Weekly Wrapup- The Clash of Giants
This week, we saw a lot of breaking news. From the RBI's decision to transfer a whopping Rs. 1.76 Lakh Crore to the government, to NHAI's massive debt pileup. It couldn't have gotten more interesting and we have the complete wrap-up right here.
The Government Backtracks
On Monday, we talked about the government’s big U-turn on the whole automobile fiasco. For the longest time now, the government has been asking manufacturers to think long term and prepare for an electric future. However, with the automobile slowdown taking center stage, it seems that their priority has now shifted towards rescuing this sinking ship. And that means helping automobile companies sell what they have in stock right now i.e. lots of petrol and diesel vehicles. Electric Vehicles can wait i suppose?
Yeah, you can read a more detailed version here.
Anybody say Office Space?
Tuesday, we were trying to figure out why the commercial real estate sector was brimming with excitement when the Residential Real Estate sector was down in the dumps.
The inordinate amount of money that was pumped into Residential Real Estate is now slowly moving into Commercial Real Estate. And this has attracted a lot of attention from global investors especially considering there’s a desperate need for quality commercial properties in India. And people are willing to pay top dollar, making commercial real estate quite a juicy investing prospect indeed.
You can read more about this on our Tuesday's newsletter
The Clash of Giants
Wednesday was a big day for us because there was all this talk about the government raiding RBI's reserves and we wanted to bust that myth.
The government’s reliance on RBI's money is obviously not a good thing. But equating it to a raid and deliberately sabotaging the whole discussion isn’t a good thing either. Our story tried to give both parties a fair shot and we put together a cogent narrative about the real issue at hand.
So if you want a detailed exposition on the RBI's surplus transfer, dive in right here folks.
The FDI Bonanza
On Thursday the big news was FDI. The government had in fact been mulling over certain key FDI reforms for quite a while now. And we saw a lot of concessions on Wednesday, including 100 % FDI in contract manufacturing, coal activity, some relaxation in FDI Single Brand Retail etc.
But most readers didn’t care much for it. Instead, they were fixated on the other story we wrote the same day i.e. Xiaomi’s plans to start lending money to people online. In partnership with a Bangalore based lending startup KreditBee, Xiaomi plans to enter the Fin-tech space in a big way. However, the real story was about privacy concerns, considering there were rumours about Xiaomi wanting to access a lot of critical user data to offer the lending service.
Your Aadhar number with a Chinese company? Jeez!!! That’s a scary thought. Anyway, you can read more about FDI and the Xiaomi saga right here.
Highway to Hell?
On Friday the big focus was NHAI and a letter from the Prime Minister’s Office that said “road infrastructure has become financially unviable” and that NHAI is “totally log jammed with unplanned and excessive expansion of roads”
The scary part about this story is that collection from toll booths is so meager that NHAI (National Highways Authority of India) can't even cover the interest cost as of today. And government support seems lackluster at best. So it’s been on a borrowing spree.
But who’s going to pay it back? Who will ultimately bear responsibility for all this debt?
That was what we wanted to figure out and if you want in on the details, you can go read the whole thing right here :)
Anyway, that’s it for this week now. And since Monday is Ganesh Chaturthi, we’re taking the day off. So we will see you on Tuesday.
Until then… Goodbye :)