financial markets

Democratising of financial trading fails to recognise the skewed character of finance markets.

Analytical issues have arisen in the conduct of flexible inflation targeting as the framework of monetary policy, adopted formally by India in 2016, despite the noticeable downward drift in the inflation rate and concerns of many economists about its relevance in the light of the global financial crisis. Issues such as the framework’s rationale, the medium-term inflation target, the meaning of real interest rate in the Indian context, the realism in respect of inflation expectations and of the inferred logic of the yield curve, and the implications for economic inequalities have been pointed out.

Liquidity measurement in financial markets has generated considerable attention in financial research. In this paper, the cost of liquidity is measured by computing the bid-ask spreads of liquid securities traded in the Indian government securities market, and is analysed with other liquidity measures. Overall, volatility is found to be the key variable impacting bid-ask spreads. Trading volume has a negative impact on spreads, although at a much smaller magnitude. Trade initiation and net liquidity appear to be smaller but significant drivers of spreads. Order imbalance and trade execution variables, analysed separately with the other variables, show divergent relationship with spreads.

The Lehman moment is the moment when Lehman Brothers—one of the largest investment banks in the United States (US) at the time—collapsed. The collapse happened on 15 September 2008.

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