The Securities and Exchange Board of India, the official stock market regulator, has taken more than two steps backward in the march towards financial liberalization. Faced with pressure to respond to the evidence of market manipulation, price rigging and excessive speculation, the SEBI has decided to do away with carry-forward operations available through a number of schemes, as of July 2. To curb speculative practices, this decision has been combined with others such as a move to rolling settlements in a much larger range of scrips and the imposition of a synchronized settlement system across stock exchanges.
 
The most common among the schemes which allow market players to carry forward their transactions without settlement is badla trading. In that scheme, the stock exchange acts as an intermediary for loan finance at variable interest rates provided to those making share purchases without outlaying the required capital. The buyer, through his broker, undertakes the transaction without settling his bill, by agreeing to pay interest to a lender who finances the transaction for a period of up to 70 days. Depending on the demand for badla trading in the concerned stock, the interest rates vary. Since buyers expecting a short term increase in the prices of particular shares can choose to resort to badla transactions, in the hope of selling out the stock within 70 days and settling their debt as well as booking a profit, badla was an institutionalized form of support to speculation.
 
This, however, was not the only form in which broking entities could, on behalf of themselves or their clients, increase their exposure to shares to an extent far in excess of their immediate capacity to pay. There were other means such as the offshoots of the Securities Lending Scheme introduced in 1997. These included the Automatic Lending and Borrowing Mechanism (ALBM) in the National Stock Exchange and the Borrowing and Lending Securities Scheme (BLESS) introduced in the Bombay Stock Exchange. Under these schemes, holders of dematerialized securities lodged as per statutory requirement with the Stockholding Corporation of India Limited (SHCIL) could 'lend' these shares to brokers or other trading entities for specified periods at pre-specified interest rates. This allowed traders to get access to shares that they did not own for varying periods of time, which they can trade, subject to their meeting interest costs as well as their commitment to return the shares to the SHCIL on behalf of their rightful owner. Thus traders expecting a fall in prices of shares ruling high currently, can trade in borrowed shares at the current high price, expecting to buy the same shares at a lower price when the time comes to settle their transaction under the share lending scheme. These schemes too allowed brokers to increase their exposure to an extent far in excess of their net worth for speculative purposes.
 
The inherent tendency of deferral or carry-forward schemes like these to facilitate speculation is aggravated in markets that are speculation prone. India's markets are indeed prone to speculation because they lack depth. Shares of only a small proportion of companies are listed in these markets, and of those only a few are actively traded. Yet these companies are able to use a high stock price to garner huge premia from share issues and the promoters of these companies benefit substantially from high share values when going in for mergers and amalgamations. The promise of such benefits encourage price rigging, through the agency of bulls like Ketan Parekh, as was allegedly the case with the shares of the Global Trust Bank in the run up to its aborted merger with UTI Bank. Price rigging was also resorted to in the now notorious BPL-Videocon-Sterlite share-rigging episode, in which the SEBI dragged its feet about taking penal action despite the incriminatory evidence yielded by its investigations. Those rigging prices used their own capital, borrowed funds and exploited schemes like badla trading to achieve their goals.
 
The problem becomes acute when manipulation of this kind is countered by other brokers and trading entities. At moments when a few players are willing to make purchases to drive share prices upwards, other brokers or trading entities reading the signals right or obtaining insider information, believe that the prevailing price is artificially high. This encourages them to sell shares which they do not own, by exploiting the stock lending scheme. Their sales at the prevailing high prices are expected to drive prices down, so that the same shares can be bought back at much lower prices, allowing the traders concerned to book a profit, before returning the borrowed shares.
 
Thus in shallow markets that are prone to manipulation, the so-called deferral or carry-forward schemes engender speculation of a kind in which the gains of some must necessarily involve losses for others. This makes such markets prone to a high degree of volatility, resulting in periodic price collapses. So long as the market is rising, advocates of such speculative behaviour glorify the market, the regulator and the government. When the market collapses, talk of bad faith, poor regulation and scams abounds. The 1990s experience in India's stock markets epitomizes this tendency.
 
It is of course true that financial markets the world over are prone to failure. However, the speculative disease to a far greater extent afflicts shallow markets, such as those in India. That is not the only problem. In some developed country contexts, such as the United States, a number of benefits are seen to flow from the functioning of their stock markets. First, they are seen as means of efficiently channeling household savings to firms undertaking productive investments. Second, since poor financial performance adversely affects the share values of firms, share prices are seen as signals for penalizing errant managers as well as ensuring that poorly managed firms are taken over by better performing firms, that exploit the low equity value relative to the actual worth of some companies. And, third, since share prices tend to move in tune with trends in earnings, the signals generated by stock markets are seen as means of attracting savings to the most deserving sectors.