Best of BS Opinion: No space for SPACs, NSE trading outage, and more

Here's a selection of Business Standard opinion pieces for the day

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies or SPACs are rapidly gaining traction on Wall Street. As shell companies floated typically by celebrities to acquire other companies, they offer start-ups a convenient way to list on the stock markets. But, as the edit points out, allowing these opaque entities to operate in India is an exercise fraught with risk, given the market regulator’s limited monitoring capabilities. Instead, a more transparent and easier process to allow start-ups to list would probably work better in India. Read it here

Other views examine the urgent need to end the loan moratorium, the future shocks embedded in the National Stock Exchange’s IT systems, a look at the gainers and losers of past technological revolutions and the implication of the Quad’s vaccine project

When will the Supreme Court moratorium on bank loans end? If it continues banks, wary of borrowers’ opportunism and distorted credit discipline, may not come forward to lend, writes Tamal Bandyopadhyay. Read it here

The outage at the National Stock Exchange was a disaster waiting to happen and many more are likely. Debashis Basu shows how the reality of interoperability with the Bombay Stock Exchange varies widely from the soothing official version. Read it here

The IT revolution has raised the spectre of citizens’ privacy, but as Ajit Balakrishnan points out, technological revolutions in the past have largely benefited society even as some segments suffered. Read it here

The vaccine cooperation project that emerged from the first virtual meeting of the four Quad leaders under the Biden administration offers clear signals that the four-nation grouping is moving beyond the narrow security partnership as a means of challenging China’s regional hegemony. Read it here

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Government shall collect information from e-Commerce platforms to aid it in making necessary decisions”

Statement in draft ecommerce policy