Akash Prakash on buybacks: “This is a time of high profits and cash flows. Animal spirits of corporate India are rising. Everyone is optimistic and bullish. The worst mistakes are made in the best of times. Capital discipline can easily slip. Hopefully companies will closely evaluate any unrelated business investment and realise that capital return is a viable option. Paying money back to shareholders does not mean that you have no growth. It may simply mean that you do not need all the capital you generate for your core business. Times like today of strong corporate profitability are the most dangerous for investors. This is where the art of capital allocation comes into view. Companies must maintain their standards for return on capital thresholds. That is how they got their premium valuations and rising payouts will not lead to valuation compression.”
Mint: ““There are over a hundred graduates in this village but not even 20 have a regular job,” said Akash Ramesh Narule, 25, who is a member of the village gram panchayat, the local governing body elected by residents. Pressed for funds, Narule did not finish his graduate degree and dropped out mid-way. The predicament of the educated is stark. For instance, Shubham Khobragade, 29, who failed to find a job despite completing a master’s degree in commerce, offers private tuition to school students. He earns less than ₹5,000 per month. Or a little over ₹150 per day—lower than what unskilled workers receive under the government’s rural employment guarantee scheme ( ₹297 per day). For the unemployed youth, education appears to be a handicap—they hesitate to take up menial work after spending years pursuing a degree. “Ten to twelve lakh students apply when just a few thousand government job openings are announced. It’s a lottery,” Khobragade laments. To be sure, the jobs crisis is not limited to rural Maharashtra. A recent report by the International Labour Organization showed that 29% of graduates in India are without a job—the extent of unemployment among educated youth is nine times higher than among those who cannot read or write (3.4%).”
WSJ reviews “The Ritual Effect”: “What…Mr. [Michael] Norton… calls a ritual could as easily be described as a custom, a practice, a routine or a bit of magical thinking. What a ritual is not, he emphasizes, is a habit. In his view, a habit pertains to the “what” we do, whereas a ritual speaks to the “how.” It is a distinction without much difference. Say a husband makes a frothy latte for his wife each morning: Some days he might do it by rote (making it a habit) while on others he might take extra care to perform the act with love (making it a ritual). But one needn’t quibble with his definitions to see what Mr. Norton is getting at: Human beings seem given to ritualized behavior. Some rituals come to us as legacies, as with the white dress of a bride; some arise from practical impulse, as with spring cleaning to rid a house of winter grit; some are improvisational, as with a family movie night that starts as an occasional treat and becomes a weekly fixture on the calendar.” Norton: “No ritual has the power to make rock stars or savants out of us. We still have to contend with the realities of aptitude and proficiency and the discipline of daily practice. But rituals can give us a way to manage our nerves, dial into the skills we’ve worked so hard to achieve and give us that elusive something more that allows us to step into the spotlight and shine.”
Bloomberg: “Comparing AI to the internet offers a broader and more nuanced understanding of its potential impacts, not to mention one that hasn’t been softened by the passage of time. We can all still feel both the positive and negative side effects of the web on our lives. Overall it’s a better comparison than the steam engine — as are the printing press, electricity and any other revolutionary inventions from the days of yore. Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., listed all these metaphors in his letter along with, to his credit, the internet. Bankers will always hedge their bets; but if you’re going to draw just one parallel from history for the potential of AI, stick with the internet.”
The Generalist: “One of my persistent obsessions is the provenance of exceptional entrepreneurs. Where do they come from? What were their families like? What were they interested in as children? How would they describe their younger selves? What were their earliest startup endeavors? What difficulties did they encounter? How did they manage their first commercial failures? Hidden in these anecdotes and recollections, it feels as if you can often find the making of an entrepreneur.”
