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Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho, recently posted something on X that made me pause and think about investing in ways I hadn’t before. He argued that the era of the Washington Consensus—globalisation driven by Davos-style thinking—received “a mortal blow during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09, died during the pandemic and today we perform the last rites.” What struck me most wasn’t his geopolitical analysis, but his warning about where India’s smartest talent is heading. “We don’t want our smartest talent going into high finance,” he wrote. “We must realise we are borrowing what failed America. It is a colossal misallocation of resources.” He connected America’s obsession with financial engineering directly to both the 2008 crisis and the societal tensions that followed. This aligns with what we see in Indian investing circles. We’ve developed an unhealthy fascination with “financial sophistication” at the expense of productive, patient capital form
This article was originally published on September 08, 2025.
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