The other day a friend of mine was telling me how he is making a killing at the stock market. A share that traded at 800 the same time last year was up to 1300 now.
The past year has been a tough one. It's been carnage on a biblical scale, both in terms of life and in terms of livelihood (read capital).
The pandemic was expected to hit markets so badly that governments and central banks around the world have been printing money as if they are all in the TV series Money Heist. Trillions and trillions (I don't even know how many zeroes goes into a trillion) have been pumped into the market to help it survive this huge shock. A lot of that money has found its way into India and this can been seen by the fact that although key parameters such as production and export are down, Indian companies are showing huge profits. It's almost like there has never been a better time to invest in the market.
But, what we fail to see is that a lot of the profits companies are showing comes from salaries saved by laying off workers, not having to buy raw materials since they aren't producing anything, and other such ways.
The market has been so good that India has been adding to its list of millionaires in this period that was meant to break our financial system.
One of the effects of so much liquidity flooding into the Indian market has been the falling interest rates. In the old economic system, this would be seen as a good thing. Low interest rates meant that companies would borrow more to fund their expansion plans and that would lead to more jobs and opportunities. But this isn't the old days. Most banks are not able to lend the money they have on hand. In lieu of lending they are parking their funds with the Reserve Bank of India for a minuscule interest rate.
In 2019, a term deposit would fetch you 5% interest. Not much, I agree, but in 2020, it gets you a meager 2.95.
What does this mean in real terms? Simple, that the poorest and most vulnerable in our society are in deep trouble. Your driver, maid, watchman, tea shop owner, and the rest do not invest in the share market and mutual funds, they park their savings in recurring deposits and fixed deposits either at the bank or at the post office. They don't have hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands, they usually save in hundreds AND thousands.
A rough, back-of-the-hand calculation shows that a person saving Rs. 1000 a month in a recurring deposit in 2019 would have earned 140 rupees more in 2019 than in 2020. India has close to 700,000 people (https://www.statista.com/statistics/482579/india-population-by-average-wealth/) who earn less than Rs. 7000 a month. This means that they have lost, collectively, over Rs. 100,000,000 (10 crores) in the last one year.
Ache din indeed!
Well, the system is broken and it is broken badly, but we haven't realized it yet.
What has been made abundantly clear is that advances in science, especially medical science, made us so complacent that we were perfectly ready to elect incompetent people who catered to our basest desires to positions of power. All around the world, small people, with smaller brains were elected to power based on their message of splitting populations in to "us" and "them".
Especially in India, our politics hit rock bottom and then with nowhere else to go, we got out our shovel and dug deeper. It was easier that trying to climb out of the hole since that would take effort and actual hard work. It was just easier to blame everyone else for the shit in which we found ourselves.
Gandhi once said that any reform must improve the lot of the poorest and weakest in the community to justify it. (https://www.mkgandhi.org/gquots1.htm) While I don't agree with many of the man's economic ideas, this is a philosophy I buy into and I believe it is the equivalents of true north on our moral compass.
Times have changed and ways of making money have changed but our policies have just not kept up. Our economists and financial gurus are still following theories that held good in a different world. The last time this happened it end in bloody revolutions around the world as the poor and meek made their voices heard using crimson ink.
What the world desperately needs now are enlightened leaders with the foresight to see, understand, and internalize the changed world and then to fix it so that the rising tide lifts all the boats with it and not just the luxury liners. If the wave sinks the smaller boats, the people in the water will rise in protest and create a tsunami that will destroy the liners.
It's happened before. It can happen again.
Those who do not learn from history and condemned to repeat it, warts and all.
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