India Short-Term Rates May Rise, Weighing on Spending, Investment

Higher Short-Term Rates May Weigh on India Spending, Investment Good morning... I’m Bhaskar Dutta in Mumbai, where traders are set to return to their desks after the Diwali break. A steady decline in oil prices should bode well for Indian assets as trading resumes on Wednesday. Still, options data points to scope for some consolidation in stocks after the benchmark Nifty surged about 8% last week, as we write below. Tata Power Co. and Hindustan Copper are among Indian companies due to report earnings today. In the bond market, meanwhile, the case is building for short-term yields to climb — potentially raising borrowing and operating costs for companies as we explain in the Markets Buzz section. Globally, Anthropic’s IPO remains in focus as investors try to gauge the next leg of the artificial-intelligence trade. The Claude chatbot maker is seeking a valuation of about $1.4 trillion in an offering that could make it the first frontier AI lab to go public. Any disappointment could reignite the global AI selloff and further burnish the Indian market’s anti-AI appeal. Asian stocks are up in early trading after better-than-expected earnings from AI computing provider CoreWeave revived interest in the AI trade. That’s helped offset a Wall Street selloff fueled by hotter-than-expected US inflation data and hawkish commentary from some Federal Reserve officials which have boosted expectations for rate hikes. In today’s newsletter, we also write about: