Moneycontrol Pro Panorama | Waiting for Godot?

The impatience of capital can be seen even in the microfinance sector where private equity thrusts business targets.

Dear Reader,

Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play 'Waiting for Godot' shows the futility of waiting for the future with hope. While nihilistic, it would strike a chord with many Indians who have had a brush with the justice system. In fact, several of our institutions are guilty of taking too long to dispense with resolutions in the name of accuracy and thoroughness in procedure.

Look how our prized reform Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is faring here. The time taken for a resolution to just get your money back from a defunct company is not less than two years. Criminal justice court cases take a decade to reach a verdict and even consumer courts give out rulings quickly in rare cases. For any individual or a firm mired in procedure, resolution and restitution demand an exorbitant sunk cost.

While institutions and systems are turtle-slow, capital is impatient. That is the reason the predictions of a surge of foreign investors in India’s junk assets market didn’t live up to the hype -- private credit is still dominated by already existing foreign investors and domestic players. The impatience of capital can be seen even in the microfinance sector where private equity thrusts business targets, sometimes lofty, onto microfinance lenders in the name of outreach to exit at a juicy valuation that such a growth brings.

Yet another set of impatient investors is in the bond markets. Imagine being given a free ticket to a party guaranteed to be fun filled and refusing it. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has thrown in rate cuts, large liquidity infusions, and outright purchases of bonds at the market, but nothing has stuck. Bond yields are still elevated because no matter how much the central bank buys, there is always more coming down the state government pipe. For investors, the sovereign must offer more if it wants their money.

In a Trumpian world, we have been witnesses to impatience of unprecedented scale. Foreign investors want nothing to do with Indian equities even when it is dressed in perhaps the best macroeconomic performance in many years. Dollars are flying off everyday to find newer lucrative shores as America under President Trump recasts global trade.

If Indian policymakers had walked the path that says success comes to those who wait, Indian markets would have been far worse off today. For once the RBI cannot be accused of doing too little too late on liquidity or interest rates. The central government too has done its bit throughout this fiscal year, from income tax reductions to goods and services tax revamp that fuelled consumption.

Investors are hoping that the Union Budget on Sunday will continue to show that it has got their backs. Ananya Roy in her column here, lists what are these expectations that are priced in the markets today. Indeed, stock market investors are willing to work on a Sunday rather than wait 24 hours to place their bets on the Budget announcements. There is no regard for delayed gratification here because capital is impatient, always.

That brings us to a rather cheeky section of the Economic Survey titled 'Delayed gratification and the cost of impatience'. The survey censures Indian citizens on their impatience with state machinery and policy in developmental work. Manas Chakravarty lays bare the Survey’s delusional lament about this impatience in his column here and argues that Indians are impatient because institutions do not deliver on time. “When contract enforcement takes a decade, delayed gratification becomes economically irrational,” he points out. The Survey errors in painting institutional failure as a cultural failing.

We started with saying that it takes more than two years of time for creditors to get money back from a defaulting company and why capital won’t stay that long. When capital is impatient, why shouldn’t people be? To be fair, patient capital earns more and there are the likes of gurus such as Warren Buffett who support patient investing, also called value investing. But when patience becomes an exercise akin to waiting for Godot who never arrives, the whole approach is futile.

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Aparna IyerMoneycontrol Pro