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 57 seconds.

That's less time than it takes for Pepsi to make cola more expensive, Indian inflation to jump again, and Elon Musk to give Ukraine their Wifi back. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Markets seem a little confused, yet again. It's not the first time this year we've had to weight a lot of news - both good and bad.

• Inflation in the US persists, with wholesale inflation rising 0.4% and triggering the Fed a little.

• The Fed's on tilt too - they're apparently fearful of doing "too little" to stamp inflation out.

Story Roundup

1 - Pepsi smashes earnings and hikes prices. 🍻

Higher inflation = higher profits. 

Pepsi is having a profit party despite rampant inflation - reporting earnings of $1.95/share vs $1.82 expectations. 

Their revenue also came in ~10% higher than expected, at $22bn vs $20.2bn. 

They're raising their prices yet again, so your cola and chips are gonna get a little pricier. 

Another interesting thing to note is that prices for Pepsi-owned products were up almost 18% over the last year. 

Inflation nation. 🥵

2 - Elon Musk gives Ukraine their WiFi back. 📶

Critical lines of communication are back to Ukrainians. 

Elon Musk seems to be a pretty noble guy - when Russia invaded, he offered Starlink connections to all Ukrainians for free. 

This is super important as it provides them with a network to safely communicate on, since you never know who's watching you. 

And since the networks are safe, they were used to control drones, launch missiles, and exchange info with each other. 

Until yesterday - when they went out for some technical reason, which seems to be fixed now. 

Tech support. 👑

3 - Indian inflation spikes and the economy snicks. 📉

The heat seems to be catching across in the Indian economy. 

Retail inflation accelerated to 7.41% in September - that's the steepest increase in 5 months. 

High food prices were a big culprit in this, since food makes up 45% of the CPI basket. 

At the same time though, industrial activity saw a contraction of 0.8%, with mining output falling 4%. 

This puts the RBI in a tricky place - how hard should they tap the brakes on the economy? 

Knife's edge. 🔪

4 - US Fed starts getting fearful. 😅

It's always interesting to speak with the Fed.

And our takeaways from yesterday are that they are fearful. 

The Fed seems to be signalling that they're scared of doing too little to fight inflation as compared to doing too much. 

We know this because of the FOMC minutes released yesterday, which talk about how they remain committed to "purposefully tightening" things up in light of "unacceptably high inflation".

Red-hot, but not for longer. 🥶

5 - Pound's pounding seems to have an end in sight. 💡

The Pound continued it's little push up after the FT reported that the Bank of England might extend it's bond buying into next week. 

BoE governor told the FT that market conditions "seemed calmer" - a sign that their intervention worked. 

It looks like a sharp gamble from their end, with a 3 week window between the end of the BoE program and the announcement of government's fiscal plans at the end of the month. 

What do you do when the debt of the world's 6th biggest country starts trading like it's a crypto? 💀

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