FT: “Because America is based on an idea, rather than ancestral ties, its revolution triggered a quest that can never be exhausted. Much is rightly made of the fact that many of the founders, notably America’s first and third presidents, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves while proclaiming the equality of men…The US example helped inspire freedom movements around the world, including the Spanish American wars of the early 19th century that liberated much of the hemisphere from colonial rule. The same creed helped insulate the US from the lure of foreign ideologies, notably Marxism and fascism, and motivated its prosecution of the cold war. It is no coincidence that a nation founded on ideas became the world’s leading source of new ones, commercial and political.”
Bruce Feiler: “Everyone is leaving jobs, losing relationships, researching strange diseases, and feeling like we’ve abdicated our relationships for our smartphones, in a lot of ways. Everyone is experiencing a type of existential home sickness. That’s when I realized that I wanted a way to reconnect, to remake all of these things and restitch the bonds in my life. I thought, “I need a ritual.” Rituals are one of the few things that we know work to hold us together. A ritual is a shared unnecessary act—shared because it connects with other people—that makes us feel at home. They are unnecessary acts because you don’t need to get down on one knee to propose or wear black to mourn. Yet, they become necessary to give us meaning. They also make us feel at home.”
NYTimes: “Private credit is essentially a rebranded version of high-interest-rate lending that was first popularized under the term “junk bonds” in the 1980s and later became a subset of “distressed” or “special situations” investing. In prior iterations, these practices centered on banks, which amalgamated money from deposits and divvied out loans. This had advantages — it was heavily regulated and relatively transparent — and disadvantages, in that it put the banks’ ordinary savers at risk. Laws enacted after the 2008-9 financial crisis made it far more difficult for banks to be directly involved in such loans. The demand for financing from fledgling companies didn’t disappear, so private equity firms stepped into the void under the name private credit and began lending money.”
Business Standard: “Our monster Consumer India just got more monstrous, with another shot in the arm. After the first phase of liberalisation in the 1990s — when the prices came down and quality went up (due to lower taxes, more competition) — came Chinese goods with great price-performance points and innovative everyday products that had not been seen before. Then came Amazon, with all its incredible merchandise assortment, prices and the ability to return anything you did not want. Now comes quick commerce. Even if QC is eventually contained, it will not be for a lack of customer enthusiasm but for a lack of supplier staying power and patience through the scaling period, or their shifting to a high-margin and high-ticket-size merchandising mix. Consumer India leapfrogs in the most interesting ways, skipping stages of evolution other markets went through. Offer it customer-perceived superior value and do not demand that it change its ways, and you have a hit.”
