Month: September 2024

New Delhi (TIP)- Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. plans to add to the $13 billion it has already invested in Indian infrastructure, describing it as the “brightest spot” in emerging markets.“There’s no reason why we can’t keep up with that trajectory,” Arpit Agrawal, head of the Canadian investment firm’s India infrastructure business, said in an interview. Brookfield has ramped up spending in the sector across India from just $100 million eight years ago.
Brookfield’s wider themes for infrastructure that focus on digitalization, decarbonization and deglobalization play well in India, according to Agrawal. The firm will explore investments in fiber optics, where demand is projected to increase as more data shifts to the cloud, he said.
It may also partner with semiconductor manufacturers and increase investment in gas pipelines, Agrawal said. The firm has already invested in transmission towers, pipelines and data centers, and is looking at smart meters, he added.
Brookfield’s local team of 15 investment and operations professionals has faith in India’s growth prospects and demographics, while “predictable depreciation” in the rupee makes it easier to factor in returns, and currency hedges are easier to put into place, Agrawal said.
Toronto-based Brookfield has nearly $29 billion of assets across infrastructure, real estate, renewable and private equity investments in India. Towers account for between $10 billion and $11 billion of the infrastructure assets, followed by pipelines at $2 billion. The rest is in data centers that are being built.
The Indian government has made a push to upgrade poor infrastructure, and private capital has been crucial to that strategy. A World Bank report in 2022 estimated that the country needed to spend $840 billion over the following 15 years on urban infrastructure.
Regulatory and policy changes have eased infrastructure investment and are leading to a deeper pool of players in securities like infrastructure investment trusts. Brookfield’s InvITs command a third of the roughly 1.8 trillion rupees ($21.5 billion) market value of the asset class, Agrawal said. InvITs are designed to support funding for costly infrastructure projects.
Brookfield didn’t need permission from the telecom department for its recent $2.2 billion acquisition of American Tower Corp.’s portfolio in India thanks to a regulatory change in 2021, Agrawal said.
“Incrementally, it’s becoming better,” he said. “We see India just going forward. There’s really no turning back.”
The firm is also dipping into its global investments to build out opportunities in India. Two years ago, Brookfield invested in Triton International Ltd., a freight container company that gives it access to data on the movement of goods around the world, Agrawal said.

New York (TIP)- The US Federal Reserve cut its key lending rate by half a percentage-point Wednesday in its first reduction since the pandemic, sharply lowering borrowing costs shortly before November’s presidential election.
Policymakers voted 11-to-1 in favor of lowering the US central bank’s benchmark lending rate to between 4.75 percent and 5.00 percent, the Fed announced in a statement.
They also penciled in an additional half-point of cuts before the end of this year, and an added percentage point of cuts in 2025.
The Fed’s decision will affect the rates at which commercial banks lend to consumers and businesses, bringing down the cost of borrowing on everything from mortgages to credit cards less than two months before the US presidential election.
The Fed said its rate-setting committee “has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent, and judges that the risks to achieving its employment and inflation goals are roughly in balance.”
The central bank has a dual mandate from Congress to act independently to tackle both inflation and employment.
In updated economic forecasts published alongside the Fed’s rate decision, policymakers’ median forecasts pointed to an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent, on average, in the fourth quarter of this year, up from 4.0 percent in the last update in June.
Officials also penciled in an annual headline inflation rate of 2.3 percent, slightly lower than in June.
Sensex, Nifty scale fresh peaks
Benchmark equity indices Sensex and Nifty surged to their fresh record high levels in early trade on Thursday, September 19, after the US Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate after more than four years.
The 30-share BSE Sensex jumped 735.95 points to scale a new all-time high of 83,684.18 in early trade. The NSE Nifty also surged 209.55 points to hit a fresh record peak of 25,587.10.
From the 30 Sensex firms, NTPC, Axis Bank, Tata Motors, Tata Consultancy Services, Bharti Airtel, Tech Mahindra, Infosys and HDFC Bank were the biggest gainers.
Bajaj Finserv emerged as the only laggard from the pack.
In Asian markets, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong rallied while Seoul quoted marginally lower.

Google won a court fight with the European Union over a Euro 1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) fine for thwarting competition for online ads, partly atoning for last week’s crushing defeat in a separate judgment for abusing its monopoly powers.
Judges at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg backed the Alphabet Inc. unit’s challenge to a fine doled out in 2019, saying regulators made mistakes in their probe.
The European Commission had alleged that Google — as a dominant online ad broker — illegally prevented rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. from placing ads on third-party websites. Wednesday’s ruling can still be appealed at the bloc’s top tribunal, the Court of Justice. The decision comes on the heels of two court successes for antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and her bid to rein in Silicon Valley. Last week she won victories at the top court against Google’s attempt to avoid a Euro 2.4 billion antitrust penalty for favoring its own product results on search and Apple Inc.’s bid to skirt a Euro 13 billion Irish tax bill.
The EU’s case into Google AdSense service is the last of a trilogy of court disputes over cases that set the course for Vestager’s tenure, which is about to end after a decade.
EU regulators targeted Google’s role as an ad broker for websites, where the AdSense for Search product placed advertising on platforms including newspaper websites, blogs and travel sites.
When the Brussels watchdog hit Google with the Euro 1.49 billion penalty in 2019, it said Google’s contracts with websites prevented them from accepting rival search ads from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo. When a user would input a query on a Google search box on websites, ads from such rivals were blocked. The problematic contracts were all dropped by 2016, when the EU escalated the investigation.
Despite confirming most of the EU’s reasoning, judges in Wednesday’s ruling said that regulators blundered in their assessment of the duration of the disputed clauses, as well as the part of the market covered by them during 2016.