Three screens this morning. Kuwait airport hit. TCS down 8.79%. Nifty red.

The obvious story is “Iran chaos sinks Indian markets.”

The obvious story is wrong. Two unrelated events landed on the same screen. Watch the facts, not the statements. The TCS drop has nothing to do with Iran.

It came one day after the IT index rallied over 4%, its biggest single-day move of the year. What you saw was profit-booking plus short-selling unwinding a one-day pop.

Geopolitics did not crack TCS. Traders did.

Back in 2021 HDFC Bank wanted deposits from MSRDC, a Maharashtra government infrastructure agency. The bank was offering 3.5% on savings. MSRDC, per the reporting, said rivals were offering 6%+ and would route a large deposit pool its way only at 6.01%. The bank could not legally offer one depositor a special negotiated rate. RBI Master Directions explicitly prohibit that. So a regular 6.01% savings rate was never an option. The gap between 3.5% and 6.01% was 2.51 percentage points. That gap had to go somewhere.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

The Eagles wrote that in 1977. In 2026, it describes Indian equities better than any analyst report.

Except the lyric is wrong. FIIs are leaving. The question is where they are going.

A thread. First, the receipts.

Net FII flows into Indian cash equities, by month:

Jul 25: -47,667 cr
Aug 25: -46,903 cr
Sep 25: -35,301 cr
Oct 25: -2,347 cr
Nov 25: -17,500 cr
Dec 25: -34,350 cr
Jan 26: -41,435 cr
Feb 26: -6,641 cr
Mar 26: -1,22,540 cr
Apr 26: -67,300 cr
May 26 MTD: -33,815 cr

Eleven straight months of selling.

TOI's "3-year backstory behind PM's appeal" is the cleanest balance of payments picture I've seen in mainstream Indian media.

Rupee weakness is not a 2026 story. It is a structural problem dressed up as a crisis.

8 charts. Let me walk you through what's actually happening. 🧵 First, the framing problem.

We treat the rupee as if it falls because the dollar rises. This time, the dollar is falling. USD index is down. Yuan, Euro, Pound, Yen all holding or strengthening.

Rupee is falling against a falling dollar. That's not an FX story. That's a story about us.

The rupee at 96 is not really about Iran or oil or Trump.

It is about two years of artificial calm that has now broken.

What two pieces in the Indian Express this week revealed is more important than the number on your screen. Let me walk you through it. In FY24, India had a balance of payments surplus of 64 billion dollars.

The rupee should have strengthened.

Instead the RBI bought 41 billion dollars of foreign currency and built forex reserves. The rupee was held in an 81 to 83 range for almost two years.

Reliance has slowed the Jio IPO.

Bloomberg blames the Iran war.

The real reason is buried one paragraph in. Valuation discomfort. The risk of Jio listing below Bharti Airtel.

Let that sit for a moment. Then look at why. Jio has 524 million users. Airtel has fewer.

By any retail intuition, Jio should be worth more.

It is not. And the gap is widening in the wrong direction.

Everyone is debating whether AI will take jobs.

Wrong question. The right one: where is it showing up first, and how do you tell signal from noise?

Read three pieces this week. The Economist on labour history. Bloomberg on Korea's AI dividend debate. Reuters on India IT.

One signal jumps out. The Economist's case: no technology in history has produced sustained mass unemployment. Diffusion is slow. Aggregate OECD employment is at record highs. Industrial Revolution wages stagnated because of food prices and the Corn Laws, not because machines stole labour's share.

Solid history. Wrong altitude.

ASML signed an MoU with Tata Electronics yesterday in The Hague, witnessed by Modi and Dutch PM Jetten.

Indian business TV will call this a “chip revolution.”

Let’s separate the signal from the statements. The facts:

— MoU, not a purchase order
— Dholera 300mm fab, ₹91,000 cr (~$11B)
— ASML supplies lithography tools + talent training + supply chain + R&D cooperation
— Tata’s tech partner is PSMC Taiwan
— Nodes accessed: 28nm, 40nm, 55nm, 90nm, 110nm

Notice what’s missing from that list.

The Centre just moved silver bar imports (HS 71069221, 71069229) from "Free" to "Restricted."

Most people will read this as a one-line news headline.

It isn't. It's the second half of a forex defence move that started 3 days ago.

Let me show you what's actually happening 👇 May 13: Import duty on gold and silver hiked from 6% to 15%. Overnight.

May 16: DGFT restricts the last two "Free" HS codes for silver bars. Now needs a licence.

Two moves. Three days apart. Same direction.

This isn't policy housekeeping. This is the government tightening the precious metals tap.

Alphabet briefly passed Nvidia by market cap last week. Most coverage will tell you why this is bullish for Google.

Here is what most coverage will miss.

The AI infrastructure boom is being increasingly financed by a circular loop between four hyperscalers and two AI labs. And it has direct implications for Indian IT. The shape of the loop. Read it slowly.

Google invests up to 40bn USD in Anthropic. Anthropic commits 200bn USD back to Google Cloud for TPU capacity over five years. Google recognises that as cloud backlog. Google’s market cap rises.

Google’s 40bn dollars create 200bn dollars of contracted revenue.

A Prime Minister asking citizens to defer foreign travel, postpone gold buying, and restart work-from-home is not an energy conservation message.

It is a current account defence dressed up as patriotism.

Here is what Sunday’s speech is actually telling you. The physical market backdrop first.

Hormuz traffic is running near 5% of pre-war volumes. 1,550+ vessels and 22,500 mariners are stranded. Project Freedom was launched on 4 May, paused on 6 May. The strait is technically open under new Iranian procedures. It is not actually flowing.

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.