A world without news
For some reason, I’ve long been fascinated by news publishing. At one point in my life, I wanted to be a journalist. Thank God I didn’t become one. As romantic as poverty feels, I’m not a huge fan of being poor. Despite dodging that bullet, I was still enamored by the industry—I quite can’t put…
Broken news
“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender. What a crazy decade the 2010s were! The tide of cheap money deluded an entire generation into thinking they were geniuses. Everything worked until 2022. You could raise $130 million for a $400 juicer (Juicero), $1.75 billion for…
Dear influencers, please stop hurting India
If you are working in financial services, you would have heard or thought about this: “India has 140 crore people, and even if 10–20% of the population starts investing…” If you look at the data, you’ll quickly realize that your assumptions are from Mars and the reality is from Venus. There are just 3.37 crore…
Death to the banks; central bank accounts for all
Throughout the history of modern banking, two narratives have been constant: “Banks are dead” and “Why do we need banks?” The “banks are dead” narrative is a favorite of the techno-optimist and fintech crowds. Whenever there are new technologies, regulatory changes, or market disruptions, two things happen: the likes of McKinsey and Deloitte publish “the…
It’s your grandfather’s banking crisis
In the previous post, I wrote about a few underappreciated aspects of banking panics in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Since publishing the post, the not-so-serious banking crisis seems to be getting serious. First Republic Bank, which was experiencing a bank jog, found its white knight in Jamie Dimon. After frantic attempts, banking…
Stories that cause bank failures and the scars they leave
On March 10th, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest bank in the United States, collapsed. SVB was the bank of choice for US startups, faux libertarian tech bros, and VCs. As the bank was going under, there was a minor miracle. All the economists, policy wonks, semi-retired epidemiologists, anthropologists, futurists, and cultural archeologists on…
Institutional investors are just as stupid as retail investors
One of the oldest clichés in finance is that retail investors are “dumb money” and institutional investors are “smart money.” There’s some truth to the cliché. Retail investors do all sorts of silly things. They are too optimistic, trade their pants off, take unnecessary risks, buy shiny objects, chase performance, form cults, cause market mispricing,…
No, it isn’t
Bill Burr is one of my favourite stand-up comedians and also someone you can easily relate to. At the 2014 all-star tribute to Don Rickles—another one of my favourite comedians—Jerry Seinfeld who was hosting, started the night by saying: On the Mount Rushmore of stand up comedy there are four faces in my opinion: Richard…
Revolution in a box: The extraordinary story of the ordinary shipping container
Can you think of some of the greatest inventions and innovations in human history? 90% I’m sure you thought about things like the printing press, steam engine, and electricity. Sure, these innovations permanently altered the course of human progress. But what if I told a simple box was just as consequential in tilting the arc…
Dear fintechs, please stop hurting India
Sometime in the last decade, software is eating the world became fintech is eating the world. The term “fintech” is a portmanteau of “finance” and “technology” and was coined in the 1990s but became popular after 2010. It’s a catchall term for companies that use technology to deliver better financial service experiences. In popular discourse, the…