Feeling Down?

Someone emailed me yesterday and asked “why does your blog have such a negative angle on India?”  Part of me wanted to just tell the person to read the headlines and tell me what they see.  Americans always get blamed for not knowing anything about anything outside of the United States. Many Indian’s suffer the same fate, they don’t care what’s happening in the world financial markets – wrong attitude if you invest in Indian stocks you better give a damn about global macro events.

Let me run through some headlines over the last 48 hours:

– IndyMac 2nd largest bank failure in history
– Lehman down 75% for the year
– Fannie Mae and Freddic Mac down 80% for the year 
– Oil hits $147, highest recorded price EVER 
– Dow drops below 11,000 – first time since Aug 2006 

And some Indian headlines:
– Infosys down 7% after announcing flat revenues (this is India’s tech bellwether stock similar to Cisco) 
– S&P might cut India’s investment grade rating
– June air traffic down 15% (GoAir down the most at -33%)
– Industrial growth dipped to 3.84% lowest in six years (it was 10.59% last May)
– Inflation at 11.89%
– Sensex dives 456 points on Friday
– HCL Technologies suffer forex losses of $65-75 million (the dreaded yen carry trade?)