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Showing posts from December 15, 2008

Karachi stock market braces for a bloody Monday

Islamabad: They call it the coming bloodbath. The decision by Pakistan's stock market regulator to lift an artificial floor at the Karachi stock exchange (KSE) on Monday marks the removal of a five-month-old anomaly. The KSE has been surrounded with controversy over this issue, with investors and brokers opposing the lifting of the floor and the government determined to remove it as early as possible. When the floor was introduced last August, the idea was to prevent the KSE's representative 100 index from falling further after suffering considerable losses. But the floor ended unexpectedly drying up the trading on the Karachi stock exchange. Some gurus have gone as far as to predict that the KSE-100 index will fall anywhere up to 20 per cent while others forecast a significantly high number as a new regime without any restrictions comes into play. It is impossible to know how much the index will fall. But forecasts of a bloodbath essentially suggest that the losses will be con