ECONOMICS · FINANCE · STRATEGY · AI
Sarabesh
Muralidharan
“I believe in learning from the past, understanding the present, and questioning the future.”
PAST LESSONS | PRESENT MARKETS | FUTURE QUESTIONS
WHY I WRITE
Three years of studying economics gave me a way of thinking: reduce a messy situation to its incentives, discount a cash flow before trusting the story around it, and stay suspicious of a correlation until it has earned your belief.
What a degree could not teach me was how incomplete real information usually is, and how little time you get to fill the gaps. In a seminar, the numbers arrive cleanly labelled. In a real conversation with a business owner, they are scattered across three registers and half of someone’s memory — and the person across the table is not thinking about net present value. They are thinking about payroll on Friday.
That distance — between the model and the moment you actually have to decide something — is what I find most worth writing about. So I pick questions that sit where economics, finance and technology overlap, and I try to answer them honestly, including when the honest answer is that the evidence only takes you so far.
I am also drawn to the long shadow of the Second World War — particularly how the economic order that emerged from it still shapes trade, policy and global power today. The past is rarely finished with us.
What I Work On
Three questions I keep returning to
01
Digital Payments & Market Design
What UPI’s scale reveals about transaction costs, monetary velocity, and whether a country can export its financial infrastructure.
02
Artificial Intelligence & Economic Policy
Where machine learning genuinely closes information gaps in markets — and where it simply relocates them somewhere less visible.
03
Corporate Finance & Valuation
Valuation, M&A and investment analysis — and the organisational questions that decide whether a good financial case ever gets executed.
SELECTED PROJECT WORK
A Proposal I Wasn’t Assigned
CRK Financial Services · Internship Project · 2026
I joined CRK Financial Services expecting to learn how a financial services business runs day to day. Within the first week, I found something more interesting to work on than the tasks I had been given.
CRK had built a strong, well-run practice across its existing lines of business. Advisory, compliance, the day-to-day work, all of it was in capable hands, and the numbers reflected it. What struck me was how long the firm had stayed within those same known areas. There had been no real move into anything adjacent in years, not because the opportunity wasn’t there, but because nobody inside the firm had stopped to ask the question.
So I asked it. I spent the next few weeks studying where a firm like CRK could credibly extend itself without straying from what it already does well, and landed on Fractional CFO services: senior financial judgement, on a part-time basis, for small and mid-sized businesses that cannot yet justify a full-time hire. It fit CRK’s existing client relationships and expertise closely enough to be a natural next step, not a leap.
I put the idea into a full proposal: market sizing, service tiers, staffing needs, and a phased rollout plan, and presented it to the founder. It wasn’t part of my internship brief. But a professor once told me that the best way to learn a business is to find the gap nobody in it has noticed yet, and this was mine.
EDUCATION
University of Manchester
BA Economics and Finance · 2023–2026
Financial Decision Making 89% · Macroeconomics 78% · Financial Reporting 75%
HLC International, Chennai
IGCSE and A Levels · Class Valedictorian
A* Economics · A* Business · A Mathematics · A Accounting
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
MUTIS Ethical Investment Fund
Head of Financial Sector, leading eight analysts. Selected stocks returned 20.7% on a weighted annualised basis — ahead of the S&P financial index by 10.3% over the same period.
Ernst & Young, London
Assurance Spring Intern. Worked in a team of six on climate and environmental project strategy across EY’s CCaSS and Audit divisions.
Read the writing
Essays on digital payments, artificial intelligence and economic policy — each one built around a question I could not answer straight away.