Expense Account, Mint
Have you been feeling low lately? Generally pessimistic and grumpy? I met a colleague in the lift bay and swapped stories. A fund manager drops by to meet me and we discuss how everybody feels much older than before. That the last 10 years feel like 20. Many conversations over the past few months lead me to think that the urban mass affluent Indian is not feeling too happy. It’s a big come down since the go-go days of 9% growth. No wonder that the Misery Index for India is the highest since 1991. Nomura Research has tweaked the classic Arthur Okun method of adding the unemployment and inflation rate (higher levels of both, the argument goes, would cause higher economic and social distress) to take the difference of the Index of Industrial Production growth and the Consumer Price Index to construct the Indian Misery Index. The swap was made necessary by poor employment data in India. The greater this difference, the higher is the misery index. With inflation persistently high and industrial production and jobs falling, no wonder the lines of worry are settling in. Add to this the sheer persistent deluge of bad news across all fronts—economic, political, social, moral—and the picture looks even worse.