1. Adani plans to enter wind turbine manufacturing, unsettling Suzlon.
After scaling India’s renewable energy landscape faster than anyone else, across solar parks, transmission networks and green hydrogen, the Adani Group now wants to manufacture wind turbines not just for itself, but for the market... Adani has said it wants to deploy around 30GW of wind capacity by 2030, or a third of the country’s 100GW target by then. Until recently, Adani’s turbine manufacturing was widely assumed to be a captive exercise, designed primarily to feed the group’s own rapidly expanding power needs... For Suzlon Energy Ltd, India’s largest wind turbine maker and one of the few global survivors in a brutally cyclical industry, the timing is unsettling. The company has only just emerged from a long financial winter. It is debt-free, profitable again, and benefiting from a renewed policy and market push for wind as India confronts a structural mismatch in its power mix... Apart from Adani, the JSW Group and Reliance Industries Ltd have also disclosed their intent to manufacture turbines. These are conglomerates that can absorb early losses, compress supply chains and tolerate long gestation periods.
2. Italian and Spanish bond yields have declined as markets reward them for measures taken for fiscal discipline.
Government borrowing costs paid by Italy and Spain have fallen to their lowest level relative to Germany in 16 years, as investors reward Rome and Madrid for belt-tightening and grow more worried about surging debt elsewhere in the Eurozone. The extra yield on 10-year Italian debt compared with German Bunds — a closely watched measure of the risk associated with lending to Italy — narrowed to within 0.7 percentage points this month, the lowest since late 2009. Strong economic growth in Spain has helped to cut its 10-year spread with Germany to less than 0.5 percentage points. That is also the lowest since before the Eurozone crisis, when high debt loads drove up both countries’ borrowing costs and stoked worries about the currency bloc breaking up... Investors point to Spain’s improving economic trajectory and Italy’s prudent fiscal policies under a politically stable government, as part of a broad reduction in fiscal risks for these countries as well as for other previous debt hotspots such as Greece.
3. Roger Federer's commencement speech at Dartmouth College is a classic. He makes the point by invoking the fact that, though he won almost 80% of his 1526 singles matches, he only won 54% of all points.
“When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot,” he told the crowd. “You teach yourself to think, ‘OK, I double-faulted. It’s only a point.’ When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world, and it is. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point and the next point after that, with intensity, clarity and focus.”
This has resonance elsewhere.
It’s an easy concept to apply to almost any field. In 2022, Ronald van Loon, a portfolio manager at BlackRock, authored a paper on the percentage of investment decisions that need to be correct to beat market benchmarks for returns. He researched markets, crunched the numbers and came up with a number: As low as 53 percent.
4. Men's athletics records dating back to the 20th century.
Jonathan Edwards (triple jump, 18.29m, 1995), Mike Powell (long jump, 8.95m, 1991), Jan Železný (javelin, 98.48m, 1996), Javier Sotomayor (high jump, 2.45m, 1993) and Yuriy Sedykh (hammer throw, 86.74m, 1986)
The so-called Shiller cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio of the US stock market, which is ending 2025 just shy of 40, an extremely high level relative to history. The only time the S&P 500 has had a higher ratio was just prior to the dotcom bubble bursting in the early 2000s. Starting from valuations at this level, Adler said, the market has never generated a return above inflation for investors.
6. The Big Three IPOs expected in 2026
OpenAI, which is currently valued at $500bn, is engaged in discussions with investors about a new fundraise at a valuation of $750bn or more... SpaceX is working on a secondary stock sale which would value it at $800bn, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Anthropic is also in talks for new funding, which investors expect will value the company at more than $300bn... Figma, Klarna, CoreWeave and Chime were among the technology groups to list in 2025, contributing to a total of more than $30bn in US IPO proceeds in the first nine months, the bulk of it from technology groups, according to EY. This year’s total is likely to dwarf that sum, if even one of the three big start-ups goes public. SpaceX alone is widely expected to surpass Saudi Aramco’s $29bn raise in 2019 to become the largest public listing.
7. Good interactive graphic of President Trump's epic conflicts of interest in his government deal-making.
8. Japanese scallop exports have become the latest victim of China's weaponisation of trade.
As China has emerged as a global economic power, its 1.4 billion citizens have become critical consumers of international goods. Beijing has dangled market access to its growing middle class as a diplomatic lever, imposing import restrictions for Taiwanese pineapples, Australian wine, American soybeans and Lithuanian beef in recent years...
The latest trade spat between Japan and China began in August 2023, when Beijing suspended imports of Japanese seafood after the release of treated wastewater from the decommissioned Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. While Japanese officials and U.N. regulators defended the move — noting the water was filtered and heavily diluted — Beijing protested. Before the freeze, China was the top buyer of Japanese seafood, with scallops accounting for most of that trade. Hokkaido’s scallops, harvested from the region’s nutrient-rich, frigid waters, are prized for a distinct buttery flavor and deep umami. They command a premium in China, where they have become a staple luxury at high-end celebratory banquets... In 2022, the year before the halt, Japan exported roughly $641 million worth of scallops, with China accounting for more than half of all sales. Scallop exports plunged 30 percent in 2023 from a combination of China’s trade ban and a fallow period of production...Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, stated in the National Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could be a “survival-threatening situation,” a legal trigger implying Japan could use military force. It was a rare public declaration regarding an island that Beijing considers a breakaway province. Within two weeks, Beijing abruptly froze all new seafood export applications.
9. Nokia's successful reinventions.
By 2000, Nokia had 26.4 per cent of the global handset market, according to CCS Insight. At its peak in 2000, amid the mania of the dotcom bubble, Nokia was worth about €286bn and was estimated to be contributing about 4 per cent of Finland’s GDP… However, Nokia’s failure to grasp the signficance of the smartphone era, ushered in with the release of the first iPhone in 2007, ultimately cost it dearly… With the writing on the wall, Nokia sold its devices and services division — which housed its once world-beating mobile phone business — to Microsoft for €5.4bn in 2014. Its revenues had fallen from a peak of €37.7bn in 2007 to just €10.7bn by the time it was sold…
With the Nokia brand rapidly disappearing from consumers’ minds, it fell to new chief executive Rajeev Suri to chart a new course for the company. Nokia’s €1.7bn acquisition of Siemens’ stake in a networks joint venture in 2013 suddenly made up about 90 per cent of Nokia’s revenues after it got out of the handset business. “That had to be the foundation because you cannot invent a company on a weak core,” Suri, who left Nokia in 2020, told the FT, adding that his “first priority” was to “remove any ambiguity about what Nokia was going to be”. To turn Nokia into a major player in the networks business. Suri made the biggest acquisition in Nokia’s history: a contentious €15.6bn deal for French network provider Alcatel-Lucent in 2015.
10. BSE Sensex
The BSE Sensex has compounded at just over 13.5 per cent annually over the past four decades, making the Indian stock market one of the best performers globally in US dollar terms.
11. Another K-shaped signature of the US economy (HT: Adam Tooze)
12. Finally, the audacious US invasion of Venezuela and capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his family will be discussed much in the days ahead. The NYT has an early editorial that highlights one aspect.
Mr. Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy... claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
For India, the National Security Strategy, and its operationalisation through actions like the above, should be a wake-up call that the US can no longer be relied on in any meaningful manner in case of any conflict with China.
