Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the epidemic’s devastation and a record-breaking boom in local markets.The world’s worst coronavirus outbreak has battered India’s economy and lifted its official Covid death toll to more than 318,000 -- a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount.And yet investors continue to snap up Indian assets, fueling a 65% rally in the Nifty 50 Index over the past 12 months that has outpaced every other major equity benchmark worldwide. The measure’s surge to a record on Thursday has coincided with the fastest rate of Indian initial public offerings since 2017 and an unprecedented flood of foreign-currency bond issuance by local companies.While the combination of pandemic pain and financial-market euphoria is hardly unique to India, nowhere else has the contrast been so extreme.Bulls say the gains are justified by central bank stimulus at home and abroad, along with signs that the current virus wave may be peaking and optimism that India’s long-term economic growth potential will emerge from the crisis intact. Skeptics point to overly rosy earnings estimates and the risk of further outbreaks in a country where vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. India’s central bank weighed in on Thursday, warning in its annual report that the surge in stocks “poses the risk of a bubble.”What’s clear is that financiers on all sides of the debate are stretched thin. Booming markets have left the industry swamped with work at a time when many employees have been sickened by the virus. Some have had to franticly search for medical help after hospitals were overrun and oxygen supplies fell short. Almost everyone has at least one friend or family member who has died.“You feel numb, as if we are in the midst of a war and are losing people one after the other,” said Vikaas Sachdeva, the Mumbai-based chief executive officer of Emkay Investment Managers Ltd., who lost four members of his extended family to the virus.Sachdeva expects Indian markets to be volatile in the near term as investors weigh uncertainties around the vaccination program and the possibility of a third wave. His firm has been buying shares of Indian companies with “high quality” management, betting that the country’s long-term investment case remains intact.India’s $2.9 trillion stock market has been buoyed in part by resilient demand from international investors, who’ve purchased a net $34.9 billion of shares over the past 12 months. While they pared holdings in April and early May, buying by local mutual funds and insurance companies has helped fill the gap. A steady decline in reported Covid cases since mid-May -- along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to avoid another nationwide lockdown -- have added weight to calls for further market gains.Indian companies have taken advantage of the exuberance in markets to raise about $4 billion via public offerings since the start of the year, on track for the busiest first-half since 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“The IPO boom is being driven by Indian technology companies coming of age with businesses doing better than expected,” said Sunil Khaitan, India head of global capital markets at Bank of America. “Tech companies are advancing their fundraising plans and financial sponsors also believe this is a good time to bring in public market investors in these companies amidst ample global liquidity.”Khaitan expects India IPO volumes to more than double in 2021 from the previous year.The surge in activity has left some financial firms scrambling to complete deals after employees were sidelined by the virus. The head of equity capital markets at a Mumbai-based investment bank, who asked not be named discussing private matters, said that at one point 25% of his 40-person group was infected.About 200,000 Indian bank employees have been infected and 1,200 have died since the pandemic began, the industry’s largest union estimated this month.Among the biggest risks for India market optimists is another virus wave. Just 3.2% of the population has been fully vaccinated, versus 39.7% in the U.S. and 10.1% in Brazil, according to Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Tracker.The Indian economy’s recovery from last year’s recession is already showing signs of sputtering. The country lost 10 million jobs in May, according to private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Among the 40 companies in the Nifty 50 index that have posted quarterly results so far, more than half have missed analysts’ estimates. While India’s central bank predicts the economy will grow at a 10.5% pace this fiscal year, other forecasters including S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service have recently cut their estimates to below 10%.“If this Covid situation keeps affecting newer areas and new strains keep emerging, then there is a problem for the near term,” said Deepak Jasani, head of retail research at HDFC Securities Ltd.Sachdeva, the Emkay CEO, said Covid will impact him and his colleagues in ways that go far beyond their work in finance. He’s reading “The Difficulty of Being Good” by Gurcharan Das, who writes about his search for a meaningful life.“The pandemic has brought about a change in many of us and we are more aware of things that matter most in life,” Sachdeva said. “We would though have to see if this is indeed a permanent change when life comes back normal.”(Updates death toll in second paragraph)More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.<doc-sep>Facebook Your Facebook account may have been hacked this week. The social networking giant on Friday said "almost 50 million accounts" were compromised, a discovery its engineers made on Tuesday. Here's what you need to know. Now playing: Watch this: Facebook explains breach that exposed data on 50 million... What happened? According to Facebook, "attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's code that affected View As, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens, which they could then use to take over people's accounts." What's an access token? An access token keeps you logged into Facebook so you don't need to enter your password each time you visit the site or app. If an attacker has your token, then he or she has access to your account. Was my account hacked? Odds are it was not. While 50 million sounds like a big number, it's a small percentage of the more than two billion active Facebook accounts. If you go to your Facebook page and don't need to log in, then your account is safe -- it was not breached. If you go to your Facebook page and find that you are logged out, then your account may have been breached. In response to discovering the attack, Facebook reset the access tokens of the 50 million accounts it found to be compromised, which will require those users to enter their password to log back in. Facebook also took the precaution to reset access tokens of an additional 40 million accounts for those users who used the "View As" feature in the last year. If your account was affected, Facebook will notify you in a message at the top of your News Feed when you log back in to explain what happened. Facebook has also temporarily turned off the View As feature while it investigates. Has Facebook fixed the breach? According to Mark Zuckerberg himself, "We patched the security vulnerability to prevent this attacker or any other from being able to steal additional access tokens." The company, however, still does not know who is responsible for the attack. I'm still nervous. Should I change my password? Facebook says there's no need to change your password, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to pick a new one. After all, the Cambridge Analytica fiasco was worse than Facebook initially believed or admitted. You could also just log out of your Facebook account and then log back in without needing to change your password. This simple action will reset your access token, which should put any immediate worries to rest while we wait for Facebook to share more information about the attack. To log out of Facebook on all of your devices, go to the Security and Login page and in the Where You're Logged In section, click See More and then click Log Out Of All Sessions.<doc-sep>
Hours after Facebook announced on Friday a huge data breach that affected at least 50 million users, the news got worse. In a conference call with reporters—Facebook’s second of the day, after the first one left many questions unanswered—the company’s vice president of product, Guy Rosen, said that the hackers could have also gained access to users’ accounts on other apps and websites, beyond Facebook itself, via Facebook Login. That’s the feature of Facebook that allows you to sign up for, and log in to, all kinds of other online services using your Facebook credentials. For users whose Facebook accounts were hacked, the company confirmed, it’s possible that those third-party accounts could have been breached as well. The follow-up call was meant to clarify some of the details of the breach, which is almost certainly the most significant in Facebook’s history. In it, Rosen explained how three separate bugs combined to give hackers a path to full control of users’ Facebook accounts. They gained access not by stealing users’ passwords, but via a sort of digital key called an “access token” that’s meant to let you into your account on another device (say, your phone) automatically when you’re already logged in on another (say, your laptop). The good news is that the hackers don’t have anyone’s Facebook passwords—so even users who were affected by the breach don’t necessarily have to change those. The bad news: They could theoretically have used that same token to gain access to some of users’ other online accounts, depending on how the relevant apps and sites handle Facebook access tokens. It was not immediately clear whether the hackers—who remain unknown—actually took advantage of this, nor how easy it would have been for them to do so. Any such connections should have been broken when Facebook reset the access tokens of the affected users, beginning Thursday night. That would have logged users out of those third-party apps and sites. Facebook also clarified that users affected by the Facebook breach who had Instagram or Oculus accounts linked to their Facebook account would need to delink and relink those accounts. One piece of good news: Whatsapp was apparently not affected. The story is still developing, and more details are likely to emerge in the days to come. But there’s already one conclusion we can make: There was a time when Facebook harbored ambitions to be a sort of “universal login” for sites and apps everywhere—like a driver’s license for the online world. That never quite came to pass, but it did get pretty far along. This should be the final answer to the question of whether it was ever a good idea.