I have always been of the belief that things tend to become right when Bappa arrives. This week Bappa is in the pandal and the models are not.
Start with the sentence that should sit on every dealing-room whiteboard. More than six months after the US and Israel launched the Iran war, JPMorgan says it no longer has a baseline view on oil. "We simply don't know how to model the endgame." The assumption that Middle East disruptions are temporary is "becoming increasingly difficult to sustain."
Several red lines the bank thought Washington would not cross — oil above $100, US gasoline near $5 a gallon, Treasury yields ripping — have already been crossed. "Many of those lines have been crossed, yet the exit strategy is less clear, not more." You ain't alone there, JPMorgan.
And then, even as Bank of Japan raised rates on Friday, the Fed raise and commentary dominated news. US Fed raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point to 4% from earlier 3.75% (FOMC voted unanimously) and indicated that it plans an additional hike later this year to contain inflation. Kevin Warsh said the action shows the Fed is serious about delivering on the price stability objective and removing a dose of accommodation.
"We removed a dose of accommodation so that financial and credit conditions would be more consistent with our ultimate objectives. Today's action starts to show we're serious about this, and we will deliver on the price stability objective." Yields on the 10-year note rose during Warsh's press conference, eventually moving above 5%. In a new set of rate projections released Wednesday, Fed officials' median outlook for interest rates at the end of 2026 rose to 4.1% from 3.8%, signaling growing support for a series of rate hikes.
That is the week. Everything else is a footnote to it.
On Monday the 10-year note was already through 5%. Jet fuel in the US had run to $4.35 a gallon, up 61% in ten weeks. The International Energy Agency, in the same breath, cut 2026 oil demand by another 940,000 barrels a day and now expects consumption to fall 2.5 million barrels — the largest annual drop since the pandemic.
Diesel and gas are climbing faster than the headline crude print. That is the inflation the Fed actually fears, and on cue, on Wednesday, the FOMC voted unanimously to take rates from 3.75% to 4%.
Think about this: the day the Iran war began, WTI was about $65 and markets were pricing three cuts. Today WTI is above $102 and the first hike since 2023 is in. The ECB has two in. Other central banks will be forced to the table whether they like the company or not. Imagine what a 6-month conflict did to the markers!
Friday morning, Axios gave us the human version of the same fog. Trump says he is approaching "a major turning point in the war with Iran" and has "a big decision coming up." Oil extending a decline and Asian stocks catching a bid on Friday is not peace, but a respite from the hawkish newsflow. Or it is a market that has learned to trade the pause between two threats.
India does not get to sit this one out. The House passed a Russia sanctions bill 262–159 that gives the White House authority to put tariffs of up to 100% on goods from major buyers of Russian oil and gas. New Delhi would likely be on that list. Add the US finalising anti-dumping duty of 123% and CVD of 126% on Indian solar cells and modules — Indonesia and Laos got the same medicine — and the week's America story for us is not 'decoupling.' It is stacked bills. Democrats trying to block a Saudi civil nuclear deal while Riyadh orders more F-35s is the same Washington — transactional, loud, and not done.
At home the weather is doing its own sanctions. India is on track for its driest monsoon since 2009. That is not a colour piece. It is food, rural demand, and a second-half print that every house is still writing as if July rainfall will arrive in October.
The big decadal story is the set of differences in the Tata Boardrooms being out in the open. Thursday's board meet did two things Tata Trusts did not want: it asked N Chandrasekaran to take back his August decision not to seek a third term and voted him a fresh five-year chairmanship from February 2027, and it resolved to start the RBI compliance/listing process.
Noel Tata was the dissenting vote; the Trusts have called the resolutions illegal. Shapoorji Pallonji, with about 18.4%, has wanted the list for liquidity. Listed group companies that own slivers of Tata Sons — Tata Steel and Tata Motors PV at ~3.06% each, Tata Chem ~2.5%, Tata Power ~1.65%, Indian Hotels ~1.1% — now have a mark-to-event hanging over those stakes. Continuity at Bombay House and an IPO calendar are no longer theoretical. The fight over who controls that calendar has just gone public.
There at atleast two other India stories that are good and should not be buried. Chip-policy pledges have reached as much as $12 billion within months of the new semiconductor scheme, to be spent over two to three years, as per Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. And the National Stock Exchange, after a decade of co-location residue and a valuation reset on the roadshow, finally opened the book.
The exchange allotted 3.78 crore shares at 1785/share - at the top of the band - and raised 6746 crore rupees versus a demand of about 1.2 lakh crore rupees, about 20 times. As per the management interview to me, GIC, ADIA, Norges, Fidelity, MAS and few others took part from the foreign investor side, with domestics taking the rest.
The public book on day one though, was a different animal - about 0.42 times by the close of Thursday, NIIs ahead of retail, the mood not necessarily upbeat, with listing talk already cheaper than the unofficial premia of a week ago. Consider the dichotomy - Anchor investors bought India-as-a-system at 43 times last year's earnings because they could not buy this asset for ten years.
The street is pricing a Fed that just hiked, an options engine SEBI has already throttled, and a 100 per cent OFS that sends not one rupee to the company. Both co-exist.
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A lot of the rest of the tape was capital allocation. Imagicaaworld will sell Novotel Imagicaa to Juniper for 248 crore rupees. Authum (Sanjay danghi fame) bought 15 lakh shares of listing-day Glass Wall Systems. Bharat Forge opened a QIP around 2000 crore rupees, with a floor of 1947.70 rupees (remember December 2024, almost no discount, ten times covered).
Promoters bought Alembic, La Opala, Trualt. Promoters sold Jamna Auto into DSP, 360 ONE and ADIA at Rs 128. HDFC Bank sent two names to the RBI for the CEO chair. Tata Sons was told by the RBI it cannot wriggle out of CIC rules, which means the listing question does not go away, and every listed Tata that owns a sliver of Tata Sons will be marked to that sentence.
I am not going to pretend a 90 per cent revenue jump at Skyways, a BEL add-on of 648 crore rupees, or GPT Infra's 484 crore rupee RVNL bridge order changes the week. They are what a market looks like when the index is tired and stock-pickers still have to work.
Michhami Dukkaddam, if the week felt heavy. The models broke because the war did not end and the Fed did not blink. NSE's anchors voted for the long India. The public book is still deciding if this is the week to pay for it. Anything could happen. He said it himself.
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