>The Azhar Syndrome (FIRST GLOBAL)

Sometimes we get what we wish for, and then we get the rest of our lives to repent.
This is precisely what has happened to India.

This country has craved a bull market since the day a few Gujus got together and formed the Bombay Stock Exchange under a tree (actually, that’s probably a charitable description. More likely, they formed it in a slum). Since then, this country has lived on in the hope that it will get a secular bull market, akin to what the US got between 1982 and 2000. And intermittently, it did get bull markets…short, sharp ones, that enriched no one but the brokers. But nothing ever got even close to the US bull market. All of us sell-side low lives sold the mythical India story to dumb foreigners through the ‘90s, gobbled up their dollars at Rs.31.37/$, got them to buy loads of rubbish that miraculously turned more illiquid than molasses come a mini-bear market so that the foreigners could never take back the dollars they had brought in. But the broad bull market never came.

Then came the 2003-2007 bull run. And that ruined the country.

This bull market inflated dumb promoters to God-like status. It made mediocre fund managers become stars. It made below-mediocre sell-siders become ace stock-identifiers. It made the fiscal deficit nearly go away, however illusorily. It made even lowly back office clerks become Bloomberg operators at JP Morgan’s outsourcing units, getting in a month what they were getting in a year, so tight was the market for Bloomberg operators.

To see full report: The Azhar Syndrome