The Story behind Corporate Bad Loans: Dubious Assessment, Rampant Diversion of Funds and Meaningless Guarantees
The market’s memory tends to be short as seen with the sharp rally in shares of many banks who until recently were saddled with a broken balance sheet thanks to the RBI under the Governorship of Raghuram Rajan forcing them to recognise bad loans. Last week’s high profile arrests of a former bank CEO and […]
How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed
The Russian economy has surprisingly withstood the extreme pain from western sanctions, largely thanks to its energy exports but as this article suggests, also credit to the technocrats who stayed back to run the economy despite opposing the war. The article also seems to credit Vladmir Putin for having backed these technocrats despite their position […]
Salmon Sushi isn’t a Japanese invention
For those amongst us who have discovered sushi over the past 20 years it may come as a surprise to know that salmon sushi was almost unheard of in the previous century. It took a decade long marketing campaign from the Norwegians to convince the Japanese that salmon wasn’t a “garbage fish” and that it […]
Public to Private Equity in the United States: A Long-Term Look
The Christmas break gave us an opportunity to revisit a two-year old Michael Mauboussin paper which focuses on using 30 years of US data to highlight the stark (and counterintuitive) differences between Venture Capital (VC), Private Equity (PE) and public market investing. If you work in the financial markets or are investing your hard earned […]
Divis: Greatness in Indian Pharma
It is rare to find an Indian pharma company which makes systematic investments towards building the customer’s trust, improving compliance and ramping up manufacturing efficiency. Divis Labs is one such company that has delivered on these fronts for almost three decades. It has been the preferred manufacturing partner for major Western pharma companies on the […]
How tech’s defiance of economic gravity came to an abrupt end
The year 2022 went down as one of the worst years for the S&P500, the bellweather index for the American stockmarket. A large part of the fall was thanks to the big tumble big tech companies took after a stellar run over the recent years. “America’s five largest technology companies—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta—saw […]
Louis-Vincent Gave: We Are Heading Into a Great Environment for Emerging Markets
China’s spectacular reopening amidst skyrocketing cases has puzzled many of us. The selective reporting of the western media doesn’t make things easier. Hence, we pay close attention to folks like Louis-Vincent Gave of Gavekal research, someone who has eyes and ears on the ground and is also known to speaking his mind. Here’s an interview […]
How MA Jinnah’s bargain with communal politics sealed his fate and that of India’s
In business, one is often told that it might make sense to take a negotiating stance which is at odds with one’s beliefs and convictions regarding what is right and what is wrong. The life of MA Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, shows this might actually be a very bad idea. In order to manoeuvre […]
How Founders Should Think About Cash Management
As listed market investors, we tend to think about and write about capital allocation (by ourselves and by our investee companies) for much of our time. Outstanding books have written on the subject such as ‘The Outsiders’ by William Thorndike Jr. What this Andreesen Horowitz piece does is highlight a specific subset of capital allocation […]
‘The Godfather, Saudi-style’: inside the palace coup that brought MBS to power
In our day-to-day work we tend to encounter a cross section of people some of whom have a fondness for authoritarian rule. Whilst we hope that the ongoing unravelling of China will give such people food for thought, an even more dramatic upheaval is playing out in Saudi Arabia where behind palace doors a young […]
The Best Blogs of 2022
The year 2022 was full of drama akin to a 90s Hindi feature film. Just as the world was finding its feet post the devastating blow from Covid-19 over 2020-21, we heard the news of Russia – Ukraine war that sent the energy and food prices through the roof. At the same time, we saw […]
The Best Newsletters of 2022
The end of a year is a great time for self-reflection and to assess how we’ve grown as individuals and as an organization. At Marcellus, one of the key elements of growth (and something we take pride in) is learning more about the world we live in. It’s our constant endeavor to keep building on […]
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