The tao of "MARKET" ....stayam blast on indian market....
The turning point was an experiment called blackbody radiation, conducted in 1900 by physicist Max Planck, where he observed that energy absorption was not continuous, but in tiny discontinuous jumps. This dramatic evidence was a refutation of classical physics, and set the foundation for an entirely new framework called quantum physics.
Importantly, quantum physics vie-wed the world
not as certainties but probabilities. In fact, it states that the very
act of an experiment actually influences the outcome. In essence, the
more you know, the less you know you know. This fundamental inability of
science to fully explain our world took a long while to get used to-it
is intellectually unsatisfying, especially to a world used to a diet of
the supremacy of scientific rationalism.
What does all this have to do with the financial
markets?
The elaborate cloak of the rules and rigour of
efficient markets seduces us into believing in an objective process of
price determination and equilibrium setting. The reality is that these
principles are even less reliable than classical physics, given that
economics and financial theories are attempting to explain social
phenomenai.e., the actions of peoplenot planets and stars or electrons
and protons. The events of the past year have exposed the
discontinuities in such theories, and the damage that can result from
placing too much faith in them. We are also learning that market
behaviour is actually built on a foundation of shared values and
trust.
The Satyam scandal is a painful and scorching
lesson on the failings of the market. There isnt a single business
conversation today in India that doesnt begin with a discussion on the
Satyam fiasco. At one level, the debates are about the mechanics of the
debacle: how did they pull this off, who were the culpable parties and
accomplices to the crime, how could all the checks and balances fail,
what does this mean for corporate governance, auditors, independent
directors, and so on.
But there is a deeper and more unsettling angst.
This has to do with ethics and values. Our actions come from our
convictions. Our convictions are born of our values. In this sense,
values are the fountainhead. At the end of the day, all the discounted
cash flows and efficiency frontiers are valid only up to a point, beyond
which we still have to deal with the soft touchy-feely stuff of human
values. Much like classical physics not being able to explain sub-atomic
behaviour, all the elaborate principles of markets cannot account for
human actions. And very much like the experimenter affecting the
experiment in quantum mechanics, we see that embracing the principles of
the market itself influences individual behaviour and ends up destroying
the very foundation of trust and values that the market is predicated
upon.
The Satyam episode marks an important threshold
for India, how we are getting influenced by globalization and what is
happening to our collective value systems. India is bootstrapping itself
into the 21st century with an incredibly complex bag of values, which
include centuries-old beliefs in asceticism, renunciation, the role of
the karma yogi, the universality in each of us, the work of our sufi
saints, and so on.
Over the coming decades, we are going to see
pitched battles being fought in our minds, and enormous churn in our
value systems, as we make space for material benchmarks. With this will
come economic success, and hopefully the rising tide of prosperity
carrying people out of poverty. This is all good. But it will also come
with outrageous examples of extreme materialism. And also instances such
as Satyam, where an ambitious business family gets onto a tiger it
doesnt quite know how to dismount. The tragedy of the Raju bro-thers is
that they are also victims of our societys evolving value system, as we
worship the gods of material success.
Satyam reminds us that models for the market are like classical physics they can reasonably explain most of the phenomena we witness. But their explanatory power to describe behaviour at the smallest unit is very limited. In fact, unless we come up with a more evolved framework, we risk forsaking a lot to acquire the limited good that the markets offer us.
MANISH SINGH
|