New Delhi pulled in seventy-three billion dollars in eleven weeks. Non-resident Indians made special deposits. That's the entire story. Your uncle in New Jersey wired money back home and someone called it capital inflows.
The technical picture remains unchanged. A chart doesn't care if the money came from Goldman Sachs or from Rajesh who owns three Subways in Edison. Price action is price action. The Russell 2000 still can't hold support. The VIX still trades like a sedated house cat. None of this matters.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately Googled "how to buy India." They found seven ETFs with the letters IND in the ticker. They bought all of them. Three were Indonesia funds. One was an industrial metals fund that hasn't been rebalanced since 2019. They're down six percent since Tuesday.
The special deposits sound important. They're not. Banks offered higher interest rates to people with foreign currency. People with foreign currency said yes. This counts as sophisticated monetary policy now. The Reserve Bank of India basically ran a CD promotion and Bloomberg wrote it up like the Marshall Plan.
Eleven weeks is a weird timeframe. Not a quarter. Not three months. Eleven weeks. Someone cherry-picked the start date to make the number look big. If they started twelve weeks ago the number was probably sixty-eight billion and that didn't test well with focus groups.
Every finance bro with a podcast just added this to their "emerging markets are back" thesis. They'll repeat it for six months. The thesis will be wrong. They'll never mention India again. By then they'll be talking about Vietnam or some other country they can't find on a map.
The rupee still trades like a currency whose government just begged its diaspora for cash.
Photo by shalender kumar on Unsplash
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