Anupam Jha | अनुपम झा | 阿努潘.杰哈

What is Evergrande? Evergrande is a Chinese property developer company also known as Hengda Group in China. It is the second largest property developer in China, owning more than 1300 projects spread across 300 cities. It was started by Chinese entrepreneur Xu Jiayin in southern part of China in mid 90s when Chinese economy liberalized and opened up to foreign money. Company also has interests in various verticals including wealth management and owns a football club with the name of Guangzou FC. The company grew on the tailwinds of growing Chinese economy and its middle class contributing a great deal to the growing Chinese housing market.   What is Evergrande crisis? Basically, excessive debt which the company is finding hard to service. Its debt stands at $300 Billion as of today. While the company grew rapidly with the broader Chinese economy and the growing middle class demanding homes amidst a property boom, its debt also continue to increase and has reached unmanageab...

Virat Kohli has decided to step down from the Indian T20 cricket team captaincy post the ICC T20 World cup in October 2021. He would be a part of the T20 team in the capacity of a batsmen thereafter and Rohit Sharma would be taking over the reins of the captaincy from Kohli. There have been speculations ever since the abandonment of the fifth test against England regarding Kohli’s stepping down from T20 captaincy but nothing was concrete. Upon asking BCCI even denied these rumors of split captaincy and reinforced the Kohli would continue to be the captain of all three formats. But, today Virat Kohli officially announced through his Twitter handle that he would be stepping down as T20 captain post the world cup to manage workload.   There has been continued pressure from many quarters on Virat Kohli for his record in ICC tournaments as Indian captain. The fact that Indian won any major ICC tournament last under Dhoni’s captaincy and a world class T20 captain in the form of Rohit...

There has been a growing chorus to tax the rich after COVID resulted in record unemployment and monetary easing resulted in ballooning wealth of some of the richest people on the planet. Recent data on billionaire wealth shows dramatic increase in income inequality as poor people fell off the cliff, middle class became poor while the richest continue to grow richer. Income inequality isn't a new phenomenon but has certainly seen a new high post the COVID breakout. Widespread lockdown in the backdrop of COVID scare resulted in people losing their jobs and livelihood. While their employers received monetary easing and went on to strengthen their balance sheets while cutting costs on payroll and other input costs. Billionaire wealth somehow always increase post financial crisis and regular tax paying citizenry keeps paying for the mess. This has become a theme post the industrial revolution. In the backdrop of such hysteria, billionaires are flying in space with their entourage doesn...

NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s one of its kind, unique and can’t be replaced by something similar. Unlike Bitcoin, which can be replaced by another bitcoin - NFTs don’t have multiple replicas of the same unit. So, the owner of an NFT can be rest assured of him/her being the sole owner of that particular NFT.   What can be an NFT? The answer to this is anything that can be converted into a digital asset can be an NFT. Art, sneaker, hell even tweets can be an NFT (Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for a whopping $3 million as an NFT).   Why does anybody need an NFT? This is an interesting question and the answer isn’t very simple. On surface it does seem that converting an Art into a digital form will make it everlasting and easy to share but it doesn’t stop at that. Fashion houses have started experimenting with clothing and sneakers as NFT and HNIs are showing interest in this asset class. We are certain that they can’t really wear these N...

Leather has been the go-to raw material for footwear for as long the history of footwear can be traced. It has been identified as the best raw material available for making shoes because of its inherent properties of temperature regulation and breathability . In fact it had no real competition. But, what changed in recent times that leather went from this supremely robust and fairly sustainable material (if we keep the chrome tanning part aside) to this evil monster trying to end the world ? Well I did some research and came to a rather interesting conclusion . Leather as a raw material has fallen victim to a massive negative propaganda that has been relentlessly pursued by the savvy oil and petroleum industry and their processing ecosystem . Blame also goes to the leather industry as they continued to sleep while their house was on fire (we will discuss the reason why they aren't as savvy as their counterparts later). Some of the negatives that were highlighted...