Pakistan is a sleeping giant — Ammar Yaseen on investing in a crisis

From garment accessories to a trading algorithm

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Ammar Yaseen as someone he had been trying to get on the show for a while — specifically because of the moment Pakistan finds itself in: a falling rupee, runaway inflation, and a population with almost no framework for protecting its wealth.

Ammar’s own story is a useful entry point. His great-grandfather came from Bombay, settled in Lahore, and built a garment accessories factory that, at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s — what Ammar calls Pakistan’s “global golden era” — employed 500 people and attracted engineers from Germany and Japan. Nationalisation in the 1970s began a slow decline. By the time Ammar graduated from LUMS in 2011, the family had rebuilt through a different play: importing Indian garment accessories at a time when nobody else was doing it. Starting with 50,000 rupees, the business scaled to one crore rupees per month in sales within two to three years, running on the trust of a fifty-year-old family name and a simple pitch to investors — good margins, clear product, split the upside.

The business eventually hit the ceiling that most fashion-adjacent businesses hit: it created a monopoly, the monopoly attracted competition, and margins compressed. What Ammar did next is what the rest of the conversation is really about. He started building an algorithm — a framework for evaluating companies on growth factors, stability factors, intrinsic value, and cash flows. When he began investing on the basis of that algorithm, the results were, in his words, “very outstanding.” That algorithm became the intellectual foundation of Sarmaaya.pk.

What capital fundamental analysis actually means

Muzamil asks Ammar to explain, in plain language, what “capital fundamental analysis” means. The answer is more layered than the phrase suggests.

At its core, it is the practice of understanding a business from the inside out: management quality, financial health, valuation relative to intrinsic worth, inventory management. But Ammar insists that company-level analysis is only half the job. The other half is understanding the economy the company sits inside — specifically, which direction money is flowing and why.

He uses a simple analogy. Imagine two markets, each with ten shops. Market A is oil companies. Market B is textile companies. In year one, oil prices rise and cotton prices rise. Market A is the obvious place to invest — profits are being generated. In year two, both prices fall. Now the question shifts to which individual shop within a market has the better fundamentals: one that has reinvested its profits to expand, or one that has kept its cash flows stable and predictable. The right answer depends on your risk appetite, but the point is that the analysis is always two-layered — macro direction first, company quality second.

Where money goes when markets fall

One of the most practically useful sections of the conversation is Ammar’s explanation of what actually happens when a stock market stops performing. Most people assume the money has simply vanished. It hasn’t.

“By law, SECP की तरफ से جو بڑے بڑے آپکے banks ہوتے ہیں یا mutual funds وغیرہ ہوتے ہیں — they are not allowed to take that outside of Pakistan,” Ammar explains. The money stays inside the country. It rotates. When equities fall out of favour, it moves into money markets, T-bills, gold, or real estate. When those become expensive or illiquid, it rotates back. Understanding that rotation — and positioning ahead of it — is what separates a managed portfolio from a savings account slowly being eaten by inflation.

He illustrates this with Warren Buffett’s moves across COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war. Buffett sold airline stocks as COVID hit, took the losses, rotated into Pfizer and Moderna (500% return in that year), then sold pharma as oil prices spiked in 2022 and bought Occidental Petroleum (100% return that year, against an S&P 500 that was down 16%). The arithmetic Ammar walks through is striking: 100 rupees invested, down 20% to 80, multiplied five times to 400, then doubled to 800 — while the index was negative across the same period.

Pakistan’s debt profile in context

Muzamil asks the direct question: how bad is it, really? Ammar’s answer is more calibrated than the headlines suggest.

Pakistan’s total debt is around 70% of GDP. Ghana’s was 80% when it defaulted. Egypt’s is 90%. Zambia’s was 100%. Sri Lanka’s was 120%. Pakistan’s external debt — the portion owed to foreign creditors — is 40% of GDP, which Ammar describes as “the lowest” among countries currently in IMF programs. Short-term debt is around 7%, compared to Turkey’s 30%.

None of this means the situation is comfortable. Ammar is direct about what went wrong: oil was being sold domestically at 150 rupees when it cost 210 rupees to procure. The subsidy had to come from somewhere. It came from reserves, which fell from 19 billion dollars to levels that left Pakistan with less than a month of import cover. The IMF program that should have been resolved by November or December dragged on. “Pakistan ka masla hai yahi — economy ko hardships to aayenge,” he says. But the comparison to Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Argentina is meant to show that default is not the same as collapse, and that the path back is navigable.

Economic cycles, central banks, and the logic of quantitative easing

A significant portion of the conversation is devoted to explaining how central banks actually work — and why their behaviour is predictable enough to be investable.

Every central bank has a target. The US Federal Reserve targets 2% inflation and low unemployment. Pakistan’s State Bank targets 5–7% inflation. When inflation overshoots, the central bank raises interest rates to cool the economy. When the economy cools too much, it cuts rates and, in extreme cases, conducts quantitative easing — buying bad loans and bonds from commercial banks, injecting liquidity, and pushing markets back up.

Ammar traces this cycle through 2008, COVID, and the March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Each time, the Federal Reserve’s discount-window borrowing marked the bottom. “Jaise hi quantity easing karte ho — that is the bottom of the market. That is the bottom of the economy as well at that moment.”

Muzamil pushes back here, and it’s one of the sharper exchanges in the episode. He suggests that quantitative easing is essentially “quack economics” — that since 2008, central banks have been pumping a bubble that is becoming too big to fail, and that when it eventually does fail, the pain will be enormous. Ammar doesn’t fully disagree. He acknowledges that America is “running on steroids” and that the debt-to-GDP ratio of 130% means quantitative easing has become the only tool left for developed economies. But he resists the collapse narrative: “America tabah nahi ho jayega. It doesn’t happen like that.”

The dollar, BRICS, and what a reserve currency shift actually means

The conversation moves into geopolitics when Muzamil raises the question of de-dollarisation — the accelerating trend of countries settling trade in yuan, rupees, and dirhams rather than dollars, partly triggered by the weaponisation of the dollar through Russia sanctions.

Ammar references Ray Dalio’s Changing World Order directly. His reading of Dalio is measured: reserve currency dominance does decline, but it declines gradually, and the decline of a reserve currency is not the same as the collapse of the country behind it. “British empire khatam hua — sure. Lekin Britain stays today, right?” The more realistic scenario, he argues, is a slow reduction in dollar dependency, a modest GDP slowdown in the US, and a corresponding rise in Asian economies — particularly China, which he notes is on track to become the world’s largest economy by 2026.

Muzamil adds his own read: that the Middle East is quietly repositioning itself, that the Saudi-Iran rapprochement and the end of the Yemen war signal a region cleaning itself up to connect eastward, and that Pakistan — as always — risks missing the boat. But he sees the China alignment as a potential mental-barrier break for Pakistani markets. Ammar agrees, and both converge on the same underlying point: the percentages are in the East, even if the optics still favour the West.

Why Pakistan’s real estate obsession is the wrong bet

Later in the discussion, Ammar introduces the concept of income inequality as a structural drag on Pakistan’s economy — and connects it directly to the country’s fixation on real estate.

“Plotistan,” he calls it. Policies that channel wealth into undeveloped plots favour the already-rich, generate no employment, produce no exports, and do nothing to close the gap between the top and bottom of the income distribution. Productive real estate — construction — is different. But speculative land-banking is rent-seeking, and rent-seeking economies hit the same wall every few years: GDP grows for two consecutive years, the current account deficit widens, luxury imports surge, and then the cycle resets painfully.

The alternative he points to is stock market listing. When a company lists, it raises capital without taking on debt. Its performance is visible. Its growth creates employment. Its share price rise creates wealth that is distributed across shareholders, not concentrated in a single landowner. He uses Elon Musk’s Tesla-to-Twitter move as an illustration of how share price appreciation creates real capital that can be deployed — and notes that Pakistan is already seeing more IPOs, mostly from export and manufacturing companies.

Singapore, sleeping giants, and Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes by asking Ammar how he sees Pakistan twenty-seven years from now. The answer is anchored in the Singapore model — not as a fantasy, but as a policy checklist.

Lee Kuan Yew’s reforms, as Ammar describes them: political stability and friendly relations with neighbours; ethnic integration through mixed housing allocation; a mandatory skills-development levy on companies that redirected investment into biotech, aerospace, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals — the industries the world actually needed. By the 1990s, Singapore was a pioneer in all of them. The result: 57.5% of household income in Singapore goes into investments. In Pakistan, the figure is 0.01%.

“Pakistan is a sleeping giant,” Ammar says. “Jab jaage jaoge — this is one of the best countries that can perform very very well.” The youth demographic — 40–50% of the population — is the asset. Economic pain, he argues, is what eventually forces that youth to rise. He draws a direct line from the 1929 depression (record millionaires created in its aftermath) to 2008 (record billionaires) to COVID (billionaire wealth skyrocketed). “There is opportunity everywhere. Sirf dhundhne ki zaroorat hoti hai.”

Muzamil wraps the conversation with a note that is worth quoting directly, because it captures the editorial intent behind bringing Ammar on: “I fundamentally believe that an economy that is not driven by investments cannot begin to even think of growing the way that we require Pakistan to grow.”