Not happy hour.

"Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) remained net sellers in the Indian equity market yesterday, offloading shares worth Rs 11.405 billion, according to provisional exchange data." "Domestic Institutional Investors (DIIs), meanwhile, continued to provide support, emerging as net buyers to the tune of Rs 31.5924 billion." "FIIs have remained net sellers throughout the week, withdrawing a cumulative Rs 50.476 billion over the first three trading sessions." "DIIs, meanwhile, continued to offset the foreign outflows, purchasing a cumulative Rs 128.0269 billion worth of equities." CNBC TV18. "Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) offloaded $29.28 billion (Rs 2.74 trillion) in the equity market in the first six months of 2026, according to NSDL." "In comparison, FPIs have invested around $6.8 billion (Rs 637.84 billion) in the debt market this year." BT. Higher investment in government bonds is because of the removal of taxes on profits from bonds and relaxation in the upper limit of FPI investment. A higher influx of foreign exchange supports the rupee. "An astonishing $53 billion has exited Indian stocks in the last 18 months." It is because domestic investors are keeping the share prices relatively higher, so that "India's price-earnings (P/E) ratio - the ratio of share price to net profit per share - is 22.5 on a trailing basis and 18.8 projected for the coming year." China's P/E ratio is just 12-14, Korea is 10-12 and Brazil is 8-10, wrote Swaminathan Aiyar. Curiously, the cumulative effort of the government and the RBI to keep the rupee strong against the dollar allows FIIs to get more dollars in exchange for their rupee profits. So DIIs, the RBI and the government are expediting FIIs to sell. India "is the fastest growing major economy with political stability, a young population, a large domestic market, and robust growth prospects. Yet India remains a paradox: It can attract much more foreign investment, but it does not." This is because of the political inability to reform labor and land acquisition laws. "Reforms create losers in the short run, while benefits accrue only later. Jean Claude-Juncker, former head of the European Commission, once said, 'We all know what needs to be done. We just don't know how to get re-elected after doing it," wrote Aiyar. Calculating the monthly per-capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) at 2023-24 prices, just the bottom 0.5% of the rural population today has the same MPCE of the bottom 10% in 2011-12 while for urban India it is 0.4%. In 2011-12, 121 million of the population fell in the bottom 10%, in 2023-24, that has fallen to 6.5 million, wrote Ashish Kumar and Payal Seth. Extreme poverty may almost have been eliminated but people aspire to a much higher standard of living, inspired by smartphones. Only salaried jobs can fulfill their dreams. But, "last year, 11.6 million Indians in their 20s were unemployed and about 6.8 million of them had been job hunting for over a year." "These numbers understate the full picture: another 78 million in the same age group were not looking for work at all as per our estimates based on the Periodic Labout Survey data for 2025," wrote Prof Vidya Mahambare & Asrar Alam. "The most concerning fact, set to get worse with the advent of AI, is that as education levels rise, so does the unemployment level." Even for those with jobs, salaries do not reflect company profits. "Profit before taxes for over 33,000 sampled companies nearly quadrupled between 2019-20 and 2022-23." GDP grew at 6.7% annually between 2021--22 and 2023-24 while real wages for regular workers contracted by 0.7%, wrote Ajit Ranade. Political paralysis, corporate greed, and a frustrated, defeated youth. A sad cocktail.