Read more about You feel numb : India s markets keep rising as traders cope with Covid-19 on Business Standard. Booming markets have left industry swamped with work at a time when many employees have been sickened by the virus.
Read more about Covid toll on Indian economy deepens, jobs crisis to worsen: Reuters poll on Business Standard. Renewed restrictions have stalled economic activity, leaving many millions out of work and pushing economists to downgrade their views for the second time since early April
(Bloomberg) As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the epidemic’s devastation and a record-breaking boom in local markets.The world’s worst coronavirus outbreak has battered India’s economy and lifted its official Covid death toll to more than 318,000 a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount.And yet investors continue to snap up Indian assets, fueling a 65% rally in the Nifty 50 Index over the past 12 months that has outpaced every other major equity benchmark worldwide. The measure’s surge to a record on Thursday has coincided with the fastest rate of Indian initial public offerings since 2017 and an unprecedented flood of foreign-currency bond issuance by local companies.While the combination of pandemic pain and financial-market euphoria is hardly unique to India, nowhere else has the contrast been so extreme.Bulls say the gains