Today, the world seems to be at the cusp of a trade war. The US and China have imposed hundreds of billions in tariffs on each other, export controls on semiconductors are proliferating, and countries from India to Brazil are raising trade barriers.🧵👇 But it wasn't long ago when the world was marked by far more integration. The flow of goods, services, and ideas across borders has been a key story in economic growth and poverty reduction. What does the past tell us about where global trade is headed?

Industrial gases are the backbone of all industrial production. We never looked at this industry before, frankly, we didn't realize how important it is. But once you know where to look, you'll see it everywhere.🧵👇 Hospitals, steel plants, refineries, food packaging, even semiconductors, all of them run on a constant supply of gases. It's one of those hidden systems of the economy, quiet, technical, and taken for granted.

Somewhere between the jargon and the disclaimers, CEOs accidentally said some real things this week.

We dig through concalls & interviews every week for our newsletter - The Chatter.

Here are the 8 insightful quotes from this week’s edition 👇 Dr Reddy’s CEO on how the biz of GLP-1 is a marathon, not a sprint

In India, millions chase thousands of seats in elite institutions like IITs, IIMs, AIIMS. This brutal competition created the perfect opportunity for PhysicsWallah, from scrappy YouTube channel to ₹3,820 crore IPO filing. Here's how they built an edtech empire 🧵👇 India's ₹15 lakh crore education market breaks down into clear segments. K-12 dominates with over half the market, serving 37 crore school children. Higher education handles formal degrees, while test prep operates as a parallel industry unlocking competitive exam success.

Most people obsess over the stock market—which makes sense, since it directly affects their portfolios. But the bond market often tells us just as much, if not more, about the economy. The problem is that not a lot of people pay attention to it.🧵👇 So we decided to take a closer look. And honestly, it looked strange at first glance. Since the start of the year, the RBI has been slashing repo rates aggressively, front-loading cuts to jumpstart growth. In theory, this makes borrowing cheaper across the economy.

Imagine building a new house. You think cement and steel, but what about plumbing, wires, paint, tiles, woodwork, sanitaryware? That simple cement exercise pulls in a whole bunch of industries, collectively known as "building materials."🧵👇 A house isn't just walls and a roof. To actually live in it, you'll need water and electricity. That means plumbing, wires, cables. Then comes the part where you want it to look good. So you paint it, do waterproofing, lay tiles.

While headlines focus on farmer distress and export restrictions, the latest RBI bulletin reveals a quieter transformation across India's farmlands, a story about how Indian agriculture has grown over the past three decades that matters for nearly half a billion people.🧵👇 Agriculture remains central to India's economy in ways GDP numbers don't capture. While farming contributes less than one-fifth of GDP, it still employs 46.1% of India's workforce, that's almost half the population affecting food security for 1.4 billion Indians.

Picture the world in 2050, just 25 years from now. Will factories in Bangladesh produce goods as efficiently as those in Japan? Will India's economy finally rival that of the United States? These aren't just abstract questions, they're about the economic futures of billions.🧵👇 For decades, economists held what seemed like ironclad logic, poor countries should grow faster than rich ones. If you're starting from almost nothing, you have enormous room to grow, right? You can copy technologies, learn from mistakes, and leapfrog entire stages of development.

Something fascinating is happening in Andhra Pradesh. Companies across sectors, from clean energy to electronics to oil, keep announcing massive projects there. We noticed this pattern in conference calls and interviews, and we're not alone.🧵👇 SOIC founder Ishmohit spotted the same trend. Why is a single Indian state getting this much attention? What's driving this investment rush? The answer lies in a story that began 11 years ago with a painful division.

There's a fundamental question about our fate as an economy that we all keep coming back to, how did China, a country as complex as ours, beginning from roughly the same point in the 1980s, leave us so far behind?🧵👇 Many different answers have been offered, ranging from our political systems, to our respective cultures, to when and how our two countries liberalised their laws. And all of them get to some of the truth.

The Reserve Bank of India makes decisions that impact 140+ crore people in almost every aspect of their financial lives. So how do we know if the RBI is doing a good job? Turns out, the RBI has something resembling a report card.🧵👇 Back in 2016, Parliament amended the RBI Act to give it a crystal clear mandate, keep prices stable while supporting growth. This was to be measured by how well it stuck to a target, keeping consumer price inflation at 4%, with a tolerance band of 2%.

In its heyday, Evergrande was the world's most valuable real estate developer, the engine behind China's urbanisation push. Its founder Hui Ka Yan became China's richest man from nothing. On Monday, it was quietly kicked out of Hong Kong Stock Exchange.🧵👇 This marks the end of perhaps the world's greatest corporate fall from grace. Four million workers relied on Evergrande for their livelihood, with 200,000 directly employed. Its name adorned thousands of skyscrapers across hundreds of Chinese cities.

From Japan's demographic challenge, let's turn to India where the picture looks very different. The share of working women in India, particularly in manufacturing, has been stagnating.

This isn't just about diversity - higher female participation is key to economic development. 🧵👇 Women in India face barriers from family attitudes to workplace discrimination. But there's also a legal side. Many Indian laws actively prohibit women from some work - like night shifts. Delhi bans women from working after 9 PM in summer, 8 PM in winter.

We've talked a lot about oil on The Daily Brief, Russian oil, global crude prices, and what not. But there's a completely different type of oil that's equally important to India's economy and your daily life, edible oil. The stuff you use to cook your dal and fry your samosas.🧵👇 In February 2025, after skyrocketing over the last 2 decades, India's edible oil imports hit a 4-year low. The government has been playing around with import duties, slashing them from 20% to 10% just in May to control food inflation.

8 years ago, India promised "one nation, one tax" with GST. Today, as the government prepares GST 2.0 as a potential "Diwali gift," the reality is more complex. While GST expanded the tax base dramatically, it created new challenges for MSMEs, exporters, and India's middle class.🧵👇 Before GST, doing business across Indian states felt like navigating different countries. A truck from Maharashtra to Tamil Nadu would stop at multiple checkposts, pay different taxes at each border, juggling central excise, state VAT, service tax, and octroi.

The Lok Sabha just passed India's most sweeping gaming legislation in 7 minutes, banning all real-money gaming. This isn't just government overreach, it's a complex tale of competing priorities and unintended consequences that will reshape India's digital future.🧵👇 On August 20th, 2025, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw introduced the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill. Passed by voice vote in approximately seven minutes, despite opposition protests demanding detailed debate. But what exactly does this comprehensive ban cover?

Remember that late-night Domino's order when nothing else was open? These brands are so embedded in our daily lives that we barely think about the companies running them. But their Q1 results reveal fascinating economics behind fulfilling millions of Indians' cravings daily.🧵👇 We'll examine three Indian QSR giants, Jubilant FoodWorks (Domino's), Westlife Foodworld (McDonald's), and Restaurant Brands Asia (Burger King, Tim Hortons). Their businesses run extremely tight operations to ensure every next meal feels as delightful as the last.

India's biggest trading partner just slapped us with a 50% tariff practically out of nowhere. That's a 25% base tariff, plus another 25% because we buy Russian oil, a punishment whose logic we don't quite get. The first 25% is already in force, another 25% kicks in August 27.🧵👇 These tariffs could practically close the world's biggest consumer market to our exports. From shrimp exporters to carpet weavers, some pockets of our economy will see extreme pain. But this situation is terribly confusing, too extreme and sudden for anyone to accurately predict.

There's a truism about the Indian economy that everyone seems to know, India's manufacturing sector has been stuck at 15-17% of GDP for decades. This gets repeated so often by us, cabinet ministers, everyone. But what if the entire narrative rests on a measurement error?🧵👇 A provocative paper by economists Bishwanath Goldar and Pilu Chandra Das makes an extraordinary claim, manufacturing has actually boomed to nearly one-third of India's economy, we just don't know how to count it. Here's what we learnt about this complex problem.

DHFL was once India's third largest housing finance company with a ₹1 lakh crore loan book. Then investigators discovered something shocking, its most active branch in Bandra Mumbai, responsible for ₹22,000 crore in disbursements, didn't actually exist.🧵👇 For nearly 40 years, DHFL built an empire providing affordable home loans to lower and middle-income Indians. By the mid-2010s, it had a sprawling, India-wide retail network and seemed like one of the most stable variants of the housing finance business.

We went through management commentary from 20 companies across 11 industries — India & abroad for The Chatter

Here are the juiciest, most telling things CEOs & CFOs said this quarter 👇 Maruti Suzuki says the small-car era is fading fast and SUVs have taken over the market.