(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
India Business News: As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the ep
India’s economic activity showed signs of beginning to cool off in April as several states resorted to lockdowns to control a deadly second wave of the coronavirus. Although the three-month weighted average scores of eight indicators tracked by Bloomberg News showed the pace of activity was unchanged from March, the single month reading pointed to weakness setting in. Even more recent data from this month confirmed the softening trend in activity. A basket of high-frequency, alternative and market indicators such as retail activity and road congestion pointed to weakness in the week to May 16, Abhishek Gupta, India economist at Bloomberg Economics, said in a report.
Google mobility indicators exhibited a dip across all major cities in April as compared to the baseline. E-way bills — an indicator of domestic trade — recorded double digit contraction at 17.5% month-on-month in April — and possibly pointing to a moderation in goods and services tax collections.