Anxiety on Anna Salai....

PANIC......
A familiar feeling these days...
It momentarily gripped the usually unruffled offices of Sweatshop yesterday..
Unruffled by global issues that is...

A stranger stopped young Champagne on the street with some startling information...

Are you coming from the ATM of XYZ Bank????.. he asked...
Did you know......
It is not possible to get money out of any of their ATMS on Anna Salai????..he added..

Was he a helpful good Samaritan-type person??..
Or just a perverse rumor-monger?????...
Out to create a run on the bank???....

Anyway....it was enough to rattle her...
XYZ Bank? I have all my money there...she wailed... to us...

Colleagues quickly buzzed their husbands..
Ordered them to pull out money...
Emotional pandemonium prevailed..
Then the news wires put out some reassuring news..
The moment passed....

Our little microcosm..
Was only reflecting the larger macrocosm...
Out there...
In the world outside......

The sub-prime crisis in the USA may have touched off the meltdown.....
But it is the interconnected nature of the global financial system that helped spread the contagion...
To touch even us here.....
On Anna Salai.......
Our very own Main Street..

Is globalization such a wonderful thing after all????.....one wonders...
Given the domino effect at work on markets..
And seeing that gloom seems to beget more and more and more gloom.....in a cycle ....

Even Chennai has not been spared...
Our quota of bad news has come trickling in...

Only a day earlier, we had the horrible murder-suicide news of an IIT-Madras 1985 alum in LA.. on the front pages of Chennai newspapers...
He killed his wife, his mother in law and his three children before turning the gun on himself..
His life's savings gone in the Wall Street Crash..
The prospect of a trailer park existence stared him in the face...
And something snapped...

Long faces are the norm these days...as pessimists rule the roost......with their terrible predictions...and it seems like anyone and everyone in the city is a pundit......especially on matters economic...

Indeed George Bush and I are the only optimists around....
Fellow citizens: we can solve this crisis and we will.. he is supposed to have said..
Anxiety is feeding the meltdown..he added....
For once in his life he is right..
But who listens to him????...

Not the bulls surely......frisky sensitive animals......given to herd mentality...
Especially when the news flowing in is negative...
The coverage and slant to it even more so...

A zillion panic buttons sparked off.........
Leading to the stampede out of stock markets ..the world over..
The bears have been hammering away at prices....pushing indices below ground zero levels...

Conservative money management could have averted disaster.....

Years ago, a former executive director of the Madras Stock Exchange..now gone to the Other World...had sound advice for investors... large and small...

Spread your risk... was his message....
Put a third of your money in securities like government bonds or in fixed deposits in public sector banks..
A third in blue chip company deposits or debentures.....
And the last third in the equity of companies you can hedge your bets on...and..
The investor...whether an individual or a mutual fund...has to do his homework.... he held...
So true...

It does not take an MBA from the Wharton School of Business to manage funds effectively..
A prudent housewife with a large dose of commonsense can do the job equally well...

As with individuals so too with corporates...and all the other big guys....
The greed for more and more and more...the search for higher yields.... risk taking...investing the entire corpus on doubtful schemes...shady investments....
This is their undoing....always....

Anyway, what comes down must go up..eventually.....that is the law of the markets....and it will happen sooner or later...

And what goes up must come down..... Right????....Right!!!!
Yea, except petrol and diesel prices...

International crude oil prices may tumble to below 80 dollars per barrel...but petrol prices are fixed firmly at the Rs 50 per liter mark....
Amazing how a rise in crude prices is factored in instantaneously..
But a drop of more than 20 dollars is just ignored...
This is partly why tomato prices are reigning at Rs 35 per kilo....
And hey, if the middleman realizes that the common man has the capacity to pay Rs 35 per kg.....he will make that the price till Kingdom Come!!

Either an end will come to all this..
Or we will live to forever BORE coming generations to tears..
With tales of the way things were..
Back in good old 2008....or thereabouts..

As for me..
All things considered......
I am a Bull...
I am in it for the long haul...
I'll just wait it out....
Until the next big bull run....

Hrrmph!!....