Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.

Yesterday, Ukraine bet against WW3, FTX found billions in liquid assets, and Saudi busted the pickaxes out. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Copper and other metals with heavy exposure to the Chinese property sector rallied big on hopes of a China economic rebound. It's gonna take a hell of a lot for them to bounce back.

• A few comforting words along with healthy economic data pushed American markets higher yet again, with not much else moving stocks.

• Asia stocks were basically dead, with little-to-no volatility. Looks like all the traders are playing stress-ball cricket. 🤷🏼

Story Roundup

1 - Ukraine musters hope. A lot of it. 🙏🏼

Ukraine is confident that they can still win the war.

Their buddies from the West are sending through a free flow of arms, and it looks to be game-changing for the situation.

Britain and Poland have donated a lot of heavy battle tanks to Ukraine.

In short, these are walking death machines.

Russian tech is relatively inferior, so Ukraine now has a sneaky trick up it's sleeve.

Papa Putin's problems are also snowballing. He had to demote his right-hand army general over some disastrous battlefield failures.

Maybe the tides are turning? 🌊

2 - FTX stumbles upon a gold mine. 💸

The folks down at FTX may have found something useful.

They've recovered ~$5 billion of liquid assets.

This $5 billion is in crypto, cash, and other securities. Remember those millions in Robinhood stock?

But there's a massive problem.

FTX's holdings are so large that selling them would drive the market down, which life pretty difficult.

We're playing chess, but SBF is playing Monopoly. And he's landed on go to jail. 🤦🏼

3 - Saudi plows into mining with a mammoth fund. ⛏️

The great Saudi Arabian growth engine is spitting with life.

They just announced a $15 billion mining fund to invest in overseas assets.

49% of it will be owned by the government, and 51% will be owned by a Saudi mining company. Which is also owned by the government.

Oil bros desperately want to diversify and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

Stuff like this is gonna improve Saudi's industrial firepower - and they'll be able to secure other natural resources like iron ore, copper, and nickel.

Commodities go brrr. 🪨

4 - Japan's PM calls on businesses to bump salaries up. 🤔

Japanese employers are looking at the government in confusion.

The PM just said that businesses should be raising wages.

Salaries in Japan have stagnated for decades - partly because of the fact that inflation is close to 0.

However, it's ticking up slowly, and it's gonna bite everyone around.

Asia's largest clothing retailer (the folks that own UNIQLO) are increasing Japanese employees' salaries by 40%.

Yeah, that zero on the end is intentional. Not 4%. 40%.

Looks like something's missing. 🤨

5 - UPI gets set to go global. 🌍

Indians living abroad can say hello to the payments network that changed the country. 

NRIs (non resident Indians) can now have UPI without relying on their Indian phone number - and this looks set to be a game changer. 

Remittance volumes are definitely gonna surge along with a pretty healthy boost to local businesses. 

The pilot program is being tested in 10 countries, and it'll soon be global. 

To the moon. 🚀

Hope you enjoyed this issue of the Market Munch. If you've got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

Aryaansh