Ajay

The Washing Machine 🤡 Himanta Biswa Sarma : • Saradha Chit Fund Scam • Value -> ₹30,000 Cr. • Joined BJP in 2015 Suvendu Adhikari : • Teacher Recruitment Scam • Value -> ₹10,000 Cr. • Joined BJP in 2020 Praful Patel : • Aviation Scam • Value -> ₹70,000 Cr. • Shifted to BJP led NDA in 2023 Ashok Chavan : • Adarsh Housing Scam • Value -> ₹1,000 Cr. • Joined BJP in 2024 Naveen Jindal : • Coal Allocation Scam • Value -> ₹1.86 Lakh Cr. • Joined BJP in 2024 Since 2014, 25 opposition leaders facing corruption probe switched to BJP, 23 get reprieve. JOIN BJP = Escape CBI, ED Probes 🤐

I don't blame SEBI actually. The Indian ethical construct is non-existent. There is fraud around every corner.

What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit. Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed. I'm close to being single-issue on this.

@jasveer10 @rohini_sgh You didnt answer her question.

Oh hello, As a journalist, normalizing this as ‘just a favour’ is shocking. There’s a clear difference between asking for help and asking for a fake document (it’s straight up fraud). The issue is not whether he was rude or polite. The issue is the nature of the ask itself. Politeness doesn’t make it acceptable. It’s still misrepresentation, no matter how nicely it’s framed. This is exactly how dishonest behavior gets normalized. Now you are saying ‘why put this in public’ misses the point. When something like this feels normal enough to ask, it reflects a drop in standards. This is not about one individual. It’s about a mindset where dishonesty gets reframed as networking, mentorship, or just a favour. If this feels okay to you, that’s the real problem

IIT grad, top consulting background, applying to Ivy League Not working for a year. “Can you just give me an offer letter?” The entitlement is insane 🤦‍♂️ Impressive resume, embarrassing mindset. Degrees don’t fix character

White smoke seen from Apple Park to signify a new CEO

The prototype of the mass-man is the specialist. The man who knows one tiny corner of one science. Formally ignorant of everything outside it, but carrying the confidence of someone who "knows." He has the arrogance of the learned and the blindness of the ignorant combined. The learned ignoramus. Taleb named the same phenomenon in his more modern works: the idiot intellectual.

An entire generation was told to save in rupees, invest in Nifty & trust India's growth story. The rupee is now at 94. Portfolio hasn't moved in 3 years. Oil prices are surging & India imports more than 80% of its oil. This is the compounding they were talking about.

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

They say there is enough petroleum, LPG, CNG. But try telling that to a nation brought up on a daily staple of WA conspiracy theories? Difficult. Perhaps it will require part III of that propaganda movie to make sense of it all.

Our PM stood in Parliament, compared ongoing crisis to COVID, & asked us to prepare for a long battle. The moment a society watchman says water supply cuts for 2 days, we fill every vessel in the house. This is just how we are as a country. Now, kilometers of queues outside petrol pumps across every major Indian city. Absolute chaos. Isn’t it an obvious outcome? And now the govt says, don’t panic? Bhai, you said covid. We heard COVID.

Ouch... Dard hua lagta hai Arora saab ko... Packing for chana is a good reuse. Environmentally friendly. Sadly, aapne jo paisa dubaya logon ka can't be reused...

Great timing

Ajeya Sharma tweeted that he's not seem such despondency among Founders, HNIs, Family Offices etc. That's not surprising. Let's go one by one: A. Founders: you largely ran domestic focused " appified businesses that our idiot retail ( and MFs) paid 15x global multiples for. So you started to believe your own press. Now your valuations will normalize which will mean falling between 50 to 90% over the next few years. Basically, what happened in the dotcom bust ( and no, this time is not very different), when companies became, what I termed " Reverse Compounders" ie, stocks that fall 50% from each level. Like the half life of radioactive material. Your stock valuations were radioactive and they will go the same way. B) Family Offices: you guys sold your chemical factory or biscuit company or something to some private equity fund or dumb retail investors ( need I mention " dumb" each time or it's understood?). Now suddenly you started ( or your US returned son) fancying yourself as great investors. Instead of correctly viewing your exit as a lot of hard work and the idiocy of Indian retail/ PEs. You then went and hired a team of analysts (eye roll) and horror of horrors, something called a CIO ( major eye roll). The CIO usually was a 3rd grade analyst from a MF or an RM from a Private Bank. None can fart and chew gum at the same time insofar as markets are concerned. Definitely not the RMs. So based on this crack team, you went and allocated massive amounts of capital to meaningless products like PMSs etc,run by even more Meaningless Managers who flashed chappals and sang hosannas about the undiscovered" moats" of 30 year old cos like HDFC Bank, Asian Paints etc. And then, you bought startups because they made you shed your chemically smelling lineage. We know how all that worked out. Fact is: Markets are every bit as tough as any other business, but they seem bloody easy on Indian Financial TV. HNIs: I am too tired to write about them because they are usually from real estate and gutka sectors, and I don't want to make them feel worse than they feel about themselves already. They are under -educated, and markets find out rookies within 5 years. Always. The Market will take away every last coin fools minted in a bull market. And then some more. Mark my words. That's the natural order of markets. Truth is: Markets are a perfect device for making the vast majority poor so that the tiny minority can get rich. Remember where you read this first. Ciao!!

@rohitchauhan Which way do these shocks go?

Demand shock from AI Supply shock from oil Are we missing anything?

SIP will not let market fall they said, we are still falling due to FII selling

Going to be very funny when it turns out humans are cheaper than tokens

Marc Andressen on his "barbell strategy" for reading habits. - real-time news on X or books older than 50 years. - He ignores newspapers and magazines. - He finds practitioner-led newsletters to be a superior, underrated resource.

Pension fund posts first Private Equity loss since 2009 At -5.3% return, private equity was the worst performing asset class “Ontario Teachers’ said it felt it had to lower the valuations it assigned to some of the assets in the private equity portfolio to reflect the broader environment.”

We are going to see world peace like we’ve never seen before

BREAKING: The US is 'dismayed' by Israel's strikes on Iranian fuel depots and this has sparked the 'first significant disagreement between the allies since the war began', according to Axios report.