1. A fascinating article by Ed Conway documents how a cod fish caught off the Scottish coast travels 30,000 nautical miles to Rotterdam, Shandong, China (for manual deboning and skinning), and back to the UK, where it is breaded and sold as fish fingers.
2. AI solves the Navier Stokes equation breakdown.
Scientists plug in numbers to the NS equations to derive accurate answers for the behaviour of moving fluids. But the NS equations can sometimes return apparent nonsense, predicting things like infinite velocity and zero volume (called a “singularity”)... Can it be proved that the NS mathematics don’t allow infinite velocity? Or alternatively, can it be proved that this can happen in some theoretical cases, weird as that may seem? Mathematicians refer to this possibility as a “breakdown” in the “existence and smoothness” of NS. .. NS is one of the seven famous Millennium Problems that were listed in 2000. The Clay Institute offers a prize of $1million for a proof that, one way or another, addresses four specific conditions for NS.On Tuesday, September 8, OpenAI announced that it had found a solution to the NS problem by using a new AI model after 88 hours of intense computation involving 10,000 AI agents and 17 hours of verification. The agents exchanged 3 million messages and used 130 billion output tokens, which amounts to costs of well over $10 million. OpenAI claims its AI resolved two out of the four statements in the proof demanded by the Millennium Prize and that, indeed, infinite velocity is theoretically possible under certain conditions.
3. Brilliant description of the Dauphin discount, applied when a founder-owner hands over the reins to his entitled but not similarly competent children.
4. There may have been an inflation regime shift in the US in the last few years. Consumer prices overall have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2019. That’s two and a half times as much as they went up from 2012 to 2019.
The interest rate demanded by investors to absorb this debt appears not to be a straight linear function of its growth. Instead, more debt seems to accelerate the rise in the rate demanded. The reason lies in who buys the debt. Nineteen years ago, 76 per cent of US Treasury bonds were held by price-insensitive investors, such as central banks, who bought them more or less reflexively according to their stable reserve-management policies. Today, they hold only 43 per cent. The majority is now held by price-sensitive investors, such as households and investment funds, which demand greater returns as government debt grows and inflation erodes their purchasing power...
The twin problems of surging Treasury supply and stagnant foreign official demand will be exacerbated further still if new Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh ploughs forward with his stated ambition of reducing the central bank’s security holdings. The last episode of Fed balance-sheet reduction saw the share of Treasuries held by price-sensitive investors soar by 17 percentage points over 2022 to 2025, while the so-called term premium — the extra compensation demanded by investors to hold long-term debt — rose by 1.1 percentage points. Given the continued increase in price-sensitive investor dominance, further Fed balance-sheet reduction could see yet sharper rises in the price of long-term US debt.
Founders Fund, for example, turned a roughly $600mn investment in Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI group into a stake worth more than $50bn at the company’s initial public offering, according to PitchBook estimates.
8. More on the collateral benefits of Aliko Dangote's business activities (HT: Adam Tooze).
Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, wants his drivers, cooks and security guards to own a share of the continent’s largest refinery. At a signing ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria, on Monday, 7 September, Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals (DPRP) free establishment zone launched the formal process for what is expected to be Africa’s largest public share sale, aiming to raise ₦2.15trn ($1.4bn). The offer comprises 4.1 billion ordinary shares at ₦525 per share, with a minimum subscription of 10 shares. It opens on 14 September and closes on 13 October. “There is no segregation of who can own the share. We want every human being living on the continent to be part of this action,” says Dangote, president and chief executive of Dangote Industries Limited. “This is why we have called it the IPO for the people.”He said the offer, which opens on 14 September and closes on 13 October, is designed to allow “drivers, cooks, servers, our managers, everybody” to own a stake in the refinery. The IPO is targeting about 10 million retail investors, according to FirstCap Limited, one of the parties to the transaction. “This transaction is not just about the size of the offer; it’s about the significance and how it’s going to shape retail investment in Nigeria’s capital markets,” said Ukandu Ukandu, MD/CEO of FirstCap, describing the deal as digitally driven and built for mass participation. “Family members, security guards, drivers, colleagues, schoolmates, community members are all encouraged to participate.” Dangote described the raise as less of a financing exercise than a wealth-distribution one, calling the ₦2trn target “too small” and “a meagre amount” relative to the group’s needs. He said the proceeds are earmarked for the refinery’s expansion.
9. Tiruppur facts of the week.
Its knitwear exports rose from $3.3 billion in 2020-21 to $5.3 billion in 2024-25 (TEA, 2026). The cluster accounts for about 68 per cent of India’s knitwear exports and supports the livelihoods of more than a million workers, around 70 per cent of them being women. Within roughly 20 km, yarn, knitting, dyeing, printing, stitching, finishing, packaging and dispatch are woven into one production ecosystem. Nearly 20,000 units operate across different stages, from knitting, dyeing and printing to garmenting and ancillary activities. This is the ecosystem effect where firms specialise, workers specialise, and thousands of jobs are created around a common market.
10. India's affordable housing market facts.
The preference for midsize housing priced between ₹45 lakh and ₹90 lakh fell to 21 per cent in H1 2026, from as high as 35 per cent in H1 2021. Similarly, preference for housing priced below ₹45 lakh declined from 27 per cent in H1 2021 to 18 per cent in H1 2026. “This is also mirrored in supply, with affordable housing’s share of new launches across the top seven cities declining from 26 per cent in H1 2021 to just 8 per cent in H1 2026,” says Anuj Puri, chairman of Anarock.
11. KP Krishnan makes very important points while questioning the RBI's recent FCNR (B) scheme which attracted $136 billion.
The capital flow of $136 billion is brought in by providing currency hedging to commercial banks at no cost. A forward guarantee on the exchange rate creates a contingent liability for the state. If macroeconomic fundamentals guide the exchange rate to ₹110 per dollar in three years, the RBI will pay ₹15 per dollar. This is a cost of approximately ₹2 trillion... Such tricks have been done before. India Development Bonds 1991 raised an estimated 0.6 per cent of gross domestic product. Resurgent India Bonds of 1998 raised 1 per cent, and India Millennium Deposits 2000 raised 1.2 per cent of GDP. The 2013 FCNR(B) exercise raised 1.4 per cent of GDP. The 2026 FCNR(B) raised 3.5 per cent of GDP. The scale, the opacity, the complexity have gone up. ... The daily inflow and outflow across India’s borders is $11 billion. The global daily trading volume on the rupee is $140 billion. Throwing just $2 billion a day at the problem for 250 days will burn through $500 billion.We should instead take one step back and ask the foundational question: All this drama is in return for what? Recent research by Hande et al. (2026, https://bit.ly/4dlXP5d) indicates that the natural annualised volatility of the USD/INR exchange rate, without intervention, is approximately 7.5 per cent a year. The apparatus of intervention generates a realised volatility of roughly 5 per cent a year. We suffer fiscal risk, distorted monetary policy, instability, and constraints on financial development, which impact the people through inferior economic growth. In return, we get a 2.5 percentage point reduction in currency volatility, which benefits a small set of business users.
12. This is a staggering statistic on IPOs
Anthropic’s investors are expecting the company to reach a valuation of $2tn when it goes public in the coming weeks. Add in SpaceX, which began trading at $2tn after its IPO in June, and OpenAI, which is considering raising money privately at $1.2tn ahead of a public listing next year, and these companies alone could be worth well north of $5tn. Now compare that with the entire history of IPOs from 1980 to 2025. The 3,365 tech companies that went public in that period were worth a combined $4.1tn when they started trading, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, emeritus professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.
13. The return of conglomerates, but with overlapping national strategic goals.
In China, Huawei has gone from an empire with two business lines to a local champion with 70 per cent of sales at home in five divisions. Chinese car companies own their supply chains — BYD operates ships. To defuse sovereignty fears abroad, they are willing to forfeit control, using licensing and joint ventures. India’s Reliance and Tata have re-embraced nation building across industries, from cola to air defence. Even in America, Amazon and Alphabet have become conglomerates that own parts of their supply chains, such as chip design. SpaceX’s strategy is to be a techno-national champion with up to nine divisions, from asteroid mining to tourism. In the pursuit of state-endorsed AI, OpenAI has gone further than Amodei, offering Uncle Sam an equity stake. US pharmaceutical companies want new drugs invented in China, but geopolitics makes takeovers impossible. Instead, there is a surge in licensing. Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer have made bets worth up to $26bn. In Europe, some firms are diversifying to plug strategic holes. The parent of Lidl, a supermarket, does data centres. Renault is expanding into military drones. Governments are trying to dilute US tech companies’ control over their local subsidiaries.
14. Gig work platforms are a form of unemployment insurance, and are now running the risk of being disrupted by the likes of autonomous vehicles and robo-delivery agents.
Gig platforms have indeed become a safety net for people who have fallen out of — or struggled to access — the formal labour market. A report by the World Bank in 2023 estimated there were between 154mn and 435mn online gig workers globally, representing between 4.4 and 12.5 per cent of the global labour force. Among the advantages of this development, according to the report’s authors, are that it “helps manage income shock” and “serves as unemployment insurance”.
China is perhaps the best example of a country in which gig work has served as a labour market shock absorber. Amid a prolonged construction downturn and the increasing automation of manufacturing work, the number of people who work as food delivery or ridesharing drivers in China increased by 10mn in two years to reach 53mn in 2025, according to estimates by the China New Employment Forms Research Center, a Beijing think-tank.
15. A very good oped by Boddu Srujana raises the important point about what UPI has done for its users, especially those in the informal sector whose services are now captured in the formal net. She writes,
This system has made India’s informal workers extraordinarily visible to banks, lenders, the state and to the platforms that manage their labour, without making them correspondingly secure... A worker who has been absorbed into a real-time national payments system is traceable and taxable, still has no pension, no enforceable minimum earning, and no institutional means of bargaining... The JAM trinity — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, mobile — was to deliver subsidies with less leakage. UPI extended that logic to everyday commerce by enabling a vegetable vendor not to worry about carrying cash, with payments settled in seconds rather than requiring a trip to a bank that takes hours. But this is not the same as securing income and financial inclusion. As operationalised in India, it has functioned as a substitute for the much harder political project of labour formalisation...A worker’s UPI trail has become the raw material for an entire private lending and “alternative credit scoring” industry, sitting atop a public rail, useful to someone who lacked collateral, but built with little meaningful consent. The same logic now governs platform work. UPI-enabled instant settlement is what allowed gig and delivery platforms to scale... it has done so by making these workers legally almost unclassifiable — employee or contractor — and by subjecting them to algorithmic discipline such as ratings and incentive structures, without any corresponding algorithmic right to contest a rating or know why an account was switched off.
16. Finally, some FDI facts about Indian states.
Nearly 82 per cent of all FDI equity inflows into India went to just six states or Union territories — Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana) — from January 2000 to March 2026... Among sectors, services had the highest share at 16.37 per cent in gross FDI equity inflows from January 2000 to December 2025, followed by computer software and hardware (15.62 per cent) and trading (6.55 per cent). Financial services accounted for the largest share within the services sector.
And several questions about the value of EoDB and Business Reform Action Plan (BRAP) rankings in determining FDI flows.
States such as Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu fared poorly in the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) rankings released by the government in different years over the past decade. For instance, Delhi and Tamil Nadu featured outside the top 10 in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019, while Maharashtra and Karnataka’s best performance in these four years was the eighth rank... On the other hand, states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Telangana had relatively better rankings but considerably lower FDI inflows to boot... None of the top FDI receiving states was in the top two categories in the latest ranking of 2024. Experts say EoDB and BRAP rankings are not the prime reason behind FDI inflows. Instead inflows reflect states’ infrastructure, access to ports, prosperity and presence of industrial networks.
No comments:
Post a Comment