Nepal's Infant Stock Market Gets Cracking
Immediately after Kathmandu's stock exchange was opened in 1984, a letter arrived from a village in West Nepal with an urgent request:
("Bandits are becoming very troublesome. Please arrange for security.") The officers of the infant agency, all primed up and eager to sell stocks and shares, were taken aback by this call for police protection. The villagers had understood the name "Securities Kharid Bikri Kendra" to mean a Government agency that somehow sold protection from thugs and bandits.
While the bewildered Pradhan Pancha from West Nepal is certainly an extreme case, his confusion, is not unique. What, after all, is a stock exchange doing in a country where commerce is still primitive, industry undeveloped, and where the handful of major joint stock companies date back to the times of the Ranas? And where the wallowing buffaloe and the scrawny mountain cow represent better the sluggish marketplace and the emaciated economy than the "bear" and the "bull" of the global capital markets.