Pricing and Valuation on the Capital Markets: How to Clear the Fallout?

These ppt slides represent my presentation prepared for the National Seminar on Financial Markets: Concerns & Challenges (Ghaizerabad, India; Feb 21-22, 2009) and set off with the vision of social functions for the capital markets. In exploring this basic dimension, the slides lean on the Keynesian vision of capital markets in opposition to one espoused by the Modern Financial Economics where markets are conceptualized as efficient and 'fully reflecting all the relevant information'. The opinion expressed is that instead of taking care to act on long-term fundamental information investors have been treated, and eaten with pleasure, a short-termist diet of 'Snap and Musical chairs'. In regulatory terms, it means that some institutional arrangements upholding expectation-formation processes about the prospects of entities (mostly valuation and rating practices) have revealed themselves in unfavourable light, outlived their relevance and are in dire need of replacement by a new architecture and methodology for economic measurements, rating and valuation on capital markets. Following this view, some institutional and methodological features that can be weaven into the new system are suggested and briefly explored, including the proposal for creating a public network of industry-specific rating agencies. It is speculated that what would make for a prolonged crisis on the capital markets is the inevitable distrust toward the old architecture of micro-economic information and forecast providers and to anything that henceforward is likely to come from their analytical motions (whether sensible or not). With pre-crisis enthusiastic expectations gone out of the window, the vacuum of micro-economic expectations which was thus left is the place which regulators should look into and try to contain. This can't be done without looking at the situation anew by first embracing a proper new vision related to the market behavior and recognition of the serious danger implicit in the Modern Financial Economics paradigm. The edifice of the latter may collapse, as the enormous scale of liquidity effects and fallout from speculation may put paid to the infatuation with the building blocks of that paradigm. It is yet foolhardly to speculate on the replacement structure before the event, but any new theoretical view of 'capital ideas' should provide for their explicit linkage with the real economic sphere and direct incorporation of the policy for sustainable macroeconomic development. "Macroeconomic foundations for micro-economic market behavior practices" is a hackneyed shibboleth of vision for what capital markets theory and regulation needs but one which may well come to give fresh boost to the vigor of capital market activities.