Arvind's Newsletter

1.AI Modi started as a joke, but it could win him votes, reports Rest of World.

The internet has been amused at an Instagram Reel where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi can be heard “singing” a hit Bollywood song. Accompanying the singing is a picture of Modi sitting cross-legged, strumming a guitar. The video, made by creator @ai_whizwires using artificial intelligence, has over 3.4 million views. “Before uploading [it], I was a little scared. But after it went live, everybody was enjoying it,” @ai_whizwires, who didn’t want to be identified by his real name over fear of political backlash, told Rest of World.

The rise of free AI voice-cloning tools has allowed Indian meme pages like his to mix politics with entertainment and trolling, drawing more eyeballs and engagement. Over the last few weeks, Modi’s digitally rendered voice has been used for videos not just in Hindi, but also in south Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, captivating audiences in regions where Hindi is not commonly spoken.

2.The index of eight core industries (ICI) in India saw a growth of 8.1% in September on an annual basis, down from 12.1% in August.

Meanwhile, retail inflation for industrial workers eased to 4.72% in September, compared to 6.91% in August this year, mainly due to lower prices of certain food items and cooking gas.
Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/indias-eight-core-sectors-growth-output-up-8-1-in-september/articleshow/104856056.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Also, global investors dumped a net $1.5 bn worth of Indian stocks last Friday, marking the single biggest day of selling since September 2022 as mixed earnings, rising oil prices and “higher for longer” rates in the US weighed on appetite, reported the Financial Times.

The surge in sales by global funds follows a rush of inflows to India earlier in the year on the back of strong growth as investors shifted out of sluggish Chinese markets. Indian shares are up about 13 per cent from a low in March of this year.

But analysts said Indian equities had been hit harder than other Asian markets in recent weeks. Weaker than expected earnings by IT companies and downbeat commentary from some Indian banks contributed to uncertainty over the strength of the country’s economic momentum.

3.Several deaf-from-birth children in China can now hear after being treated with a revolutionary new gene therapy. 

The treatment uses a virus to deliver a working copy of a gene to cells in the ear, making them express a protein vital to hearing. The specific form of deafness treated only applies to about 1-3% of deaf people, but scientists told MIT Technology Review that the breakthrough “could be the gateway drug that drives a lot of funds toward other causes of deafness.” 

The children, originally entirely deaf, ended up with 60 to 65% of normal hearing, one researcher estimated: The mother of one child said that her daughter was now “complaining it’s too noisy.”

4.The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy. Roge Karma’s long piece in the Atlantic on the US private equity industry is interesting and worth reading. Some excerpts:

"In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole." 

“Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”

“This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.”

“Meanwhile, private equity has matured into a multitrillion-dollar industry, devoted to making short-term profits from highly leveraged transactions, operating with almost no regulatory or public scrutiny. Not all private-equity deals end in calamity, of course, and not all public companies are paragons of civic virtue. But the secrecy in which private-equity firms operate emboldens them to act more recklessly—and makes it much harder to hold them accountable when they do.”

“Private-equity funds dispute many of the criticisms of the industry. They argue that the horror stories are exaggerated and that a handful of problematic firms shouldn’t tarnish the rest of the industry, which is doing great work. Freed from onerous disclosure requirements, they claim, private companies can build more dynamic, flexible businesses that generate greater returns for shareholders. But the lack of public information makes verifying these claims difficult.”

“The government appears to be at least somewhat aware of this problem. In August, the SEC proposed a new rule requiring private-equity fund advisers to give more information to their investors. That’s better than nothing, but it hardly addresses the bad behavior or systemic risk.”

5.Music can be mental health care, reports the New York Times.

Music therapy, which helps people cope with ailments like stress, chronic pain, limited mobility and hypertension, has grown over the last decade. Research has shown that it can improve depressive symptoms, decrease anxiety levels and improve day-to-day functioning.

Clients will often play instruments with their therapist or write lyrics together. But they don’t have to be musically gifted or proficient at playing an instrument in order to participate. Others prefer to listen to music rather than create it. It’s up to the patient to decide what feels right.