and built much of the London Docklands. Its annual spending in Britain — around 8.5 million pounds — equaled about a quarter of the British government’s total annual expenditure. In India it collected taxes, minted coin, administered justice, ran its own courts and diplomatic service, flew its own flag, negotiated treaties and made war on sovereign states, all in pursuit of increased dividends. An international corporation that began trading spices ended up transforming itself into a colonial superpower... For much of the 18th century it was staffed with as few as 35 people, in a building five windows wide. Yet in India the East India Company owned a private army that by 1803 numbered some 200,000 men — roughly twice the size of the standing British Army. Its stock was a pillar of British public finance, and its profitability and solvency were matters of state...
Its lawyers and lobbyists and parliamentarian shareholders slowly and subtly worked to use its immense wealth to influence and subvert legislation in its favor. In 1693 the company was discovered to be using its shares to buy influence with prominent members of Parliament and ministers. The following parliamentary investigation, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the East India Company guilty of bribery and insider trading. After that, the company became more subtle and instead backed candidates favorable to its policies. It arguably invented corporate lobbying, that alchemy by which the interests of a company somehow magically become the policies of the state. Around one in 20 members of Parliament sat on the East India Company’s board, and more than a fifth of the company’s directors sat in Parliament at some point; about 40 percent of members of Parliament were shareholders.
2. The Netherlands is Ground Zero for electricity grids that are hitting capacity constraints to evacuate the renewable capacity becoming available.
Since July 1, the grid operator has frozen new connections in Utrecht to avoid power cuts... Fewer housing projects can be developed, while plans to electrify local industry and install faster chargers for electric vehicles are on hold. Utrecht’s predicament could become the norm across the EU unless governments learn from its example and invest heavily in grids to support the bloc’s shift from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies... The EU’s fifth-largest economy has more solar panels and electric charging points per person than any other country in the region... But its failure to invest fast enough in pylons, cables and substations to support the transition means the queue of companies waiting for a power connection increased from 12,000 to 15,000 last year. Only 700 companies received a connection in 2025... Ember research suggests that in countries such as Austria, Poland, Portugal and Romania, there is enough grid capacity for less than 10 per cent of the renewables projects planned by 2030.
3. The FCNR(B) deposit scheme inflows in perspective.
Gross inflows on the current account are at $1.1 trillion a year. On the capital account, those are $1.7 trillion a year. Put together, we are getting inflows and outflows of about $2.8 trillion a year or about $11 billion a day. A comparison against conditions in the 2013-14 currency defence is instructive. At that time, gross inflows were $0.55 trillion and $0.52 trillion on the current and capital accounts, respectively, i.e. $4.3 billion a day. Today’s India is 2.6 times bigger. The FCNR (B) stratagem relies on using public money to defend the rupee. The state subsidises foreign borrowing to attract dollars. This tool requires large-scale borrowing to make a material difference against a gross external flow of $11 billion a day. A commensurately large fiscal cost falls upon the exchequer. The Ministry of Finance will choose how much it is willing to spend in exchange for this round number.
And its total cost could exceed $10 bn for the RBI
Under the Foreign Currency Non-Resident (Bank), or FCNR(B), program, the central bank agreed to shield banks from losses if the rupee weakens, through a favorable currency-swap facility estimated to cost 3 per cent-3.5 per cent a year. It will also need to absorb some of the extra cash pumped into the banking system as banks exchange the dollars they raised for rupees. The two operations could cost as much as ₹1.2 trillion ($12.7 billion) over five years, according to an analysis by Madhavi Arora, economist with Emkay Global Financial Services.
4. The rise and rise of bond yields.
5. India cash transfer schemes facts.
The Sixteenth Finance Commission estimates that unconditional transfers by states increased from ₹73,099 crore in 2018–19 to ₹2.63 trillion in 2023–24 and are at ₹4.14 trillion in 2025–26. Large-group cash transfers alone are projected at ₹.96 trillion, accounting for 47.4 per cent of all unconditional transfers, up from roughly 16 per cent in 2018–19. Social-security pensions have also risen in absolute terms, from ₹44,453 crore to a budgeted ₹1.58 trillion, but their share of unconditional transfers has fallen from 60.4 per cent to 37.9 per cent; the share going to farmers has similarly declined from about 24 per cent to 14.7 per cent. This implies that states are not merely expanding welfare but are shifting their composition towards broad category-based payments that claim an increasing share of fiscal space.
6. Europeans pull out their gold reserves from the US.
The Dutch central bank has shifted more than 78 tonnes of gold from New York to London in a politically sensitive move, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”. The transfer follows calls from European politicians and taxpayer lobbyists to repatriate gold reserves from the US, warning that an unreliable American government under President Donald Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions... The move follows a similar decision by France, which removed all of its gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026. François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the French central bank at the time, said then that the move was not politically motivated. Gold last year overtook US government bonds as the world’s largest reserve asset, according to ECB data, but some central banks are becoming increasingly skittish about storing gold in the US.
7. Interesting trends in gold prices.
For the first two decades of this century, a 1 percentage point move in US real rates typically coincided with a roughly 14 per cent move in gold in the opposite direction. That relationship ended in February 2022, when western governments froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. Reserve and asset managers globally were left confronting a simple question: if $630bn held in Treasuries, Bunds, gilts and other bonds could become inaccessible overnight, what constituted money? Their answer was gold. Emerging market central banks and sovereign funds have since increased gold allocations from 5 to 7 per cent of reserves in 2022 to 11 per cent today, still short of the 26 per cent held by developed-market peers. Between March 2022 and October 2023, US five-year real yields rose more than 4 percentage points. Based on historical relationships, gold should have fallen about 55 per cent; instead, it rose 7 per cent. Over the following two years, real yields fell less than 1 point while gold rallied 110 per cent. Gold is now far more responsive to falling real yields and less sensitive to their rise.
9. Shyam Saran describes the efforts being made by China to circumvent the US-controlled SWIFT and other cross-border financial flows management systems.
The mBridge project is a network of the central banks of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Malaysia, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, who have linked their central bank digital currencies (CBDC) on a blockchain ledger system pioneered by China, to allow virtually instant cross-border financial transactions. The pilot phase of mBridge is now over and its commercial launch is imminent... mBridge does away with the correspondent banking system... mBridge enables escape from sanctions... One should consider mBridge as only one component of the Chinese efforts to achieve the internationalisation of its currency, the yuan. There are parallel institutional and procedural tracks.
One is the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (Cips), which provides both an inter-bank messaging system like SWIFT and a clearing and settlement system. It does not seek to supplant SWIFT, but provides an efficient alternative, taking advantage of China’s role as the world’s largest trading nation and increasingly as a significant source of investment. It makes sense for partner countries to opt for yuan-designated transactions to avoid exchange risk. Increasingly Cips also avoids sanctions risk since, unlike SWIFT, it is not subject to US or Western regulation and control. This is why both Russia and Iran now use Cips almost exclusively for their cross-border financial transactions.
10. Excellent op-ed by Ajanta Krishnamurthy about the premiumisation of everything we consume.
A biscuit is no longer a biscuit. It is handcrafted, slow-baked, perhaps even inspired by some grandmother somewhere. The packet is brown, the lettering is tasteful and the quantity inside is just enough to make you wonder whether you have accidentally bought stationery. The same thing has happened to the rest of the kitchen and, increasingly, the bathroom. Detergent has become laundry care. Pickle is a small-batch preserve. Tea is a single-estate experience. Ice cream is slow-churned. Salt has become strangely ambitious. It can be Himalayan, smoked, pink, infused, mineral-rich, and important enough to deserve a place at the table. Water has perhaps had the greatest career transformation. For most of our lives, water was the one thing nobody had to explain. You drank it. You asked for more. Now there is water that sounds like a minor European aristocrat, comes in a glass bottle, is alkaline, and costs enough to make you briefly consider dehydration.
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