Indian stock markets in a bubble?

That Dr Doom aka Nouriel Roubini is not seeing any 'green shoots' (a metaphor used to describe initial signs of economic recovery) has been largely publicized in the media in the past few weeks. However, for the first time in many months, he has expressed his views on the Indian economy and its stock market and sadly, it does not make for a very good reading. Speaking to a leading business daily, Roubini was of the opinion that the Indian stock markets along with other emerging market equities may have run up too soon too fast and there is a potential asset bubble building here. Although he agrees that part of the reason the stocks have rallied is because of better fundamentals in these markets, he remains concerned about the easy-money situation which is pushing up asset prices sharply.

Roubini also proffered his views on whether inflation because of money printing by most governments or deflation because of rising unemployment and lower consumer spending is staring us in the face. He opined that while in the near term, the global economy will be gripped by a deflationary spiral, eventually all the money printing by the government will go into goods inflation, leading to runaway inflation. Hence, in the longer term, it will be the inflation that will act as dampener while the global economic growth will be beset with problems of deflation in the near term. Going by the man's track record, we better take his comments seriously.