In an interview with ET Now, Shankar Sharma, Global Trading Strategist, First Global, shares his views on Indian markets vs. regional markets, GDP growth and commodities. Excerpts:
The Indian markets of late have underperformed the regional markets. Do you think the Indian markets for the year have topped out?
Let me start off by making a big contra call and that has no direct sort of nexus with the stock market, but it has a lot of nexus with the state of the country itself. And my biggest contra call right now is that the media and the judiciary and parts of the middle class, who are holding candle light vigils at Gateway of India and India Gate against corruption, are the single biggest reason why India is going to run into trouble. All these people are well meaning, the media, the judiciary and part of the middle class, but they do not understand the long-term damage that they are doing to the business environment and the business confidence of the country.
Everybody has kind of assumed with the financial lynch mob mindset that anybody who has got money, anybody who can be even peripherally accused of some wrong doing irrespective of evidence has to be hanged and that is why you are seeing a procession of people going to jail, based in my view and my reading of the chargesheets on very flimsy evidence. But that is what has become the order of the day. Then people are being completely tried and convicted without their being even a modicum of the lawa of evidence, the laws of logic, the laws of rationality.
To my mind as a business person in India, I would be a very scared person to enter into any contract with the government to try and bid for anything to do with the government simply because in hindsight, two years later, somebody can question the whole process and say that there was influence being exerted at the time the tender was awarded and in hindsight you can question any process whatsoever.
In my view, this is so damaging and I talk to business people every single day and all of them are unanimous that even they will not come out and say this on television. They are unanimous privately that what is happening is so damaging to business confidence that they cannot even begin to talk about it and people like yourselves in the media or the judiciary might think that they are cleansing India. In my view they are laying the seeds of the long-term loss of business confidence in India and that is the single biggest contra call that I have out there at the present moment.
0 comments