When the going gets tough

Needless to say, the government is not going to comply even if it were a pretty reasonable demand. With a huge fiscal deficit on its hands, there is no way the government is going for the hand-out. The request - and the request in the US - serves as an index into the minds of not just the peculiarities of the neo-liberal project, but also the mind of the business community, the world over. They want for governance to be privatized; for a lot of governmental functions to be performed by private enterprise. In effect, in many cases, for public capital to be transferred into private hands. But when the going gets tough, they want private debt to go into public hands. So the US government is going to fund these huge financial institutions. And the public exchequer in Pakistan is expected to bail out stockbrokers. And if the government declines, the politicians and bureaucrats are going to be deemed as unreasonable and not aware of what makes businesses tick.

The business community is an engine of growth in any country, as it has been in ours. But it also needs to be put in its place. It should be taught to clean up after its own mess. If the floor-price mechanism's end leads to a free-fall, perhaps the scrips were over-valued. Deal with it.