Indian markets are not getting much good news, and global trends are not helping. In the US, tech is badly hit. Google's troubles with Europe's governments, Facebook's challenges with user privacy pretty much everywhere, with multiple states including the UK, the US and Singapore ramping up investigations, and Apple's weak iPhone sales combined with concerns around its future in China are all adding up to great pain in the US markets. As far as the tech titans are concerned, there is little good news to be had. And US jitters are infectious - they have hit global markets including India, which like others opened lower.
In India, bad news keeps on coming in from the banking sector, making investors especially cautious. IDBI Bank is only the latest to disclose large frauds, saying that fraudulent loans of 7.72 billion rupees ($118.8 million) were issued from five of its branches in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Some of these loans were issued against fake lease papers, including fake "fish farms".
Asset quality, especially of public sector banks (PSBs), has deteriorated drastically and very much in the public eye as the RBI cracks down. And weakening asset quality, plus these kinds of bombshell disclosures, are significantsly hurting the investors' temper, and reducing risk appetites, because no one knows the things that have been swept under the bed when investors weren't looking. Investors are waiting for good news, and so far, getting none.
