ET NEWS

Smallcap counter Sammaan Capital - which was in news today after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) cleared decks for Abu Dhabi-based International Holding Company (IHC) to acquire a controlling stake - witnessed a bulk deal where French multinational bank Societe Generale bought shares worth Rs 76 crore. In another major deal, ace investor Mukul Agrawal sold shares worth Rs 8 crore in a microcap Siyaram Recycling Industries, which had fallen 72%.Sammaan CapitalSociete Generale bought 50.6 lakh shares in Sammaan Capital at a price of Rs 149.92 per share. It was a premium of 8% over the Tuesday closing price of Rs 138.51 on the NSE. Today, its shares settled nearly 6% higher at Rs 146.30.The stock has been a market outperformer with 23% returns over a 1-year period and is currently trading above its 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages (SMAs) of Rs 145 and Rs 144, respectively, according to Trendlyne data. The acquisition of a 66.65% controlling stake will be made via Avenir Investment RSC, which is owned and controlled by IHC.Avenir Investment RSC proposed to invest nearly Rs 8,850 crore by the way of preferential issue. This is one of the largest investments by a Middle Eastern entity in India's financial services sector.After the completion of the preferential issue, Avenir Investment will hold nearly a 41.23% stake in the company, while the rest will be acquired through an open offer, Sammaan Capital, formerly called Indiabulls Housing Finance, said in an exchange filing. Siyaram Recycling IndustriesMukul Agrawal sold 21 lakh shares via a separate bulk deal where the buyer was Param Value Investments. The shares were purchased at a price of Rs 38.20 apiece, a 4.3% premium over the Tuesday closing price of Rs 36.64.Today, its shares settled at Rs 38.28, up by Rs 1.64 or 4.5% over the last closing price.Agrawal held 22 lakh shares representing 10.10% stake in the company according the September shareholding data on the BSE.The stock price has seen a 72% erosion in the past year.(Disclaimer: The recommendations, suggestions, views, and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times.)

Yaounde: The war in the Middle East could cause the "worst industrial crisis in living memory", the head of the International Chamber of Commerce warned Wednesday."The head of the International Energy Agency has warned that the world is facing an energy crisis more severe than the oil shocks of the 1970s," said John Denton.Also Read: In Iran war, cheap drones remain wild card"From a business perspective, we believe this could yet become the worst industrial crisis in living memory -- not only because of surging energy prices, but because industrial production itself is being disrupted and dislocated by shortages of gas and other essential inputs".Also Read: 'Gone too far,' most Americans say on Iran attacksDenton was speaking on the eve of the meeting of World Trade Organization ministers in Yaounde.

If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Donald Trump's unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself, it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning, or even basic strategic thinking, that has gone into it. Neither Trump nor his aides, according to recent reporting, planned for Iran to target shipping and close the Strait of Hormuz. They also do not seem to have planned for serious and sustained retaliation against America's Persian Gulf state allies. They did not plan for an energy crisis and the potential disruption to the global economy, and they did not plan for America's European allies to, by and large, reject their call for support. To read about the administration's decision-making process is to learn that it did not really plan for or expect much in the way of anything that now defines the war. This raises two obvious questions: What did they plan for? And what exactly did they expect to happen? It appears that both the president and the White House expected token resistance, followed by the collapse of the Iranian regime, the installation of a pro-American government -- or at least one we could tolerate -- and a return to the status quo ante: a replay, in essence, of the president's first intervention of the year, in Venezuela. Now that this replay fantasy has collided with a more complex, indeterminate and difficult reality, Trump is unable to explain his objectives or even give the country a sense of when the war might end. He told Fox News radio that he would "feel it in my bones." Let's just say that that is a far cry from traditional political leadership during wartime. If anything, Trump is caught in a classic escalation spiral. When one approach fails, in this case the initial airstrikes, he moves to the next. When that fails, he bids higher. And when escalation still doesn't produce the desired result -- when he faces the choice between accepting defeat or stalemate or going even further -- he goes further. Which is how we have arrived closer and closer to the use of ground troops: Thousands of Marines -- and now paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne -- are headed to the Middle East as Trump weighs a new offensive tied to either the Strait of Hormuz or Iranian nuclear materials. It should be said, here, that at no point has Congress either authorized this war or provided funding for ground operations. For his part, the president is either bragging about an incoming deal -- "They're gonna make a deal," he said of the Iranian leadership on Tuesday -- or threatening attacks on Iran's civilian infrastructure. "If I want to take down that power plant, that very big powerful power plant, they can't do a thing about it," Trump said during the same news conference. What's striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force. Minnesota, in particular, appears to have caught them entirely off guard -- a tendency toward docility, it seems, is their baseline assumption about everyone they oppose. Which raises another key question: Why can't the White House see what others could easily predict? None of this should have been a surprise. Anyone capable of thinking through the actions of other people -- of imagining their perspectives and of recognizing that they have agency -- should have been able to anticipate these outcomes and plan accordingly. And in the case of the war in Iran, the president ignored counsel that warned of something like the current situation. This gets to the real problem. Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds. Every presidential administration takes on the character of its principal, and this one is no different. Like Trump, the White House does not in fact seem to understand that other people have agency too. It sees itself the same way the president sees himself: as the protagonist of the universe, with everyone else acting either as a supporting character or a nonplayable one -- extras with no will of their own. And so, whenever other people do act of their own accord, both the president and his administration find themselves flat-footed. For their opponents, this represents an opportunity. The White House's inability to grasp the agency of others -- its apparent lack of a theory of mind for everyone outside its walls -- gives Democrats, especially, a distinct advantage. They can seize the initiative, knowing the president will struggle to respond in a constructive way. We have already seen this with the current partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, where Trump has thus far refused to budge, as if his stubborn intransigence will bend the world to his desires. The result has been chaos in the nation's airports and a decline in the president's standing with the American public. By virtue of his position, Trump is a dangerous figure. But he is also a weak and deeply unpopular president. The upshot of his impenetrable egotism, for his opponents, is that there are plenty of opportunities to make him weaker and even more unpopular. For as much as he is in love with violence -- for as much as he clearly wants to terrorize the nation into submission -- he is also cursed with a kind of blindness. He cannot see that his opposition is real. He cannot see that it can act. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.