Pranav—Do you drink when life becomes costly?

Here’s a question:

Imagine we suddenly experience another shocking episode of inflation: everyday things start becoming unaffordable at a rate that you can hardly believe. Now, tell me: do you think the sale of alcohol goes up, or down?

You can see why either could happen. Because everything else is so much more expensive, you might cut down on expenses you can no longer afford, like drinking. At the same time, life’s terrible, and you might want to gulp down some of the pain with a stiff drink.

Some economists tried studying this in the United States, during COVID. And here’s the puzzling thing they found: as it became more expensive to live, people didn’t really change their spending on wine, liquor or cigarettes — but beer was a different story. The higher their expenses went, the more beer they drank. Those who lived in the most expensive places drank the most beer.

Uhmm, hello, what the f—?

People drank themselves through the pandemic — but only on beer. Huh! Why is that?

I wonder what happens in India. We’re culturally not very big on beer (at least outside namma Bengaluru). What intoxicant do Indians reach for when they’re stressed? Beedis? Cheap whiskey? Or does it change from community? Do people from Benares reach for bhaang? Does South Bombay turn to cocaine?

If Indian economists do cool shit like this, someone please send me a link ASAP.

Krishna—What if the IT system breaks?

You see our modern banking system relies almost entirely on computer systems. I know that sounds obvious—we’re all used to transferring money online or tapping a card at checkout—but the actual depth of dependence is staggering. Every time you swipe your debit card or open a banking app, your request travels through layers of software, databases, and networks. If just one link in that chain fails, even briefly, it can bring big parts of the financial system to a standstill.

We saw this happen recently with the European Central Bank (ECB).

The ECB manages the euro and oversees key payment infrastructures across Europe. One critical system is called TARGET, or sometimes T2, which handles large-scale, real-time settlements among banks. On an average day, TARGET processes around 350,000 transactions, moving up to €2 trillion in total value—money shuffling between European banks, businesses, and, indirectly, consumers. Last week because of some “defective hardware” glitch TARGET went partially offline, leading to delayed or stuck payments. Some banks couldn’t settle transactions on time, which, in turn, left businesses and individuals waiting for their funds to appear. Though the outage didn’t last long, it highlighted how reliant Europe’s entire banking system is on a single piece of software.

The thing is this setup isn’t limited to Europe. In India, banks rely on colossal IT vendors like TCS and Infosys to run everything from account balances to loan processing. Even major public sector banks aren’t coding everything from scratch; they license and customize these platforms. The same goes for banks in the U.S., Latin America, Africa, you name it—most depend on specialized tech providers. Financial Times, in an article paraphrased a quote from a senior bank supervisor where he said: There is no such thing as a database provider of last resort.

If your core database or the software that updates all those balances goes down, there’s no magical central authority to swoop in with a backup copy.

So let’s break down what this dependence means in plain language. That balance you see in your app is just a record in some database. When you tap “Send,” your instruction is routed through layers of code that talk to your bank’s core system—maybe Infosys Finacle or TCS BaNCS—where your balance is verified and updated. The transaction might then get forwarded to a national clearing system. Each step requires a separate piece of software to communicate properly. If one step fails or takes forever to respond, the whole transaction stalls. If that glitch is bad enough, it can bring down thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of payments in a single day.

People often assume there are robust backup plans for every scenario. Yes, banks have data centers with mirrored servers, and the ECB likely has backup sites. But if the software itself malfunctions, those backups might just replicate the same error. Or if a vendor’s update goes wrong, it can break the system everywhere at once. That’s what makes major outages so stressful: you can’t just reboot a single computer and instantly fix it.

The recent ECB hiccup is a clear reminder: if one crucial system fails, even for a short time, the modern banking machine can come to a screeching halt.

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