The known unknowns

One of the problems in living in an environment where there's a new piece of supposedly breaking news every few hours is that when some actually important breaking news comes along, we sort of expect it to pass quickly. Unfortunately, we now have something that could be the breaking news for months, possibly years, something we are not used to. This is particularly true for investing in equities or equity-backed investments. The breathless stock market commentary that business channel anchors the world over specialise in will be a little difficult if it's the same thing over and over again, week after week, month after month. Or maybe this is something that they already know how to do. In fact, the maniacal fluctuations in the equity markets indicate this mental gap. As I'm writing this piece, the Indian markets have had a downward circ