SWNOVELXO Chapter 957: Economic Crisis 2
Dravid felt like he was living in a sick dream, a sick dream from which he could never wake up. Right after the middle-aged man committed suicide and died, the younger brother actually ran away in panic, and the police had to go after him to get him back and put him in custody. Dravid did not pity the younger brother who was now wailing as if his mother and father had died; he knew they were crocodile tears.
Instead, he simply felt sorry for the young girl preparing for her marriage, who would soon learn that her father had been cheated and driven to his death, and that her younger uncle was a bastard.
He could tell that the marriage would no longer proceed, but what happened next shook Dravid to his core. When the final update appeared on the KSE board, he witnessed the biggest stock plunge he had ever seen, a loss of 20 percent within just a few hours. It was brutal.
He expected that the people would not take too lightly to the news, but what happened next was completely out of his expectations: a few people actually tried to break into the stock exchange in anger, while a few started to assault the stockbrokers.
"Where is my money, you damn guy?"
"Cheating, this is cheating"
"Hey, unhand me"
Fortunately, the police were there to stop things from going out of control, but they were having a hard time managing it since they were outnumbered by the crazed and desperate investors who had lost everything, but what pushed people over the edge was that another corpse was lying in his own blood.
It was the last straw that broke the camels back, and the people went absolutely haywire
"NO, this can't be real!"
"Please no!!"
"Ahh, you are stepping on me!!"
"No Help Help!!"
A stampede broke out, and Dravid saw with his own eyes an elderly man being trampled by the crowd amidst the chaos. He could hear the cries of pleading from other places as well, but his eyes were totally fixed on the elderly man who stopped moving.
'Why is this happening?' This thought kept appearing again and again in Dravid's mind. Weren't they all here to just invest in the future of the empire and make some money in the process? Why did it lead to so many deaths? Wasn't the stock exchange the heart of the economy? Then why has this heart slowed down its beating, causing so many people to lose their livelihoods
He began to question whether it is even moral to invest in the stock exchange
While Dravid was lost in thought, the horrifying nightmare in the KSE Square continued, more people were trampled, more people lost their lives, and even more people tried to get onto the buildings and end themselves.
Some succeeded and some failed.
Fortunately, the police called in for reinforcements a while ago, and the reinforcements finally arrived.
Hearing the sound of a gunshot, Dravid finally woke up. The police were making the people orderly leave the KSE square, and the medics ran into the crowd trying to rescue the people who were trampled under the feet of desperate investors, but Dravid could tell they were too late.
Dravid got up from his seat, preparing to leave this sad place that brought him so many sad memories, but just when he was about to leave, the words of a pair of men who were sitting on the chairs next to him in the restaurant echoed in his ears.
"Did we do the right thing, brother?"
"Maybe we shouldn't have sold all the stocks"
Hearing the young man, the older man banged the table with an excited expression
"What are you talking about? Do you even realise what you're saying? Shouldn't have sold all the stocks? Then what do you suggest we do with the useless stocks, hold it in our hands and completely lose everything we have built over 5 years?"
"Remember you have a family to feed, think about them before allowing your emotions to speak for you"
"But..."
"There are no buts. Do you think everything here has been caused by us? Pah! Wake up, brother, our investment couldn't even account for a 10th of a percent in a percent, we are simply a startup investment firm. Do you think we alone are capable of bringing down the prices of all these stocks in the stock exchange?"
"Then...why?" The young man was really confused now,
"Sigh! It's because of the 3rd quarterly report that just came out, in the report, the performance of all the companies, large or small, as long as they are not in the industrial zone and they do not have a steam engine, their performance has taken a nosedive"
"They are showing losses of over thirty percent or more, and the products they produce are no longer viable to the market, now tell me, can companies like this be profitable companies?"
"...."
"Why are you silent now ? Why don't you tell me that we should have kept the stocks?"
"..."
Sigh
The older man patted the younger brother on his shoulders and responded, "That is exactly why all the big players in the investment business quickly dumped all the stocks so as to reduce their losses and look for other profitable opportunities"
"And we did the same thing, what is wrong with that. Even now, we may not be able to recover all our money, and our losses might not be bearable; we may even go bankrupt. Now tell me, do you still want to hold on to the stocks?"
It was not only the younger brother who was silenced; even Dravid was at a loss for words. In hindsight, he felt better about selling all the stocks he had and incurring only a loss of under 10 percent after all the commissions he had paid.
---
A similar situation happened in Mangaluru stock exchange as well, the cries of sorrow, riots, stampedes, and suicides, the whole nine yards, but the unfortunate thing is not all the companies in the empire are listed in the stock exchange, so in unknown corners of the empire every moment some business owner, unable to bear the pressure, chose to commit suicide and end themselves.
It happened so much that even the count could not be kept properly.
The next day, all the headlines of the newspaper were filled with the news about the incidents in the Kolkata Stock Exchange and Mangaluru Stock Exchange.
KSE Bloodbath: Stock Crash Wipes Out 200 Million Varaha in Hours, Triggers Riots and Dozens of Suicides Across the Empire
Third Quarterly Report Triggers 30% Average Company Losses, Investors Lose Generations of Wealth Overnight
200 Million Varaha Erased in Market Value as Panic Selling Sweeps Exchanges, Thousands of Families Ruined
Business Owners Commit Suicide Across the Empire as Financial Collapse Hits Unlisted Firms
Investors Question Morality of Stock Trading After Deaths and Chaos in MSE Square
All the major economists had a field day as they analysed what had happened and why it happened.
All the people who studied society called for a closing of the stock exchange and the permanent banning of its existence.
Protests were observed in several cities across the empire demanding that the director of securities and the commerce exchange commission appear before the public and answer to the public about their incompetence.
Knowing that he couldn't stay silent, Badradri Ramachandran, the Director of the Securities and Commerce Exchange Commission, appeared in the public eye and gave multiple interviews to major newspapers across the empire. Unfortunately, his response was completely different from what the people had expected.
"What happened in Kolkata and Mangaluru is a very sad thing, and it is worth observing the day as the darkest day in the Bharatiya Empire's economic history"
"However, please remember that whenever an investor opens an investment account at any bank, a civil servant from the Securities, Commerce, and Exchange Commission clearly warns that investing in the stock market carries risks, and that one invests at their own risk. In fact, many people in the past even scolded the Commission for allegedly slowing down the registration and investment process."
"Now I'm not saying this just to boast or say 'I told you so.' I'm saying this to remind the public that we have been continuously working to prevent situations like yesterday's collapse. Unfortunately, the economy's rapid growth gave too many people a false sense of security. They stopped weighing the risks and invested recklessly."
"A few months ago, the five bank directors put forward a proposal to the Securities and Commerce Exchange Commission for a feature to be added in stock trading where a person could leverage more funds from the bank to do his or her investment, which could multiply the profits the person made if there is really a profit"
"But being a responsible department answering to the public, we decisively shot down the proposal because even if leveraging funds could bring more profits, it could also cause more losses, if that feature had been enabled, I cannot even imagine how horrifying the results of yesterday would have been"
"So people of the empire, please take yesterday's horrifying incidents as an example and only invest your hard-earned money in the stock exchange responsibly, and also invest with the knowledge that all of it could go away, no matter how low the probability is"
The interview with Badradri Ramachandran was like poking a hornet's nest. No matter how subtle his words were, ultimately, he still blamed the people who died for their own irresponsible behaviour, so the family members and the people who sympathised with the victims immediately started to accuse the director of the Securities and Commerce Exchange Commission of being heartless and asked him to resign.
However, unfortunately for them, they did not have the monopoly of opinion in the public because after reading the interview, various people from all walks of society came forward to support Badradri Ramachandran as a counter to the people who opposed him.
Even an influential economist in the Empire, who had recently signed with the business weekly Parabramma Jain, said in an interview
"The people demanding that the stock exchange be closed and banned clearly have no idea what they are talking about. The stock exchange is just a tool, like a lever at a construction site or a machine in a factory. You cannot blame the tool for injuring the user simply because they did not know how to use it properly. That would be like asking the government to ban military guns just because a few reckless teenagers accidentally killed their friend with one."