Wall Street doubles down on India despite inflation, currency headwinds

Jon Gray sits in his Park Avenue office, thousands of miles from the action, and describes what he sees in India with the confidence of a man watching a door swing open. For Blackstone's president, the country has become something remarkable: the world's easiest place to get an initial public offering done. That assessment carries weight. Across India's towns and cities, retail investors are buying shares in newly listed companies at a pace that has made the country one of the globe's busiest IPO markets. A listing valued above $100 billion from Mukesh Ambani's business empire is now possible. This is not a marginal story about emerging markets. This is Wall Street recalibrating its bets on a $4 trillion economy.

Gray and his peers acknowledge the friction points plainly enough. The rupee has weakened. Inflation has climbed. Yet between private equity and real estate, Blackstone has listed companies steadily over the past decade, with strong revenue growth to show for it. The firm expects its assets under management in India to double to $100 billion in coming years. This confidence is not isolated. Citigroup's Jane Fraser met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon sat down with the finance minister. Both banks are working on the Jio Platforms IPO, expected to become India's largest ever. Goldman Sachs has injected at least $500 million into its India banking franchise in recent years. The investment banking fees tell their own story: bankers in India now collect 1.86% of an IPO's value, higher than the roughly 1.5% paid in Hong Kong. The competition is fierce—Wall Street banks fighting each other, Japanese firms competing, and local powerhouses like Kotak Mahindra and Axis Bank defending territory they know intimately.

The private equity money flowing in reflects a longer arc. Until the 1990s, India was nearly closed to foreign capital. Now tens of billions have poured in, and deal sizes keep climbing. Brookfield Asset Management's CEO Connor Teskey announced that over the next five years, his firm will invest more than $100 billion in India, up from about $30 billion in 2025. The bet is on scale, growth, infrastructure demand, and respect for capital. Real estate has boomed alongside this wave. Office space in Mumbai and New Delhi has seen companies scramble for room in new towers. Blackstone's logistics portfolio has thrived despite currency headwinds because, as Gray put it, underlying demand is so strong it can absorb the rupee's decline.

The infrastructure supporting this capital flow has transformed. Global Capability Centers—the back-office operations that began in the 1990s—have evolved into mission-critical nodes of global finance. India housed more than 1,800 of these centers in 2025, with projections to exceed 2,400 by 2030. These are not basic processing shops anymore. They house armies of quants, risk analysts, investment specialists, and technologists. JPMorgan alone employs around 60,000 people at its India GCCs, more than it has anywhere outside the United States. Last fiscal year, these centers generated roughly $100 billion in revenue. Some Wall Street giants now have more staff in India than anywhere else outside America.

Domestic capital is the other pillar. Only a small percentage of India's nearly 1.5 billion people currently invest in markets, despite recent gains. Yet Indians save $500 billion annually in financial assets, and almost half of that still sits in cash and deposits. The regulator has recently allowed a $463 billion segment of the portfolio management industry serving wealthy individuals to invest in overseas securities and short equity options. The ultra-high-net-worth population is forecast to grow from about 19,000 in 2026 to roughly 25,000 by 2031. International private banks like Standard Chartered and HSBC have built substantial franchises on this wealth. GIFT City, a free-trade zone on India's west coast designed to compete with major global financial hubs, has seen assets surge. HSBC built a $23 billion balance sheet there in under six years. Citi's assets in GIFT City are expected to reach $3 billion by the end of 2026, up from $350 million a year earlier.

But the boom has fractured the country's social fabric. As one section of Indian society has grown wealthier, inequalities have deepened. A youth protest movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, erupted this year after a Supreme Court judge compared unemployed young people to cockroaches. When young people took to the streets, authorities imposed unprecedented restrictions in New Delhi, deploying thousands of police and asking telecom operators to suspend internet services near protest areas. The wealth creation Wall Street is banking on has not reached everyone.

The markets themselves have stumbled this year. Foreign portfolio investors have pulled about $30 billion from domestic stocks as they chase artificial intelligence opportunities elsewhere. India's currency has slumped and inflation has risen with crude prices. The country ranks among the worst-performing equity markets in 2026. Yet the underlying infrastructure has matured. Liquidity has deepened. Institutional participation has widened. High-frequency trading firms like Optiver and Citadel Securities compete with Indian trading operations for talent, with some firms paying interns $31,000 monthly. Retail traders, however, lost more than $9 billion trading equity futures and options in the year ended March, prompting regulators to tighten rules around derivatives. SEBI accused a JPMorgan unit based in Mauritius of manipulative trading; the ban was later lifted. Jane Street faced market manipulation allegations, which it has denied, and is pursuing a high-profile appeal. These regulatory battles will shape what Wall Street can actually do in India as the market grows more liquid and more contested.