I have a simple rule for these notes: find the number that will still be on the whiteboard on Monday. This week it is not the Nifty, and it is not the grey market premium on some listing. It is the US 10-year Treasury yield. It has been a week of contrasts. While mood swings in US bond yields held centre stage, the overarching conversation was about geopolitics, and whether higher yields and higher inflation force the US and its allies to blink on the Iran conflict, especially with the US midterms just weeks away. Oil prices, which had fallen for five to six consecutive days, flared up again, much to the chagrin of the bulls, and the Tata boardroom saga rolled on.
The US 10-year yield is the focal point. On Wednesday it printed 5.05%, the highest since July 2007. By Friday morning it was through 5.20%, the first time in 19 years. That is a 50-basis-point jump in 30 days, and 30 basis points of it in just the last two. US mortgage rates are pushing towards 7.50%. When does he blink? That is the question the bond market is asking of the White House and the Fed in the same breath.
History is not kind here. LPL Financial looked at six tightening cycles since 1994: the median S&P 500 return three months after the first hike was down 2.6%. RBC Capital Markets' Lori Calvasina is blunter: in five of those cycles the index took an 8% to 14% drawdown from the peak, with the low arriving anywhere from one month to three-and-a-half months after the hike. As the week ends, US futures are soft, Asia is sluggish and India is flattish. That is not calm. That is a market waiting to see if 5.20% is a level or a trend.
Oil is doing what oil does in this war: refusing to pick a lane. Brent was back above $107 a barrel after the Houthis said they had hit a Saudi military site. Five days earlier it had tumbled under $100 a barrel because Trump said he was open to talking to Iran at the UN, hailing "very good" talks days after an annihilation threat. Pezeshkian, for his part, will not give up enrichment and will not open the Strait of Hormuz while sanctions stay on. Ukraine then sent 1,600-odd drones into the Moscow region and set fire to a refinery that feeds a third of the city's fuel, just six days after Washington said both sides had agreed not to hit energy infrastructure. Diesel in the US is over $6.50 a gallon. France has 11% of its stations dry. Gold ETFs are sitting on about 100 million ounces. If you needed a picture of a world that cannot price the endgame, that is it.
Gavekal asked the right question this week: what would actually slow AI? Not Anthropic and OpenAI talking about "pacing" their models. Not the local American backlash to data centres. The binding constraint is the cost of capital. Worldwide data-centre capex is now expected to cross $3 trillion by 2030, an outlook that has nearly doubled since January. The top 20 US tech names are spending 16% of revenue on capex, against 9% in China. OpenAI, the Financial Times says, sees negative free cash flow of $278 billion between 2026 and 2030, even as revenue is modelled anywhere from $36 billion to $350 billion. Oracle declaring force majeure on a New Mexico data centre to shield itself from rising costs is not a colour piece. It is the same sentence in a different font. But a really important one. Meta's Muse agent hitting number one on the US app stores, and bitcoin tagging $86,000 before settling near $84,500, tells you the tape still wants the AI trade. The bond market is the one asking who pays for it.
Now, the sentence I actually liked this week.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has filed a compliance affidavit in the Supreme Court on front-of-pack nutrition labelling. Packs will have to say, in language a parent can read, if the namkeen in front of them is high in salt, sugar and fat. After years of committee-speak, that is a real consumer-protection print. The same regulator also opened penal action against Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy Instamart, Zepto and BigBasket, covering Happilo's claims, the sale of datura fruit on quick commerce, and Milky Mist's labelling. You can argue about the methods. You cannot argue that packaged food was going to regulate itself.
The rest of the domestic tape was capital and commissions.
The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) put out a distribution paper this week, and it is the ugly one. Jefferies calls it negative for distributors and neutral for insurers: commission cuts of a third to a half in health, term and motor insurance. A 10% cut in new-business commissions is 10-12% off earnings for the aggregators. Bernstein went further and said they had been wrong earlier: the cuts are shaped to pinch PB Fintech hardest. "Unviable" is the word they used. The real question, as they put it, is whether the regulator even sees PB Fintech as a positive contributor to the ecosystem. If SBI Life, Star Health or ICICI Lombard correct on the noise, Jefferies would rather buy those than the distributor.
Bajaj Finance will mull a qualified institutional placement (QIP) and other capital raises on October 1. Jefferies' sketch: 10% of FY28 net worth is about Rs 15,000 crore, a 1% lift to FY28 earnings per share (EPS), 7% to book value, and return on equity (RoE) a shade lower. They keep the Buy rating and the Rs 1,280 target. Citi initiated Tata Capital at Buy with a Rs 450 target. UBS keeps its target on HDFC Bank at Rs 1,000 and says clarity on the CEO, plus 15.6% loan growth in the first quarter, is the re-rating trigger. Persistent wants an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to raise up to $450 million in equity, and Lenskart and Pinelabs saw some block deals.
On the industrial side, the week was orders and guidance, not poetry. Waaree is taking Indosolar in at a 1:11 swap ratio, and separately booked 2 gigawatts (GW) of modules. Cupid raised its FY27 revenue guidance to Rs 725-750 crore and profit after tax (PAT) to Rs 210-225 crore, with FY28 at Rs 1,085 crore and FY29 at Rs 1,500 crore. If margins hold, you are still paying a very rich multiple for a consumer name that has to execute three years of that ramp. The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) flowed gas in the Mahanadi basin under its Samudra Manthan project, but was careful, on our show, to say that the capex numbers doing the rounds are still assumptions. Welspun's associate East Pipes signed Aramco for about Rs 2,000 crore of pipe supply over six months, and GR Infra took the Agra-Gwalior road project at Rs 4,263 crore.
Two footnotes I will not bury.
Anthropic says Claude found an unknown enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA, sitting next to a CRISPR-like repeat. Historically, such systems have gone on to change medicine. It will take years to know if this one does too. And a bicycle factory in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains is a neat illustration of how tariffs can sabotage the very goal they are meant to serve: a Bloomberg report found that US tariffs have made a truly "Made in America" bike almost impossible to build economically.
If we were purely rational about probabilities, most of the leaps we celebrate would never have been attempted. This week, the rational trade is the 10-year yield and the cost of building the next gigawatt of compute. The hopeful trade is a label on a biscuit pack, a festive order book, and a gas well that has not yet been given a rupee figure. Both can be true at the same time. That is usually when the week is worth writing down.
Essential Business Intelligence, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice, Daily Fuel, Gold and Silver Prices and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.