Seven trading days ago, on January 10, I got an SMS from a colleague who has an equity exposure that would have the Left parties deliver benign smiles of approval. “Should,” she asked, “I buy this stock (a global pharmaceutical major)?” My answer: No. Not because this person, in her twenties, doesn’t need the equity exposure — she does — but because I didn’t want to be the shoulder over which she would fire her first speculative shot. As I walked into office later in the day, I told our resident stocks expert that the market will fall.

And fallen it has — indeed, what a fall. A full 2,062 points, intra-day. To put this number in some sort of historic perspective in a market that looks at history with scorn, this fall in the value of the popular market benchmark Sensex on January 21 approximately equals the value of the Sensex 16 years ago, when it closed at 2,020 on January 15, 1992. Though I was fairly sure the Sensex would fall, the extent surprised me, as it has most market players.

There is a diarrhoea of ‘analysis’, presented with a bravado that weakly attempts to couch the experts’ real sentiment: fear. These lame-duck experts are using two crutches to make their holy pronouncements. The left crutch of reason says Indian markets have fallen because of global factors in general and the looming US recession (its declaration, really) in particular. Despite its fantastic growth, India has not decoupled from the US economy yet and so, if the Dow does an ‘aaaaah’, the Sensex would end it with a ‘choooo’.

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