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The public commentary surrounding SIA investment in Air India has become highly reactive, shifting from valid commercial evaluation to a simplistic blame game, and some even drifted into nationalist and racial populism. So far, I do not see comments or posts with domain knowledge. All are just noises touching on surface issues and questions. The only exception is my own previous post  India is sitting on a sweet spot in aviation industry   Traditional financial analysis is a myopic and wrong approach here because SIA's 25.1% holdings in Air India is not a straight-off passive investment. That is precisely where all the noises are coming from. Almost everyone are led to think it's all about trying to capture a slice of India's booming market. That may be true of Vistara, but the game changed in 2024. You need use the macro-economic lens to see above the noise. I see two points being pushed consistently which I like to address here: 1. SIA has a dismal poor record of inves...

The most frustrating psychological realities of the financial world is "hindsight bias". This is the  "I knew-it-all-along" phenomenon. Everyone look like a genius after the charts have already climbed or dived. When looking backward, market movements look like a predictable sequence of logical events. In reality, the future is always a messy cloud of probabilities. There are four types of "post-fact expertise": - The retrospective predictors: They knew the stock was going to crash, or soar. Did they hold a short or long position pre-fact? - The opportunity capitalisers: They leverage market events to build a brand/sell subscriptions. - The emotionally charged bystanders: They loudly vent or brag to cope with psychological pain/pleasure. - The institutional evaluators: They methodically audit what went right or wrong to improve. Over social media, I see lots of emotionally charged angry bystanders whose views or comments of the SIA's Vistara-Air Ind...

Mohammud had 3 sons, all died at child-birth. His line came through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali ibn Abi Talib, via their sons Hasan and Husayn . In the Islamic world, many claim descendancy from the Prophet. They are accepted in traditional community but none proven via actual DNA test. People who claim this lineage are called Sayyids (or Sadat). This status exists in both Sunni and Shia communities across the Muslim world. In Twelver Shia Islam (the dominant form in Iran), the Twelve Imams are regarded as descendants of Husayn . Many religious scholars, including some ayatollahs, claim to belong to these lines. Visual marker in Iran and some other Shia contexts: black turban = claimed Sayyid (descent from the Prophet); white turban = non-Sayyid scholar.    Qatadah ibn Idris. leader of the tribe of Banu Qatadah, seized control of Mecca in 1201 and founded the dynasty that held the Sharifate of Mecca continuously until 1925. The  tribe claims desce...

I take a pause on my next China post to ponder on this interesting development because it further enhances understanding of the "carry trade" of MAS and PBOC in my two recent articles. The next China post is about how the country did the plumbing to fix the problems of their financial system, how fixing one leak creates another leak elsewhere. It's about how errors in policy can lead to serious structural problems in the economy. This Japan story is a good prelude to the next post as it deals with the difficult tasks of plumbing the system. In early August US Treasury reportedly provided the bank of Japan USD5Bn-USD10Bn to help prop up the Yen. There are lots of rhetorical comments in legacy and social media. If a country sucks up to Donald Trump, the US will jump in to help. US helps Japan by printing money, and in the end, takes away Japan's US Treasuries, thus clearing the American debt without paying anything. Trump admin is fascist and bulldozing the Fed's i...

The post title is as audacious as Prof Jeffrey Sachs' prediction in 2019. Sachs' boast has about 3 years to go and there are no signs of anywhere near realisation. This post has about 15 minutes read time to try to convince you. In the past few years you have been pounded by media with one story after another of the RMB being used in oil trades and countries agreeing to invoice in RMB. It drives the sense of a serious rise in the adoption of the yuan as a world reserve currency.  Let's look at one metric to see the major currencies share as reserve currency in 2019 and 2025. True enough, USD has shedded 4.56%, but RMB has gained by only 0.09%. The shift to RMB stalled at the front door of Beijing's capital controls. The shifting allocation of global reserves away from USD is surprisingly into the smaller currencies This is a phenomenon called the "Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance." The driver is technology. The digitization of foreign exchange markets...