The most powerful banker in America just said something at a polite Norwegian conference that most CEOs will not say out loud.

“There will be some kind of bond crisis.”

Jamie Dimon is not given to drama. That makes the sentence heavier, not lighter.

A thread on what he said, and what it means for India 🧵 Dimon named the ingredients.

Geopolitics. Oil. Government deficits.

His point was not that any single one of them breaks the market. His point is they are all stacking at the same time, and we do not get to choose which combination becomes the trigger.

“They may go away, but they may not.”

UAE just left OPEC.

After 59 years. Effective May 1.

Third largest producer in the cartel. Walking out in the middle of a Middle East war.

This isn’t an oil price story. It’s a regime change story.
🧵 OPEC was founded in 1960. The UAE joined in 1967.

Qatar left in 2019. Indonesia suspended membership in 2016. Angola left in 2023.

But UAE is different. It’s the third largest producer behind Saudi and Iraq. Capacity above 4 million barrels a day. ADNOC targeting 5 million by 2027.

You don’t replace that with a press release.

Everyone is talking about the dollar dying.

Petrodollar collapsing. BRICS settling oil in yuan. Bitcoin tolls in the Strait of Hormuz.

The story most people are telling is wrong. Not because the data is wrong, but because they are watching the wrong system.

A 🧵 The popular story:

The US Navy guards the Gulf. Saudis price oil in dollars. Saudis park profits in US Treasuries. America projects power, the world holds dollars.

Take away the Navy, take away the petrodollar deal, the dollar dies.

It is a clean story. It is also backwards.

Scott Bessent just told a Senate subcommittee that Gulf allies and several Asian nations have quietly requested dollar swap lines from the US.

The UAE is confirmed. Indonesia, Korea are stressed. Markets haven’t broken. Yet.

A queue is forming. That’s the story. 🧵 Swap lines are insurance.

They let a foreign central bank access dollars in a crunch, without selling US Treasuries in a fire sale.

The Fed has used them exactly three times at scale. 2008. 2012. 2020.

Each time, after the crisis hit. Not before.

Everyone reading the Trump-UAE swap line story as American generosity has it backwards.

The UAE’s central bank governor walked into Washington last week and asked for it. Not the other way round.

That reframe changes everything. Gulf sovereigns do not ask the Fed for swap lines.

ADIA alone is estimated above one trillion dollars. UAE runs a current account surplus. They have been the lender, not the borrower, for two decades.

If their central bank is asking, their internal stress tests are showing scenarios they do not want public.

India’s weight-loss drug market just ran a live experiment in price elasticity.

Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide patent expired 20 March 2026.

Within 3 weeks:

15+ generics launched

Cheapest at Rs 2,000/month (branded was Rs 10,000+)

Novo cut Ozempic and Wegovy prices by 36-48%

But here is the part nobody saw coming.
🧵 Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro is STILL under patent in India.

Nothing changed legally for Mounjaro.

And yet. In one month:

Tirzepatide share fell 71% → 64%

Semaglutide share rose 25% → 33%

Mounjaro sales dropped $14.6 mn → $12.3 mn

A patented monopoly product lost 15% of its share to a competing molecule’s generics. In 30 days.

Iran just declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open.”

Oil fell 9 percent. Stocks ripped to all-time highs.

Before you celebrate, read the next tweet. “Open” comes with three words buried in the announcement.

“On the coordinated route.”

Iranian state TV then clarified: passage “is not possible without coordination of the IRGC navy.”

That is not open. That is permissioned access.

SBI Funds Management is India’s largest AMC. It’s planning a ₹13,000 crore IPO by September.

Before inviting you in, the promoters paid themselves ₹3,562 crore in dividends. In just 9 months.

That’s more than the company earned in those 9 months.

Let me show you what I mean. 🧵 Here’s SBI Funds Management’s dividend history, straight from the DRHP.

FY2023: ₹176 Cr dividend on ₹1,340 Cr profit. 13% payout.

FY2024: ₹203 Cr on ₹2,073 Cr profit. 10% payout.

FY2025: ₹1,118 Cr on ₹2,540 Cr profit. 44% payout.

9M FY2026: ₹3,562 Cr on ₹2,433 Cr profit. 146% payout.

The dividend in 9 months of FY2026 is more than double the total dividends of the previous three full years combined.

The richest sovereigns on the planet just raised $9.5 billion in quiet.

Abu Dhabi $4.5 bn. Qatar $3 bn. Kuwait $2 bn.

All via private placements this April. No public roadshow. No price discovery.

When countries sitting on $3.5 trillion in sovereign wealth borrow in whispers, that is the story. Private placement means you call up Pimco, BlackRock, a handful of large funds, and negotiate the coupon directly.

You know your cost of borrowing before you sign.

Public markets force you to discover it in real time. Gulf states did not want that discovery.

Ask why.

This morning I posted three threads.

Thread 1: S&P rallying into the blockade.

Thread 2: Structural risks nobody is pricing.

Thread 3: Private credit gating underneath.

My conclusion: the market is front-running a deal that doesn’t exist.
12 hours later, the market proved the point in real time.
🧵 This morning on my watchlist:

Brent above $100.
Gold $4,767.
Gift Nifty +0.3%.
Nikkei +2.4%.

Right now:

Brent crashed to $95. Down 4%.
WTI collapsed to $92.60. Down 6.5%.
S&P up 1.08%. Nasdaq up 1.82%.
Gold up to $4,853.
Silver up nearly 5%.

Everything moved. In one day.

The RBI just changed the rules on Tata Sons.

New draft guidelines say every NBFC with over Rs 1 trillion in assets must list. No exceptions. No discretion.

Tata Sons has Rs 1.75 trillion.

This is not a suggestion. This is the regulator closing the escape hatch.
🧵 Quick context.

Tata Sons is the holding company that sits on top of the entire Tata Group. TCS, Tata Motors, Titan, Tata Steel, Air India, all of it.

66% is owned by Tata Trusts (philanthropic bodies). 18.34% by the Shapoorji Pallonji Group. The rest by Tata family members and smaller trusts.

It has never been listed.

Dubai just capped every foreign airline to one flight per day until May 31.

IndiGo had 15 daily flights approved. Air India had over 750 flights scheduled for April and May.

All cut to one per day per carrier. Thread on why this matters beyond aviation. Emirates and flydubai? No cap. Hundreds of daily flights, business as usual.

India was Dubai’s largest passenger source in 2025. 11.9 million travellers. The airlines serving those travellers are grounded. The home carriers fly free.

India imports 800+ tonnes of gold every year. Worth over INR 5 lakh crore at today’s prices.

How does it actually come into the country?

Through a system so opaque, so concentrated, that 30-40 dealers control the entire market.

Three stories this week connected the dots for me. A thread. Story 1: The exchange that was working, until it wasn’t.

IIBX, the bullion exchange in GIFT City, traded 92 tonnes of gold in FY25. Up from 8 tonnes the year before. Up from 411 kg the year before that.

Transparent pricing. BDR settlement every 30 minutes. Vaults in GIFT City and Chennai. 200 jewellers onboarded.

Then FY26 happened. Volume collapsed to roughly 600 kg for the full year.

The Indian rupee has two prices right now.

One in Mumbai. One in Singapore.

That gap tells you everything about what the RBI just did, and what it costs. Until last month, the onshore and offshore rupee markets moved together.

Traders in Singapore would bet on rupee direction through NDF contracts. That price signal would feed back into Mumbai. The two markets were one.

The chart shows this clearly. For most of 2025, the spread between them was near zero.

A reply from @PS4204625836664 in my comments stopped me cold.

I posted about gold falling 11.5% in March despite a Middle East war.

His pushback was the sharpest framing I have seen on this.

Gold is no longer money.

It is behaving like an index fund.
Agree or not? Here is what he meant.

Money in the true sense is stable in nominal value.

You put in 100. You get out 100.

It does not appreciate dramatically.

It does not crash.

That is what gold used to be inside central bank reserves.

The hardest form of money.

You held it. You never touched it.

Especially not in a crisis.

Gold hit $5,500 in January.

By end of March it had fallen 11.5%.

Everyone blamed profit-taking. ETF outflows. War jitters.

The real story is something central banks would rather not discuss. For three years, the gold bull run had one silent engine.

Central banks were buying at scale. 860 tonnes net in 2025 alone. The market assumed they were structural buyers. A permanent floor.

That assumption just broke.

The Philippines built a $30B call center empire on one thing: English-speaking graduates who could think on their feet.

9 in 10 Filipino children now can’t read a simple text by age 10.

The pipeline didn’t break overnight. It’s been draining for two decades. The BPO industry isn’t just worried about AI anymore.

They’re struggling to find people who can comprehend what they read.

“Communication is more than English fluency. It’s comprehension,” says the president of IBPAP, the country’s IT-BPO association.

You can’t train comprehension in a 2-week onboarding.

The IMF just flagged something most people missed in the Iran war coverage.

Not oil prices. Who owns emerging market debt now, and what happens when they want out. Foreign investment in EM stocks and bonds has grown eightfold since 2008.

Cumulative inflows approaching $4 trillion. Most of it debt. Most of that debt now held by hedge funds and investment funds, not banks.

Iran just submitted a 10-point proposal to end the war.

Trump called it “significant.”

That word matters more than the deadline. Three weeks ago, both sides weren’t talking.

Now they’ve exchanged multi-point proposals through Pakistan.

You can see the shape of a deal from here.

Jamie Dimon just sent his annual shareholder letter.

48 pages. The longest section isn’t about banking.

It’s titled “Critical Issues Facing America and the World.”

Thread. On Iran and oil:

“The war in Iran risks significant ongoing oil and commodity price shocks… which may lead to stickier inflation and ultimately higher interest rates than markets currently expect.”

Markets have already priced out rate cuts this year.

Dimon is saying that may not be enough.

India just resumed buying Iranian oil for the first time since 2019.

The headline is diplomatic. The reality is simpler.

India is scrambling for supply. A thread. In February, India was paying $69/barrel for its crude basket.

By March, that number hit $113.

A 64% jump in one month. Not a trend. A shock.