Srinivas Peri

Anand Bhai, I had actually said this before. Everybody and their neighbours dog has become an expert analyst on Geopolitics and these are the people who till February thought Hormuz was an Arabian Dish and Bosphorus was an element in the periodic table. I studied international affairs and Geopolitics for 4 years and have been a student of History for more than three decades. Only thing we know is, we can't predict anything. Some of the analysis and mind numbing predictions, conclusions and so called analysis is disgusting. Bull shit wrapped in a tin foil and sold as precious metal

5–10 years in markets and suddenly everyone becomes a part-time Nobel Prize economist, full-time policy advisor, and weekend geopolitical commander. A 2% move in crude oil and people start explaining Middle East diplomacy. One Fed rate cut later, the same person is practically shortlisted to run the central bank. A semiconductor rally and now they’re discussing Taiwan strategy like they’re in closed-door defence briefings. By year seven in markets, reading one thread on X and two brokerage PDFs is enough to confidently solve: inflation, fiscal deficits, currency crises, trade wars, election outcomes, and occasionally civilization itself. The best part? Every opinion is delivered with the calm certainty of a man who has personally briefed presidents between market hours.

As Hormuz, Venezuela and Russia have driven home the point, our modern global economy is a slave of the “Global Hydrocarbon Flows”. History of the last 150 years has in many ways been the “History of Oil” and those who controlled the Politics of “Oil Flows”, controlled the Power and Profits. What we are witnessing today is nothing new and the first episode of this control for flows and profits played out a 150 years ago In Baku, the neglected corner of the Czarist Russian empire. The Russian’s, the British, Nobel’s and Rothschild’s jostled to control the extraction and flow of this liquid gold. This is the part one of this series and the second part which drops next week will look at the evolution of the Middle Eastern oil industry and the ascent of Seven Sisters through the lend of “Power, Profits and Politics”. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

Anas, Unfortunately it has been the case for this whole Iran and Hormuz crisis. While there are many sane voices, the sheer amount of crap being peddled is depressing. Everybody and their neighbours dog has become Geopolitical experts.... And many of them till February thought Hormuz was a Arabian Dish and Bosphorus was an element in the periodic table

💠The sheer volume of nonsense being published about the UAE’s exit from OPEC+ and its supposed impact on the oil market is astounding. 💠The UAE’s official statements are crystal clear. Stick to them and pay close attention to the details. 💠Want to go deeper? Fine. But first make sure you actually understand the economic and political realities, the history, the nature of the conflict, and the current oil market outlook.

It doesn’t matter till it matters. Marine Insurance was an arcane topic that no one wanted to talk about and then Hormuz crisis changed all that. Sea lanes are the life blood of global trade, carrying 80% of it by volume and 70% by value and marine insurance is the backbone. Take it away and trade collapses and we are realizing the hard way. The Hormuz crisis is more a marine insurance crisis than anything else. Companies like Lloyd’s of London had ensured smooth functioning of maritime trade for over three centuries and some form of insurance has been the norm for sea voyages for over two millennia. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

@EdConwaySky I look forward to it Ed and add it to the other two 😊 Is it a global launch and will it be available in India simultaneously?

ANNOUNCEMENT I've been working on a new book! It's nearly finished & I'm v excited for you to read. TRADE WORLD A deep dive into the mysterious, magical networks of trade that make the modern world go round. Chock full of fascinating nuggets & mind-bending facts. Sept 2026👇

@Anand_shah07 You nailed it Anand. I wrote this last year 😊 open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

Narratives don’t age well...they peak, they fade, and they quietly trap those who outstay them. What once felt inevitable often turns optional, then irrelevant. Markets reward motion, not memory. Your job isn’t to defend yesterday’s thesis. It’s to remain adaptable when reality shifts, to stay solvent when cycles turn, and to keep reallocating toward what is working now...not what once made sense. There is no loyalty premium in markets. No reward for emotional consistency. Romance belongs in stories, not portfolios. Because in the end, survival is the real edge. And money...not conviction, not narrative..is the only honest scorecard that compounds over time.

History might not repeat, but it definitely rhymes. Almost two hundred years have passed since, but the similarities are striking with our current times and there are lessons for today’s investors. In the first half of nineteenth century, at the height of industrial revolution and during the “Railway Age”, what came to be known as “The Great Railway Mania” was the first technology driven boom and bust. It was world’s first true “Technological Disruption” and a “Communication Revolution”, that drastically changed the society and economy for ever. It was also the first incarnation of “Democratic Speculation”, with media and markets fuelling a frenzy for railway stocks. People like George Hudson, with their larger-than-life image made huge fortunes, but fell from grace and lost everything. It was an episode that played out against a backdrop of radical disruption, entrepreneurial spirit, economic and political tailwinds and “Greed and Fear”. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

@chigrl Makes a lot of sense for India. Instead of depending on Uranium supplies from others, eventually use ample domestic Thorium reserves. A step in the right direction

🇮🇳⚛️India’s First Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor Reaches Criticality The first Indian-built fast breeder nuclear reactor has achieved criticality, the stage at which the atomic reaction becomes self-sustaining, according to a statement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. The prototype, located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, is designed to produce more fuel than it uses, and has been under development since the early 2000s. A launch date hasn’t been set, but once online it will be able to generate 500 megawatts of electrical power.

Great thread, thanks. My read is, a lot of "analysis" is opinions driven by lines, dislikes and ideology. There was a particularly interesting thread by @Brad_Setser about the point you make, Petrodollars drying up after 2015. Very data driven and pretty insightful x.com/i/status/20356…

🧵There’s been an acute breakout of death of the petrodollar thought pieces over the weekend. This should have discerning investors thinking twice. Not about the dollar, however. About piling into an obviously crowded and extremely unoriginal perspective that is mostly satisfying wishful thinking impulses. Here are some reasons to think differently. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Timeless Wisdom? As I am finishing up a couple of articles on past “Financial Manias and Panics”, I couldn't help but revisit this article, I wrote two and a half years ago. Four hundred years and investor behaviour has been the only constant. Are we seeing this play out in the Private Credit market? Time will tell open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

There are multiple wars going on. As the Iran war rages on, equally destructive are the wars of narratives, opinion, and ideology. While there are some sane analysts who are focussing on what is known and knowable, majority of the noise is around grand theories, predictions and strategies, which frankly are unknowable. As the adage goes, the first victim of these wars is truth. As investors, it is important for us to cut out the noise and understand, what we know and what is in our control. As Richard Zeckhauser classifies it, we need to distinguish between, known, unknown and unknowable. Future is inherently uncertain and unpredictable and the best we can do as investors is focus on what is in our control. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

@Anand_shah07 Gues room hai kya? Asking for a friend 😂

This looks like a good place to stay for the near future . Will extend the lease if the video games don't end soon..🤕

Our human minds are wired for stories. Nothing influences us more than a good story and narratives drive what we beleive in. I call this the “Narrative ABC”. I have written a fair bit about financial history, and the more I see, the more I read, the more it becomes obvious - Narratives and their impact on our emotions and outlook drives our actions and outcomes. Over the next few weeks, I will be diving deeper into this, throwing more light through the “Lens of History”.

@onechancefreedm Nailed it my friend .... History might not repeat, but it sure rhymes like hell

Page 1. The Crisis Isn’t the Cause…It’s the Cover One of the hardest truths in financial history is that governments rarely admit when the system is breaking. Instead, they wait for a story big enough to justify the kind of intervention that would otherwise look reckless. Wars, pandemics, and national security crises often become that story. Look closely at the past century and a pattern emerges. The financial plumbing is already strained, credit bubbles overextended, currency pegs fraying, leverage piled too high and policymakers face a problem: how to inject massive liquidity without spooking markets or losing political credibility. Then comes the event. A geopolitical shock, a war, or a health crisis gives them cover to do what they couldn’t do in calm times: flip the switch, flood the system, and rewrite the rules in the name of survival. Think back to the great turning points. In 1914, the gold standard was already cracking before World War I gave governments the excuse to suspend convertibility and unleash bond financed spending. In 1940, the U.S. was still clawing out of depression when WWII allowed Roosevelt to blow out deficits and normalize Fed monetization of Treasury debt. In the late 1960s, Vietnam spending plus domestic programs strained the dollar, but only once the war escalated did policymakers have the justification to tear up Bretton Woods in 1971. After 9/11 and the Iraq War, the U.S. used national security spending as the story, while Greenspan’s Fed quietly opened the spigots to cushion a financial system still reeling from the dot com bust. And in 2020, COVID-19 became the perfect excuse for an unprecedented global money printing campaign, arriving just as repo markets and corporate debt were already flashing stress in late 2019. The details differ, but the sequencing rhymes. The financial system shows cracks first. Then an event arrives that allows governments to act on a scale they otherwise couldn’t. Liquidity surges are justified as emergency responses, but in practice they are often preemptive rescues of fragile balance sheets. This isn’t to say the events aren’t real, they are. Wars kill, pandemics devastate, geopolitical shocks reshape the world. But for students of monetary history, the question is whether the timing of interventions is driven only by the events, or also by what was already happening beneath the surface. Were the events the trigger or the excuse? That’s the pattern I want to explore. When you line up the last century’s great liquidity waves with the geopolitical crises that accompanied them, you start to see that the narrative and the financial mechanics are inseparable. Policymakers need a cover story. And history suggests that the biggest liquidity expansions often arrive not just because of the event, but because the system was breaking beforehand.

Anoop, you probably were not old enough. We followed the first gulf war mostly through newspapers in the morning and I was nineteen. When the war started, we would religiously watch the 9 pm news. It was the first time there was live coverage and images, Peter Arnett of CNN .... How I wish we went back there 😂 Get rid of all this noise and Cacophony

This has never been more true than it is right now

@CoffeeandaMike Keep doing the good work Mike. Unfortunately, only shit posting and sensationalist engagement farming get you followers on SM. But there are lots of people who appreciate and genuinely like your work my friend

I appreciate that little by little one thing this has taught me that this is a game of inches. I just keep working hard and plugging away.

As Tim Marshall pointed out, we are all “Prisoners of Geography”. From Peloponnesian war to the future geopolitics of the Arctic, geography imposes limitation and dictates the rhythms of history. Russia is a country “Forged in War”, not because they love to fight, but because geography, with no defensible borders and exposed to invasions, defined the logic of their actions. Everyone today wants to talk about geopolitics, geoeconomics and geostrategy. I am just stepping back and highlighting the importance of “The Geo” in all those, “Geography”, which is the fundamental building block for all of them. You cannot make sense of them, without a deep understanding of geography, be it the lines on the map or what lies underneath. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

@JacobShap Reading both these again. Bought this hard bound combination, published by Library of America a couple years ago, to replace older paperbacks.

Geoeconomics doesn’t matter till it matters. We are entering a new era, where the coming decade will be dominated by geoeconomic competition and the quest for energy security and techno-nationalism. The ongoing war in the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz crisis has highlighted the vulnerability of energy supplies and is holding countries hostage. What will it mean for countries across the world going forward? This comes at a time, when the world is already grappling with the demands of Electrification Megatrend. Can we “Manufacture Energy Security”? We need to get rid of the old extraction mindset and approach the new challenges, where manufacturing and technology will play a bigger role. Read my latest to understand, what this means. open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…

When I wrote this piece in December, the signs were there, Private Credit is in trouble. Now the Strom clouds are gathering fast - Blue Owl, Apollo and yesterday Blackrock. This space is a blackbox in many ways and we don't know what's brewing. We might witness again, “A Gradual Instant” as in 2008. I will be writing a follow-up piece in the next few days open.substack.com/pub/periscopeg…