Tune into The Ken’s premium audio offerings 

From original podcasts to writer-narrated versions of our subscriber newsletters, existing Premium subscribers can listen to all our premium audio, available exclusively via our subscriber apps. Discover them all at the-ken.com/podcasts, including the latest episode of Two by Two.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India).

Aditya: Domestic (inflow) was plus $80 billion last year, foreign was effectively zero. That’s the inflow side of the equation. There’s got to be a clearing function. 

You have prices going up, and so the response to that has been an elevated level of activity on the primary market side—companies listing, or promoters selling down their stakes, or qualified institutional placements by even some of the larger public sector banks. Like, SBI. 

That type of activity has expanded. But that expansion and high level of activity is more of a clearing function. Because you’re getting this excess liquidity and you’re crystallising your gains. The way I see that is—it is a red herring. The illusion part of the equation is simply that a lot of this is just cashing in.

Seetharaman: There’s an interesting stat—Indian private promoter holdings are at an 8-year low as of June 2025. It’s at roughly 40.6%. In June 2022, it was 45.2%. So you’ve seen it go down by almost 4.5 percentage points…

But you’ve seen the market rally. It’s as if investors don’t care that the promoters are paring down their stake, right?

Seetharaman: The number of family offices…  all the capital being deployed in the private markets, private credit, private equity funds, and venture capital funds. Look at the number of new family offices being set up. So all these mid-tier, old family-run companies, which would never have thought of something like a family office five years ago, they all have one now.

Seetharaman: You can’t trust the numbers that you get on the economy. I don’t want to look at overall GDP growth. I would look at net national income per capita, which is your income per person. And Aditya talked about how we need to get our act together on jobs—that is the most important thing.

There was an edition I did on The elusive women powering India’s economy.

In the latest edition of the periodic labour force survey, which has been around for four or five years, there are magically more women in the workforce. But their incomes have gone down. That’s because women helping out on the family farm have been included in the labour force, but obviously, they’re not being paid. These are unpaid women

So the biggest problem Aditya was talking about was productivity. My question is—how many people are entering the workforce, how many people are actually landing jobs of any kind, and are their incomes going up? The news is not good at all on any of these fronts.