Arvind's Newsletter

1.Trump hits India with extra 25% tariff for Russia oil purchases: Financial Times and others

U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday imposing an additional 25% tariff on goods from India, saying the country directly or indirectly imported Russian oil, adding to 25% tariffs already announced, bring total tariffs on Indian goods to 50%.

The latest duty imposition ties India with Brazil for the highest tariff rate of all countries.

The move threatens to further complicate U.S.-Indian relations and comes shortly after a Indian government source said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would visit China for the first time in over seven years later this month.

The tariffs would go into effect 21 days after the signing of the order, meaning that both India and Russia might have time to negotiate with the administration on the import taxes.

Indian ministry of External Affairs, called the move “unfair, unjustified, and unreasonable,” adding that India will take all necessary measures to safeguard its national interests.

2.Air India Taps Singapore Air to Bolster Fleet Upkeep After Crash: Bloomberg

Air India plans to move some aircraft maintenance services in-house instead of outsourcing them to state-owned AI Engineering Services Ltd., according to people familiar with the matter.

The Indian airline is preparing to take on pre-flight and daily aircraft inspections, minor repair work and other troubleshooting activities, said the people, who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Air India will get help from shareholder Singapore Airlines in the transition of those maintenance tasks to the airline’s staff, the people said.

3.RBI Monetary Policy keeps repo rate unchanged at 5.5% amid Trump tariff threats

The Reserve Bank of India's MPC, under Governor Sanjay Malhotra, has maintained the repo rate at 5.5% after 3 previous cuts. This decision precedes the festive season, a period of increased credit demand. It reflects a cautious approach to balancing external economic pressures and supporting domestic growth amidst easing inflation and trade concerns.

This pause follows three consecutive rate cuts since February, totaling 100 basis points, and comes just ahead of the festive season, a period when credit demand typically rise.

The central bank decided to hold the rate as “the uncertainties of tariffs are still evolving, monetary policy transmission is still continuing [and] the impact of the 100 basis-point rate cut since February 2025 on the broader economy is still unfolding”, RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Wednesday.

The RBI also stuck with its 6.5 per cent GDP growth forecast for the fiscal year ending next March. “Headwinds emanating from prolonged geopolitical tensions . . . persisting global uncertainties and volatility in global financial markets pose risks to the growth outlook,” Malhotra said.

At a press conference later on Wednesday, the RBI governor said the impact of Trump’s new tariffs had not yet been factored into economic projections, adding: “We do not have sufficient data to revise our GDP forecast.”

4.How India lost its geopolitical sweet spot in the world: Sidharth Rimedhi in The Print

India appears to have gone from occupying a near-perfect geopolitical sweet spot to now inhabiting a geopolitical no-good-option deadlock.

“India’s geopolitical context appears to have turned 180 degrees over the past few months. From being courted by all great powers just three years ago, we now find ourselves at the receiving end of strategic offensives by the China-Pakistan nexus, as well as economic arm-twisting by both China and the United States.

We took pride in being able to sit at both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Quad, and in enhancing strategic ties with the US while retaining our historic relationship with Russia. The purchase of Russian oil in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war was itself seen as testimony to Indian diplomatic dexterity, as well as evidence of our great power status. It seemed we could juggle multiple balls in the air without losing our balance.

However, in recent months, the balls appear to be falling. Trump’s scathing complaints of India’s energy and military ties with Russia (along with sanctions) are notable; and so is China’s growing disregard for Indian concerns over a wide range of issues, strategic and economic. The great powers are now crafting strong ties with a bankrupt Pakistan, with less regard for Delhi’s sensitivities than has been the norm in recent decades.

What explains this? Is this pure randomness, chance, and bad luck? Is this just Trump being Trump? Is this related to India’s foreign policy mistakes? Is this simply geopolitical shifts that are outside India’s control? Read on

5."McKinsey in a Box": The End of Strategic Consulting? Philip M Parker in Insead Knowledge

For decades, consulting firms like McKinsey, Accenture and Deloitte have commanded premium pricing that put sophisticated analytical services beyond the reach of 99 percent of the world's businesses. That era may now be past. 

We are witnessing the emergence of AI systems that can replicate, and in many cases exceed, the analytical capabilities of traditional strategy consultants. Unlike conventional large language models prone to hallucination, these new systems leverage dynamic multi-method generation (DMG), an approach that has been implemented across use cases from large multinationals to small coffee shops, delivering McKinsey-quality strategic consulting at a fraction of the cost.

The first commercial manifestation of this revolution might be Xavier AI, which I co-founded with INSEAD alumnus (MBA’22D) and former McKinsey consultant Joao Filipe. We developed a proprietary DMG reasoning engine that enables Xavier AI to benchmark a company’s performance against competitors, estimate market sizes for new ventures, and build financial models in a matter of minutes rather than weeks.

In short, Xavier AI transforms complex business challenges into presentation-ready insights based on real, identifiable sources. Effectively, it democratises access to strategic expertise that was previously exclusive to large corporations. Read on

6.OpenAI is in early talks about a potential sale of stock for current and former employees at a valuation of about $500 bn: Bloomberg

The company is targeting a secondary stock sale in the billions of dollars, and existing investors including Thrive Capital have approached OpenAI about buying some of the employee shares. If the deal goes ahead, it would elevate OpenAI’s on-paper price tag by roughly two-thirds. Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence leader is releasing a pair of open and freely available AI models that can mimic the human process of reasoning, months after China’s DeepSeek gained global attention with its own open AI software.

7.Trump to Announce Additional $100 Billion Apple Investment in U.S: New York Times

President Trump plans to announce on Wednesday that Apple Inc. is pledging $100 billion in additional investment in the United States, the company’s latest move to ramp up its domestic production and avoid the president’s threat of tariffs on its iPhones.

The White House said in a statement that the pledge was a “significant acceleration” of Apple’s plan for more production in the United States and that the company had promised Mr. Trump to invest $600 billion domestically over the next four years.

Mr. Trump’s announcement, which was reported earlier by Bloomberg, will include the creation of what the White House is calling the American Manufacturing Program, which will focus on bringing more of Apple’s supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the United States.

8.What the "marshmallow test" got wrong about child psychology: Psyche

Self-control, grit, growth mindset – trendy skills won’t transform children’s lives, but more meaningful interventions can

“The marshmallow test, first devised by Walter Mischel in the 1960s to measure a young child’s ability to delay gratification, helped usher in a fascination with early childhood capacities and skills that has persisted to the present day – you may have seen some of the many cute videos on social media or YouTube showing children taking the test.

Mischel’s original studies provided compelling evidence that very young children differ in their capacities for self-control – highlighting the tantalising possibility that key features of adult personality typically take root before a child has even turned five years old. These studies eventually caught the imagination of the curious public when follow-up work in 1990 showed that children who waited longer during the marshmallow test were more successful as adolescents and adults, in terms of having higher SAT scores and being better-adjusted socially. This longitudinal work fuelled expectations that the early ability to delay gratification constituted a foundational life skill and, moreover, that interventions targeting this early capacity might unlock long-term benefits that would set children on higher-functioning trajectories into adulthood.

But in 2018, my colleagues and I muddied the picture. We published a re-examination of whether young children’s performance on the marshmallow test really does predict how well they will fare in adolescence. The study gained some notoriety because we found that, although performance on the task was correlated with achievement in adolescence, this relationship all but vanished when we accounted for other important factors in a child’s life, such as their general cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. In other words, we found that, if children were matched on these other factors, their ability to delay gratification was no longer related to their behavioural or academic outcomes later in life. We also recently followed up on this work and found the same was true for success in adulthood – once other factors are taken into account, the marshmallow test loses its predictive power.”

9.Meloni revives €13.5bn Sicilian bridge as part of defence planning: Financial Times

Giorgia Meloni’s government on Wednesday approved the construction of a €13.5bn bridge linking Sicily to the Italian mainland, resurrecting a controversial project that Rome now says is crucial for national security. 

Originally designed to spur economic development in one of Italy’s poorest regions, the 3.3km-long suspension bridge over the Messina Strait has had several false starts in recent decades. But the Italian government has recast the project as a way for the country to help meet its Nato commitment to boost military spending.

Like all Nato allies, Italy has pledged to increase annual defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP within a decade, of which 1.5 per cent of GDP is earmarked for strategic infrastructure.

Meloni’s government aims to include the cost of the bridge as part of this effort, and has begun touting the project’s strategic value in the Mediterranean, where it believes Moscow is striving to increase its influence.  This is stretching the concept of “a military asset”.

10.Sales of Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drugs including Ozempic slow sharply :The Guardian

Sales of Novo Nordisk’s injectable diabetes drugs including Ozempic have slowed sharply amid fierce competition and the threat of US tariffs, prompting it to cut costs and sharpen its commercial focus.

The Danish drugmaker, whose booming sales of GLP-1 diabetes and obesity drugs in recent years had turned it into Europe’s most valuable company, has lost nearly $100bn (£75bn) in market value since cutting its full-year sales forecast last week, when its share price slid 30% in its worst week in more than two decades. It fell a further 3% on Wednesday.

The company has lost market share to its US rival Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, which studies have shown to be more effective, as well as cheaper versions made by generic drugmakers. It has also been hit by “compounding” in the US, where pharmacies make up medications from ingredients, even though the US regulator declared an end to the practice recently.

Novo Nordisk’s outgoing chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, said that the copycat market had “equal size to our business” and that compounded versions of Wegovy were sold at a “much lower price point.

11.Why is India rebuffing Trump over Russian oil: Gzero An interesting analysis by Gzero

Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, India only sourced 0.2% of its oil from Russia. Now, Moscow is responsible for roughly one third of all Indian oil imports, with Delhi profiting from a discounted price that resulted from sanctions.

“Indian refineries save about $1 billion a month by buying Russian crude,” said Eurasia Group’s South Asia Practice Head Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, a lower amount than previously – the Russian oil discount has diminished in recent weeks – but still significant.

While India requires this fuel for its own energy needs, it also uses the discounted oil to generate major revenues from exporting refined petroleum products in which crude in an input, like diesel and jet fuels. In this trade, Europe is one of India’s largest markets.

“Purchasing crude oil from Russia and refining it for the market (which includes European countries) has allowed India to not only profit from the purchases but maintain its political and economic relationship with Russia,” Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told GZERO. Read on