Word: calcuttas
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Champalal Changoiwala still goes to work in the mornings. Wearing a crisp button-down shirt, his silver hair combed into a neat part, he makes his way to the crumbling colonial edifice of the Calcutta Stock Exchange on Lyons Range, an alleyway that teems with beggars, food hawkers and fortune tellers. In his windowless office on the ground floor, he puts in eight-hour days, working the phones and scouring the financial pages for that next big investment...
...Changoiwalas are not alone. This past March, India's markets crashed, knocking 16% off the national stock index. Investors across the country were rattled, and Calcutta was rocked to the bone. Daily volume on the city's exchange plunged by more than 80% and has yet to recover. Officials reckon that 400 of the bourse's 450 active brokers are near bankruptcy. And most of them are no longer showing up at the office. The Calcutta Stock Exchange, India's third- largest and one of the most venerable in Asia, looks like some backwater bus depot, rather than the bustling...
...loss of business weren't bad enough, outsiders are now saying that Calcutta's brokers were not just victims of the March crash, but among its instigators. The Securities and Exchange Bureau of India (SEBI) concluded in a May report that the city's traditional broker families and their old-fashioned way of doing business?the very things that people like Changoiwala hold so dear?helped turn their bourse into a magnet for hot money and market manipulators. Foreign pundits are even less forgiving. "A cesspool," is how John Band, the Bombay-based CEO of investment bank ASK-Raymond James...
...There's no doubt that Calcutta's exchange was operating under a different set of rules in the months leading up to the crash. More than 90% of the city's brokers are descendants of Marwari traders who emigrated from Rajasthan in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Contrary to the broker communities in Bombay and elsewhere, the Marwari are a tight-knit clan, often linked by marriage. They had few qualms about trading stocks among each other on the basis of a handshake. Finance for trades could be had from a number of Marwari lenders holding small fortunes, usually...
...There is not a broker in Calcutta who will deny what was going on. Indeed, most passionately defend it. Changoiwala's brother, Kanta Prasad, gushes that the relationships forged by families who traded with one another in the gray market gave "touch and feeling" to Calcutta's bourse that was "absolutely unique." Mention unofficial finance to Mahajan, the former exchange vice president, and he gets so excited that his arms flail like the rotors of a distressed helicopter. "Nobody ever failed to pay up," he coos. "It served Calcutta for 100 years. It was a beautiful system. It was something...