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The Indian stock market has once again demonstrated its remarkable ability to weather turbulent times. Despite significant geopolitical headwinds, including the Indo-Pak tensions in April 2025 and the escalating Iran-Israel conflict in June 2025, the benchmark Nifty 50 has shown resilience, recouping losses swiftly and even posting gains. Month-to-date (MTD) in June 2025, the Nifty 50 has its ground firmly , despite threatening news flow, a weakening rupee, and surging oil prices. Trading volumes on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) have surged, even as foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) are only marginal net buyers and promoter entities offloaded over  ₹ 400 billion in shares. Meanwhile, domestic institutional investors (DIIs) have though accelerated their buying and providing support to the market. One may argue that this tendency to quickly overcome geopolitical shocks isn’t new. Over the past five years, the Nifty 50 and Sensex have delivered annualized returns of 10-12%, navig...

The Middle East is once again a tinderbox, with the escalating Israel-Iran conflict threatening to spiral into a broader global crisis. Unlike the recent Indo-Pak hostilities, which remained contained, this clash carries the potential to draw in multiple nations, disrupting global trade and energy markets. For India, which is heavily reliant on energy imports, the stakes are high. While India has reiterated its neutral stance, the ripple effects of a prolonged conflict could significantly impact its energy security, inflation, current account balance, INR exchange rate, fiscal stability, and overall economic growth prospects. This global flashpoint could have local consequences The Israel-Iran conflict differs starkly from localized India and Pakistan military engagements. With China and Pakistan openly backing Iran, and Russia potentially supplying critical defense equipment should the U.S. directly support Israel, the geopolitical fault lines are deepening. For India, this pres...

The year 2024 is proving to be one of the worst years for political soothsayers. After a debacle in the Indian general elections last summer, psephologists have failed in the US presidential elections. The challenger Donald Trump emerged a winner, gaining popular votes to occupy the White House for four years with a clear majority in the US Congress and Senate. This kind of decisive mandate has been a rarity in US politics in the past four decades. Most of the media, political commentators, psephologists, and other experts completely failed to read the peoples’ mind and anticipated a victory for Kamala Harris. Post the election results, thousands of experts – research analysts, economists, strategists, geopolitical experts, money managers, etc. – have written reports running into millions of terabytes, forecasting the likely impact of Trump's victory on financial markets, currencies, commodities, geopolitics, and trade etc. Most of this analysis is based on Trump's election p...

  One of the major trends in the post global financial crisis (GFC) world is the weakening of the United States of America’s (USA) clout as an undisputed global economic and strategic leader. In the past 15 years, the US administration has consistently failed in achieving its economic, financial, technological, and strategic objectives. The economic performance of the US has been below par in the past decade. The handling of the pandemic has been highly questionable. Both monetary and fiscal policies have not yielded the stated objectives of price stability (inflation has been persistently high and rates have become growth restrictive) and financial stability (many regional banks have failed, delinquencies are rising and capital adequacy & reserves of banks have deteriorated, particularly in the past couple of years). Fiscal profligacy has benefited the rich much more than the poor. The efforts to restrict the benefits of advanced technological innovations flowing to China thr...

The first half of the year 2020 has been perhaps the most eventful six months in the past one decade, not only from the financial market perspective but from socially, economically and .geo politically also. Some of the key events of past six months which could have material long term impact on global socio-economic and geo political order could be listed as follows: The WHO declared COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. Over eight millions people across the world are infected and over 4,62,000 deaths have been reported till yesterday. Many countries enforced partial to total lockdown of all economic activities resulting in one of the deepest recession the global economy has faced in past 100years. The global economy is expected to contract by 4-6% in 2020. The central Bankers across the world announce massive monetary easing to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic and engineer a economic revival. India has so far reported over 4,18,000 confirmed cases and over 1...