Nirav Kanodra

My predictions for coming decade (in a thread of thread format) ...

🇸🇦Saudi crude oil to 🇨🇳China passes Bab al-Mandeb: ◾️◾️◾️A VLCC laden with 2 million barrels of Saudi crude is on its way to China. The tanker stopped in the Red Sea for a few days but has now passed Bab al-Mandeb. Map form @Kpler

@ArjunM1412 Why play domestic at all. Can have a decent focussed career. Why distract and confuse

@niravstoons Let him play 5 domestic seasons and A-team tours first, he has age on his side. There, he can learn and build his credentials for Test selection. Cricketers these days play till theyre almost 40.

I think Test cricket might not be worth it for Sooryavanshi. He can focus on white ball cricket. Make a career in T20 and ODI? Be a rockstar. Neeraj Chopra doesn’t need to sprint 100m or throw the discuss Focus on Javelin and do well.

Scotland raised its top income tax rate to 48% to make the rich pay more. New HMRC data suggests the result may have been the opposite: Scotland collected about £22m less. We can't be sure, but Scotland may have fallen over the Laffer curve. 🧵:

Ah, Laffer Curve, come in. Long time no see...

BREAKING: Donald Trump has reportedly backed away from plans to escalate the war with Iran after Pentagon officials warned U.S. forces were running low on Patriot interceptors and other air defense missiles in the Middle East, according to The New York Times. The U.S. has fired more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors, each costing over $4 million. The NYT reports Gen. Dan Caine warned that renewed large-scale strikes could nearly exhaust CENTCOM's interceptor stockpile. A senior U.S. official also said the campaign had "the opposite effect," keeping Iran united against an external threat.

@realKunalAShah Private banking business offshore will fall.

Huge development

@aRishisays Fair. Thing is bureaucrats get away without accountability. Corrupt people in the chain from paper setters to peons in supply chain to printers etc

Right. So I think the CJP leaders (and many others) have explained the rationale for his resignation better than I ever could, but since you’ve asked I’ll make a few points: 1. Did he profit? Hopefully not. No one is alleging that, and had that been the case, the demand would have been for prosecution not resignation. Incompetence vs criminality. 2. There’s precedent for ministers resigning post mishaps because they believe the buck stops with them. So this isn’t new. The reason this is important because it fixes the asymmetry that comes with these positions of power - more “skin in the game”! As it is, most of their own kids study/work abroad. What incentive do they have to ensure things get better if there’s no risk of losing their political career? 3. Comparison vs 1997/2003 - I think there’s a difference in both scale and frequency of leaks. The NTA, centralized tests on computers just increased the blast radius. NEET has leaked twice now in 3 years? At least 12-13 confirmed reports of student suicides after the leak? I think the situation is definitely worse now than in 1997/2003. 4. Lastly - if the situation was just as bad then, then maybe there should have been demands for resignations then as well? So the causation probably runs backwards? Overall, the broad point is that this system of governance only works when people in power have genuine skin in the game. If you don’t do your job well, you’ll be asked to step aside. And this needs to be an ongoing process. Not just a one-off thing! Not just a once in 5 years thing. Eternal vigilance. Accountability. The buck stops with you. I am happy because I feel that Pradhan resigning sets a precedent to continue holding other public servants accountable, which will improve life in India. We can always take this offline if you want to discuss further :)

what a GOAT moment in Indian history!

“Sir, the 10Y is back to 4.7%, we can’t attack this weekend”

BREAKING: Trump has cancelled plans to sharply escalate the war on Iran over concerns that Iranian attacks could dangerously drain the Pentagon's already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East close to zero, per NYT. The Pentagon has used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors in the war at more than $4M each, with cheap Iranian drones and ballistic missiles depleting the US inventory. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine privately cautioned that resuming major combat operations would fully deplete interceptors available to US Central Command. A senior US official adds that continued strikes have had "the opposite effect of what is intended, keeping Iran cohesive and allowing Iranian leaders to focus attention on an external threat."

Instead of US officials, foreign backed NGOs, leftists, religious outfits, media outlets, bureaucrats and political parties do the same in India. This is viewed as the most convenient option in a post colonial state that pushes back against overt foreign presence on its soil. They delegitimize elections by attempting to disfranchise hundreds of millions of voters at gunpoint. By redefining democracy as the right for minority-led anarchy, these paid foot soldiers exist to undermine and steal the rights of the people. The objective is to stall the country’s growth, create national security vulnerabilities, build profitable and strategically critical one-way dependencies, and ultimately install a sympathetic government. Apparently, the only sovereign nation that should exist is the United States. All others must be made subservient. The emergence of a third pole in the world order and consortium of middle powers is a fundamental threat to American hegemony, economic power, profit, and by extension, internal stability.

This is one of the most important long-term structural challenges facing China, yet it receives far less attention than tariffs, property or geopolitics because pension crises develop slowly before suddenly becoming acute. The headline is not simply that China's pension system could face depletion around 2035 without further reforms. The more important issue is that the labor market itself is changing in ways that weaken the pension system's funding model. China's state pension largely operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning today's workers finance today's retirees. As the population ages and the working-age population shrinks, that model becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The rapid expansion of gig work compounds this challenge. An estimated 320 million Chinese are expected to be in flexible employment this year, equivalent to roughly 40% to 45% of the workforce. Many gig workers contribute less consistently to social insurance, participate intermittently or remain outside the formal pension system altogether, reducing the flow of contributions into a system that is already under demographic pressure. At the same time, gig work has become an important buffer for China's weakening labor market as the property downturn, slower private-sector hiring and AI-driven automation reduce traditional employment opportunities. This creates a difficult policy trade-off. Gig employment helps keep headline unemployment lower by providing millions of people with income opportunities. But from a fiscal perspective, it weakens one of the government's most important long-term financing mechanisms. In effect, China is stabilizing today's labor market at the cost of increasing tomorrow's pension burden. The demographic backdrop makes the problem even more challenging. China is entering one of the fastest aging transitions in modern history. More than 300 million people are expected to retire over the coming decade, while birth rates remain exceptionally low and the working-age population continues to contract. The dependency ratio is rising from both directions: there are more retirees drawing benefits and fewer formal workers contributing payroll taxes. Importantly, this is not simply a pension problem. It is also a consumption problem. One reason Chinese households save so much is uncertainty about retirement income. If workers are unsure whether future pensions will be sufficient, they have a strong incentive to save more during their working years. Higher precautionary savings reduce household consumption, making it more difficult for Beijing to achieve its long-standing objective of rebalancing the economy away from investment and exports toward domestic demand. In that sense, pension reform and consumption reform are closely linked. A more credible and sustainable pension system could reduce precautionary savings and encourage households to spend a greater share of their income. Conversely, if confidence in retirement security deteriorates, consumption could remain structurally weaker despite policy stimulus. The government is not without options. Beijing has already begun gradually raising the statutory retirement age, strengthening the National Social Security Fund and encouraging greater participation in occupational and private pension schemes. These measures will help, but they primarily slow the deterioration rather than eliminate it. The underlying demographic arithmetic remains difficult because fertility is low and population aging is largely irreversible over the next two decades. From a macroeconomic perspective, China's challenge increasingly resembles what Japan has faced, but with important differences. Japan became old after becoming rich. China is aging at a significantly lower level of per capita income, while simultaneously managing a property downturn, local government debt pressures and an ongoing transition toward a more technology-driven economy. That combination makes the adjustment considerably more complex. Ultimately, the growth of China's gig economy should not be viewed solely as evidence of labor market flexibility. It also reflects a broader structural shift toward less secure employment. While gig work provides an essential employment safety valve in the short run, it weakens payroll-based social insurance financing precisely when China's aging population requires the opposite. Unless participation in the pension system expands alongside the gig economy, the country's pension challenge will increasingly become a fiscal challenge, a consumption challenge and, eventually, a long-term growth challenge.

I like to remind people that John Nash was just some kid from West Virginia. He was a math genius our system post-WW2 was able to find and develop. We would miss out on him today. He would have teachers who think he’s weird. And the system eliminates advanced classes.

Sébastien Jean and Jean-Pierre Landau: "In terms of welfare, European consumers should welcome cheap electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels that are subsidized directly or indirectly by Chinese workers and taxpayers. But Europeans instead see them as a threat, which is rational from a dynamic perspective. Cheap imports may raise purchasing power today, but they can destroy the industrial base on which tomorrow’s income depends. The transfer is generous in the present, but costly in the future." Jean and Landau are right, and they represent a real shift in the way the world understands trade, away from the complacent (some would even say condescending) neglect still favored by mainstream economists, to a deeper grasp of how trade imbalances allow countries that exert greater control over their external accounts to export their industrial policies (in reverse) to those of their trade partners with more open external accounts. In a world in which some economies exert substantial control over their external accounts, in other words, while other countries don't, if the former decide to implement aggressive industrial policies, not only are they restructuring their own domestic economies, but they are also restructuring the domestic economies of the latter in a such a way as to accommodate their own economic needs. Jean and Landau add: "A useful complement to this strategy is capital controls. Controls on outflows keep domestic savings at home, while restricting inflows prevents the economy from rebalancing from tradable to non-tradable sectors—the opposite of what the strategy aims to achieve. Capital inflows strengthen the currency, weaken exports, and support consumption. They accelerate domestic absorption before scale and learning are secured, thus impeding the pursuit of comparative advantage." I agree, and this suggests that rather than encourage capital inflows, economies that want to strengthen their manufacturing and productive sectors and to benefit workers by raising productivity and wages should consider capital controls as a far more effective tool than tariffs. Unfettered financial inflows largely benefit the large banks and owners of movable capital at the expense of manufacturers and workers. They also force the economy to shift out of producing tradable goods (including manufacturing) and into non-tradable goods (real estate and services). ifri.org/en/media-exter…

Great news, he keeps around $30MM (0.003%) for himself each year and puts the rest (99.997%) into technology R&D--rockets, electric vehicles, underground transportation systems, treating paralysis, etc.

On this auspicious day of Ashada Ekadashi, I am very happy to announce the launch of my humble attempt to make history interesting. bharatrajya.com The idea is actually very very simple You go to the site, select a year, and It will show you who ruled which part of India at that point in time.

@aRishisays There were leaks previously too. Addressed and move on. JEE in 1997 CAT in 2003. Both had re exams

@aRishisays Thing is - did the minister leak it or profit from the leak? Were there leaks before. Good thing they did was cancel exam and redo one without leaks New minister comes in can they ensure no leaks? The ones responsible need to be taken to task.

Mark Manson was right when he said: “Beware: learning more is a smart person’s favorite form of procrastination.”

🚨 China is now allowing engineering students to invent a new product instead of writing a 100-page dissertation to earn a PhD. 👏