Bloomberg Opinion columnist; tweets are personal. Find my colleagues at @opinion
May 21, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Time for a longish thread 🧵 around the main points in my @opinion column today, and more generally around what I found out from reading 173 pages of the Indian Supreme Court-appointed expert panel’s report. (1/n)
@opinion This panel’s job was not to return a finding on allegations against Adani. It was tasked to see if it there were enough grounds to reject the null hypothesis of no regulatory failure. It couldn’t reject H0. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate H1, the alternative. (2/n)
I have written before about the briefcase investors. Here are some of TotalEnergies’ fellow travellers in Adani Green:
Oct 10, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Here I argue that Indian outsourcing firms need to look at the state of work in their own firms, starting with freshers’ pay that has been stuck for nearly two decades at around 350,000 rupees ($4,250) a year. (TCS just reported attrition rate of 21.5%.): bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Cloud is only 21% of tech spending, but growing much faster than legacy on-premise enterprise software like Oracle, SAP. Accenture and Deloitte have made large franchises out of implementing new tech platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday. Indian IT must compete:
Jan 22, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A little thread around this piece. Bear with me. Templeton’s India Closures Leave a Bad Taste bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
In the early ‘90s, I stumbled upon Indian financial markets as a junior employee, thanks to my friend @BhartiSolanky. Back then, in the post-Harshad Mehta, pre-MS Shoes days, our firms — category 1 merchant bankers — made it like bandits. I could project any EPS on my Lotus 123.
Nov 28, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is the most personal thing I’ve ever written. A lot of you won’t share my pessimism. That’s fine. I, too, swing between blinding hope and crushing despair. But how about a “behind-the-scenes”? A short thread to set the context for this long piece? bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-…
We like to think it was our merit and hard work, but luck and timing played a huge role in expanding the opportunity set for my generation of Indians. Just contrast the dramatically different directions the country took after the ‘66 devaluation and the ‘91 devaluation.
Apr 23, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
A short thread on where I see India is going wrong in mounting an effective economic response to COVID-19. I’ll start with my piece today, laying out a blueprint for what needs to happen. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
First of all, this isn’t something that the FM or the Guv will think up. Has to be done at the level of JS and CGM. They’ll make a plan their bosses can take to Modi. So what should urgently end is fingerprinting and point-scoring. Time to rise above all that.
Mar 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Yes Bank placed under moratorium by the RBI with a 50K rupees per month restrictions on deposit withdrawals. We must ask what the RBI’s nominee was doing on the board, poring over a bailout by an investor who was getting his teeth polished like chiclets. m.rbi.org.in//Scripts/BS_Pr…
Institutions kept selling, retail investors kept buying. The management kept showing mirages of an improbable rescue, the PR machine planted laughable stories. No regulator — banking or stocks — read the riot act then. They’re reading it to the depositors now. What a cockup.
Oct 23, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Time to set a funny question paper —>The test would cover “companies law, securities law, basic accountancy, and such other areas relevant to the functioning of an individual acting as an independent director”, the ministry said.
Q1. A guy sits on the executive floor of the bank in which you’re a director. He gets called in to make presentations to you. Do you:
a) find out who he is and if he works for the bank or the CEO;
b) eat the biscuits before Sharma, sitting next to you, polishes off the last one?
Aug 23, 2019 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
I have a few things to say about this — Need to eliminate distrust within private sector, ‘extraordinary’ steps needed: NITI Aayog on slowdown | Business News, The Indian Express. indianexpress.com/article/busine…
My first warning of an impending crisis of confidence in Indian finance was one year ago: google.com.hk/amp/s/www.bloo…
Jul 13, 2019 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Here’s a thread on Raghuram Rajan’s thought-provoking piece. First, his op-Ed: Dollar debt dangers: Budget decision to issue foreign currency debt has no real benefit and enormous risks timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit…
I know @balahla said he hadn’t seen “internationalisation” of the rupee brought into the sovereign bond debate, he’s right. I wrote about it slightly earlier, though, when Viral Acharya left.
Jun 1, 2019 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
My take on Team Modi 2.0 (written before the awful GDP data) will soon be on the web. I’ll supply a link. Here’s a thread with some thoughts: My reading of Nirmala Sitharaman as finance minister is that Modi wants to drive the agenda from the backseat. That is both good and bad.
Obviously, the economy warrants decisive leadership. A lot of buzz has been created around privatisation, labour and land reforms under Modi 2.0. I have recently argued in favour of using structures like InvIT, TOT and NIIF for asset monetisation at scale. google.com.hk/amp/s/www.bloo…
