Bad actors and financial markets; Non-substantive hearings in courts; The journey of Indian finance; Episodes 23,24 of Everything is everything
Bad actors and financial markets
Hamas got big profits by shorting Israeli stocks! (No, they didn’t).
Every now and then, we hear about invaders and terrorists who establish positions on financial markets before the shooting starts. In my column in the Business Standard yesterday, Vast profits for unpleasant people?, I say that it is easy to make claims about vast profits conjured out of thin air, but these are just stories designed to sway the credulous. It is not efficient for invaders and terrorists to layer this trading component on top of their evil plans.
Non-substantive hearings in the Indian legal system
A substantive hearing is one in which there is application of judicial mind and the matter makes progress. Many hearings are non-substantive. Some of them are merely procedural. In addition, there are many situations where the team is assembled and the patient is on the operating table, but at the last minute, the surgery is cancelled. This involves a great waste of resources. Good management of a hospital involves not having such failed surgeries.
Legal system reform in India requires measuring, diagnosing and solving such process failure. The first measurement of non-substantive hearings is in How substantial are non-substantive hearings in Indian courts: some estimates from Bombay by Pavithra Manivannan, Karthik Suresh, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, The Leap Blog, 6 December 2023.
The journey of Indian finance
The best ways to understand a system is to think in historical sequence. What happened and why? How did ideas, interests and institutions come together to make a certain journey? This adds up to a thick description in a way that an ahistorical snapshot does not.
I was invited by Latika Chaudhary, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy to write such a compact story of Indian finance. The core of the paper is ten intertwined stories. In each of the 10 areas, I try to offer the birds eye view, a sense of what happened and why, of what got done and what didn't, and the forces at work. There is a unified chronology, evaluation and bibliography. Many epiphenomena are glossed over, so as to focus on the essence of finance: the play of time, risk, information, individual optimisation, and principal-agent problems.
Episodes 23,24 of Everything is everything
Episode 23, Seven stories that should be films, 1 December 2023. Four stories by Amit Varma and three stories by me which ought to be turned into movies or web series.
Episode 24, Fixing the knowledge society, 8 December 2023. There are three pillars: creating knowledge, diffusing knowledge and using knowledge to improve the world. All three are broken.