Month: February 2016

SBI’s FlexiPay Home Loan Basically Looks Like a Marketing Gimmick

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In yesterday’s column I discussed why the State Bank of India(SBI) has launched the FlexiPay home loan. This home loan allows a borrower to borrow up to 120% of what he would have been able to do in the normal scheme of things.

Further, the borrower has the option to pay only interest on the home loan for the first three to five years. The EMI, which will lead to the principal being repaid as well, kicks in only after that.

The question to ask here is, how much will this benefit the borrower. Or is this just a marketing gimmick which the country’s largest bank has come up with in order to issue more home loans. It is clear that SBI wants to give out more home loans, given that they have a very low default rate in comparison to the other kinds of home loans that the bank gives out.

Let’s try and understand whether FlexiPay home loan is a marketing gimmick or does it ‘really’ benefit the borrower. Let’s take the example of a borrower, who in the normal scheme of things, is eligible to take on a loan of Rs 40 lakh. While this number may seem very low to those who live in metropolitan cities, the average home loan given out by HDFC, the largest housing finance company in the country, is around Rs 23.6 lakh. So a home loan amount of Rs 40 lakh is pretty decent by that comparison.

Getting back to the example. Let’s say a borrower is eligible to take on a loan of Rs 40 lakh. In the case of FlexiPay home loan, he will be eligible for a loan of up to Rs 48 lakh (1.2 times Rs 40 lakh). The interest that SBI charges on its home loan is 9.55% (It’s 9.5% for women).

The interest only option of the FlexiPay home loan allows the borrower just to pay interest on the home loan for the first three to five years. As the SBI press release on FlexiPay home loan points out: “Further, to lower the impact of such additional loan amount on monthly repayments in the form of EMIs, the customers availing Home Loan under ‘SBI FlexiPay Home Loan Scheme’ will also be offered the option of paying only interest during the moratorium (pre-EMI) period of 3 to 5 years, and thereafter, pay moderated EMIs.”

The idea, as SBI puts it, is to give the borrower the option to pay a lower amount every month during the initial years. But is this amount really low? Let’s do some maths to understand this point. I had done this in yesterday’s column as well, but on reading it later, I found that the point did not come out as strongly as it should have.

Let’s say the borrower opts for an interest only option for the first five years. He has taken a loan of Rs 48 lakh, as is allowed under the FlexiPay home loan. An interest of 9.55% would amount to a total payment of Rs 4,58,400 during the course of the year.

This means a monthly payment of Rs 38,200 to service the interest on the loan. If the borrower had taken on a normal home loan, he would have got a home loan of Rs 40 lakh. The maximum tenure of an SBI home loan is 30 years. Hence, the EMI on a Rs 40 lakh, 30-year home loan, at an interest rate of 9.55%, would work out to Rs 33,780. This is lower than the monthly payment of Rs 38,200 that needs to be paid as interest on a Rs 48 lakh home loan, if the borrower opts for the interest only option for the first five years.

So there is clearly no moderation in the payment as SBI claims. And that is primarily because the interest to be paid on the FlexiPay home loan is the same as a normal home loan. If the interest were to be lower, then the interest payment would have been lower as well and the moderation claim would have been true to a certain extent. But in that case the bank would have been taking on more risk as well.

Now let’s flip the situation. If the borrower were paying an EMI of Rs 38,200, what is the loan amount he would be able to service. The maximum tenure of an SBI home loan is 30 years. Hence, paying an EMI of Rs 38,200, for a tenure of 30 years, at an interest of 9.55%, the borrower would be able to service a home loan of Rs 45.23 lakh. The EMI for this loan works to around Rs 38,197.

The loan amount of Rs 45.23 lakh is around 5.8% lower than the loan amount of Rs 48 lakh. Hence, is it worth paying only an interest of Rs 38,200 per month for a Rs 48 lakh home loan, when for the same EMI one could get a loan of Rs 45.23 lakh. And that is the question that any borrower should be asking himself.

SBI will not give the borrower a loan of Rs 45.23 lakh under a normal home loan scheme, given the borrower is eligible only for a loan amounting to Rs 40 lakh. But the bank is willing to give a loan of up to Rs 48 lakh under the FlexiPay home loan scheme.

Hence, the borrower should take this opportunity of taking on a higher loan amount of Rs 45.23 lakh, if the need be, under the FlexiPay home loan scheme. But at the same time ensure that he does not opt for the interest only option but repay an EMI. Why do I say that? If the borrower takes on a loan of Rs 48 lakh and opts for the interest only option, he has to pay an interest of Rs 38,200 per month.

Over a period of five years this amounts to Rs 22.92 lakh, close to half the loan he has borrowed. Further, at the end of five years, not a single paisa of the loan amount has been repaid and he has to start repaying the loan. The borrower will have to repay the loan over a period of the next 25 years. For this, he needs to pay an EMI of Rs 42,104 per month, which is 10.2% more.

Now what would have happened if the borrower had opted to pay an EMI of Rs 38,200 per month on a home loan of Rs 45.23 lakh, and repaid it over thirty years. At the end of five years, he would have repaid around Rs 2.03 lakh of the loan already. In the interest only option, not a single paisa would have repaid. Also, it is worth pointing out here that the difference between a loan of Rs 45.23 lakh and Rs 48 lakh is not huge. Further, when a borrower pays an EMI, the principal amount of the EMI is allowed as a deduction under Section 80C of the Income Tax Act. And this deduction will not be available if interest only option is chosen.

What these numbers tell us very clearly is that the FlexiPay home loan looks more like a marketing gimmick to lure in prospective home loan borrowers. The borrowers are better off opting for the EMI option rather than the interest only option.

The column originally appeared on the Vivek Kaul Diary on February 3, 2016

 

In the genes: Like Father Unlike Son

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Over the Republic Day long-weekend, I was having a discussion with a friend on what might seem to be a rather trivial topic. We got into a discussion on why progeny of famous parents are never really as good and as famous, as their parents.

There are many examples of this phenomenon. Dev Anand’s son Suneil never ever came close to the stardom of his father. He acted in a few films over a period of two decades. All of these movies flopped. Sunil Gavaskar’s son Rohan represented India in one day international matches but never got around to playing a Test match. None of Bob Dylan’s progeny have come close to making music that is as good as what Mr Zimmerman (Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan’s real name) has over the years. The popularity of the Gandhi family with the citizens of this country has gone down with every generation, and so has their political acumen. There are many more examples that one could come up with.

This is basically what we were discussing.  My friend firmly believed that progeny of famous parents never came to be anywhere close to be as famous as their parents were. I said there are always exceptions to everything.

My friend who had aspirations of studying economics, until the more practical considerations of getting an MBA degree took over, felt that what we were discussing was an excellent example of what economists and mathematicians call regression to the mean.

And this brings us to Francis Galton who lived in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, and among other things was also a statistician. Galton measured the height of children and came across what was then a remarkable discovery.

As Jordan Ellbenberg writes in How Not to Be Wrong – The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life: “As Galton and everyone else already knew, tall parents tend to have tall children…But now here is Galton’s remarkable discovery: those children are not likely to be as tall as their parents. The same goes for short parents, in the opposite direction; their kids will tend to be short, but not as short as they themselves are. Galton had discovered the phenomenon now called regression to the mean.”

As Galton wrote in Natural Inheritance: “However paradoxical it may appear at first sight, it is theoretically a necessary fact, and one that is clearly confirmed by observation, that the Stature of the adult offspring must on the whole, be more mediocre than the stature of their Parents.”

Galton further reasoned that what was true for height must also be true for mental achievement. As Ellenberg writes: “And this conforms with common experience; the children of a great composer, or scientist, or political leader, often excel in the same field, but seldom so much as their illustrious parents.” A rare exception to this is the music director RD Burman, who achieved as much as his father SD Burman did, if not more.

Interestingly, there are examples in the other direction as well or as Ellenberg puts it, the children of short parents are not as short as their parents. This also works when it comes to achievement. Here are a few examples.

The test cricketer Cheteshwar Puajara’s father Arvind played a few Ranji trophy matches but did not make it to the big league. And so did his uncle Bipin. The Bollywood actor Govinda’s father Arun Ahuja starred as a hero in films in the late 1930s and forties, but never came to achieve the stardom that his son eventually did.

The music director AR Rahman’s father RK Shekhar was a music director of some repute having composed music for more than fifty films. He was also a music conductor. He never came close to achieving the kind of success that Rahman has, both nationally as well as internationally.

And that, dear reader, is something worth thinking about.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected])

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on February 3, 2016

Why SBI is Launching a Home Loan that Caused the Financial Crisis

 

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In August 2015, Arundhati Bhattacharya the Chairman of the State Bank of India (SBI), had suggested that the country’s largest bank be allowed to launch teaser rate home loans. As she had said back then: “In fact, the first suggestion that I made (was) that, for a limited period, home loans could be given at below base rate for the already heavy stock of housing.” Base rate is the minimum interest rate a bank charges to its customers.

The bank had first launched teaser rate home loans in 2009. These loans are essentially home loans in which the interest rate is fixed in the initial years and is lower than the normal floating interest rate on a home loan. The lower interest rate is limited only to the first two-three years, after which the loan is priced at the prevailing interest rate on the home loans. Hence, the EMIs for the borrower during the first few years are lower than they would have been in the normal scheme of things.

Yesterday (i.e. February 1, 2016), SBI went a step further, and launched a home loan in which the monthly payments initially will be even lower than the EMIs paid in case of teaser rate home loans. It launched what it calls the SBI FlexiPay Home Loan.

As the press release of the announcement of this home loan points out: “The new offering, ‘SBI FlexiPay Home Loan’, will enable young working professionals / executives to get higher loan amount compared to their loan eligibility under normal Home Loan schemes. The additional loan amount will help such professionals in acquiring better and spacious living spaces for themselves and their families, taking into account their future needs.”

Hence, anyone applying for a FlexiPay Home Loan will get a higher amount of home loan than his or her loan eligibility would permit under normal circumstances. And there is more to this as well. As the SBI press release points out: “Further, to lower the impact of such additional loan amount on monthly repayments in the form of EMIs, the customers availing Home Loan under ‘SBI FlexiPay Home Loan Scheme’ will also be offered the option of paying only interest during the moratorium (pre-EMI) period of 3 to 5 years, and thereafter, pay moderated EMIs. The EMIs will be stepped-up during the subsequent years.”

So, other than getting a higher loan amount, the loan also comes with the option of the borrower only paying the interest on the loan during the first few years. And this makes things very interesting.

As the SBI press release points out: “Soaring aspiration levels and rising awareness about the impact of quality living spaces on healthy and harmonious living are resulting in our newer generation of working professionals to show greater preference for better and larger homes. But they are constrained from purchasing their dream homes due to the relatively lower income available at early stage of their career.”

Hence, the FlexiPay home loan will essentially allow people buy a home which they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford given their current level of income. As SBI puts it, the loan tries to “to bridge the gap between affordability and demand for quality residential spaces in the country”.

There are multiple questions that arise here. Let me try and answer them one by one.

a) Why is SBI doing this? The answer lies in the numbers. The bank like other public sector banks has significantly lower bad loans when it lends to retail consumers than when it lends to corporates. As on September 30, 2015, the bad loans when it came to lending to retail sector (i.e. home loans, auto loans, personal loans etc.) were at 1.03% of the total lending carried out to the sector. This number had been at 1.37% as on September 30, 2014.

In comparison, the bad loans while lending to mid-level corporates were at 10.62%. Bad loans while lending to small and medium enterprises were at 8.72%. Also, while the overall bad loan rate in case of retail loans is 1.03%, it is safe to say that the bad loans rate while giving out home loans would be lower.

One explanation for this lies in the fact that it is easy to unleash legal proceedings (or the threat of) against retail borrowers and get them to pay up than it is to do against corporates. Hence, it makes sense for the bank to give out home loans in comparison to other loans, where recovery is difficult.

In fact, between September 2014 and September 2015, 25% of all domestic lending carried out by the bank was in the form of home loans.

b) Should SBI be doing this? It is clear that SBI wants to give out more home loans. The trouble with the FlexiPay home loan is that it relaxes the lending standards while giving out a home loan. As the press release points out that the loan will help the borrower “to get higher loan amount compared to their loan eligibility under normal Home Loan scheme”.

While this will allow the bank to lend more, relaxing lending standards in order to lend more is not always the best way to expand the loan book. As the SBI press release further says the loan will help “to bridge the gap between affordability and demand for quality residential spaces in the country”.

The function of any bank is to give loans and to give them out to those people and institutions who are likely to return it. It is not the function of a bank to improve the real estate scenario in a country by lowering its lending standards.

Further, in the interest only version of the loan the EMI is likely to jump up once the principal repayment (through the EMI) also kicks in after a period of three to five years. In fact, even after three to five years, when EMIs kick-in, the borrowers will have to “pay moderated EMIs”.

The bank is essentially working with the assumption that the income of the borrower will go up during the period and he will be in a position to pay the higher EMI. But is that likely to be the case?

Let’s try and understand this through an example. The scheme allows for upto 1.2 times higher loan eligibility compared to the loan eligibility under the normal home loan scheme. The loan amount has to be Rs 20 lakh or higher. What this means is that anyone with a loan eligibility of Rs 50 lakh under normal conditions, can take a loan of upto Rs 60 lakh.

Over and above this he can choose only to pay interest on it for the first five years. The current rate of interest on an SBI home loan is 9.55% (9.5% for women). Hence, the monthly payment for the first five years will come to Rs 47,750 (9.55% of Rs 60 lakh divided by 12).

The question is if the borrower chooses to pay this amount as an EMI what loan amount will he be eligible for? SBI offers a tenure of up to 30 years on its home loans. At an interest of 9.55% and a tenure of 30 years, an EMI of Rs 47,750, is good enough to repay a loan of Rs 56.55 lakh, which isn’t very different from Rs 60 lakh. (The EMI for a Rs 56.55 lakh home loan to be repaid over 30 years and at an interest of 9.55% comes to Rs 47,757).

The trouble is the eligibility of the borrower under the normal home loan is only Rs 50 lakh and he won’t get a loan of Rs 56.55 lakh. By structuring the loan the way it has, SBI gets to collect interest longer than it actually would have.

What happens once the EMI kicks in after five years? The bank talks about moderated EMIs. It does not define what it means by it. Assuming that principal repayment starts after five years, the EMI will jump to around Rs 52,630.5. This means that the borrower will repay the home loan over the next 25 years, making the total tenure of the loan repayment 30 years. The scheme allows for repayment period of 25 to 30 years.

If the repayment is made over the next 20 years, meaning a tenure of 25 years, the EMI jumps to Rs 56,124. The EMI does not increase significantly in comparison to the earlier monthly payment. The reason for this lies in the fact that SBI has limited the loan eligibility under this scheme to just 20% more than the normal home loan scheme. Hence, to that extent SBI is not making a very risky loan, even though it is taking on some more risk than it currently is.

Also, it is important to understand here that once SBI launches a product, other banks and housing finance companies will have follow. If they stick to 1.2 times the normal loan amount, they will not be giving out very risky loans. If they get aggressive and up the ante, that will mean the lowering of home loan lending standards throughout the system. Hence, the RBI will have to keep a watch on this.

c) What can we learn from the American experience? Interest only home loans were a big reason behind the home loan bubble in the United States between 2000 and 2007. In the American context they were referred to as the option adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). An option ARM was a 30-year home loan in which the borrower had the option of paying a lower EMI initially. One version of the product was called 5/1 interest-only option ARM.
In this, the interest rate was reset after the first five years and then every year after that. Also, for the first five years, the bor­rower needed to pay back only interest on the home loan. In the American case, the interest rate in case of an interest only home loan was significantly lower than the normal home loan.

Hence, this product allowed borrowers to buy homes which were significantly more expensive than they could afford. In the Indian case, the interest on the interest only home loan is the same as the normal home loan.

Also, in the United States, after a point there was a race among banks and financial institutions to give out these loans. As more such loans were given, home prices went up, leading to a huge real estate bubble.

Once the higher EMIs started kicking in, the borrowers started defaulting on their loans. This eventually led to the start of the financial crisis that the world is currently battling. Given this, the lessons from the American experience are very clear. Interest only home loans are pretty risky if the interest rate differential between a normal home loan and an interest only home loan is high. That is clearly not the case with the new SBI FlexiPay home loan and this brings us back to the original question.

d) Why is the SBI doing this? From what the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has been saying, it doesn’t seem that this home loan scheme would have had a total buy-in from him. Given this, I think SBI may have been nudged to launch this scheme by the finance ministry, in order to get the real estate sector going in this country. Given that I have no evidence for this, to that extent this remains a conspiracy theory.

Nevertheless, if this scheme and other such schemes launched by other banks and housing finance companies gain some traction, they will prolong the real estate bubble in the country even more. Hence, instead of reviving real estate, it will make purchasing a home even more difficult. At the same time, I don’t think SBI is taking on an undue risk by launching this scheme. But it remains to be seen how other banks enter this space. If they lower lending standards by increasing the loan eligibility further, we may have a problem.

The column originally appeared on the Vivek Kaul Diary on February 2, 2016

Piketty’s Tax Plan to Lower Inequality in India is Slightly Rickety

thomas piketty
This is something I wanted to write last week but could not given that Satyajit Das’s three part interview took up all the space.

The French economist Thomas Piketty was in Delhi recently to launch the Hindi edition of his book Capital in the Twenty First Century, among other things. During the course of an interview to The Hindu, Piketty said: “I hope the Indian elite will behave much more responsibly [in paying more taxes] than the western elite did in the 20th century.”

Piketty wants India’s elite to pay more tax to ensure that the income inequality in India comes down. In another interview to the Mint newspaper Piketty said: “India is a relatively high inequality country with a very strong legacy of extreme inequality for centuries between groups.”

Piketty feels that India’s income inequality is close to that of Brazil and South Africa with the top 10% making 50-60% of the total income. Piketty also feels that the income inequality in India may have gone up in the recent past. As he told The Times of India in an interview in November 2015: “The share of India’s national income going to top percentiles declined in the decades following independence, but has been rising since the 1980s-1990s, and is now back to pre-Independence levels, or maybe has surpassed them. The problem is that we do not really know, because it has become impossible to access income tax statistics.”

This income inequality can be addressed by taxing the rich more, feels Piketty.

[In fact, everyone does not agree with Piketty’s view of income inequality in India. Here is another view.

As Tim Harford writes in The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: “There simply isn’t enough money in India yet for it to be unequal.”

Harford explained what he meant by this in an interview to me where he said: “The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has this idea of the “inequality possibility frontier”. Imagine an extremely poor subsistence society. Then imagine some class of plutocrats, who somehow confiscate wealth and spend it themselves. How much can they take? The answer is: not much if the society is to survive, because the poor cannot dip below the average income because the average income is barely enough to keep you alive. Now imagine a much richer society. This, in principle, could be far more unequal because the poor could still survive on a tiny fraction of the average income. Milanovic and co-authors were interested not only in how unequal a society is, but how unequal it is relative to how unequal it could possibly be. My point was that despite important gains over the past twenty years, India is still a very poor society. There’s a limit to how unequal it can get until it gets richer – which should make us worry about the inequality we do see.”]

Let’s get back to Piketty. Taxing the rich more was one of the main points that Piketty made in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century. As he writes: “The historical evidence suggests that with only 10-15 percent of national income in tax receipts, it is impossible or a state to fulfil much more than its traditional regalian responsibilities: after paying for a proper police force and judicial system, there is not much left to pay for education and health. Another possible choice is to pay everyone—police, judges, teachers, and nurses—poorly, in which case it is unlikely that any of these public services will work well.”

How do things look in India’s case? If we look at the annual budget of the government of India for 2015-2016, it’s tax revenue amounts to around 6.5% of the nominal gross domestic product (or national income). This is well below the limit that Piketty talks about.

It is very clear that the central government needs to collect more taxes than it currently is. There is no denying that. Piketty feels that it is time that India’s rich pay more taxes. He also suggests that India’s rich should be taxed more. It is important to realise here that the rich are not going to pay higher taxes on their own and hence, they need to be taxed more.

As Piketty told The Hindu: “India has zero wealth tax,” with the underlying message being that India needs to tax those who have wealth.

There are two issues here essentially: taxes and inequality. Let’s talk about inequality first. As Satyajit Das, an economic commentator and the author of The Age of Stagnation put it to me: “There are several sides to inequality. There is a moral and ethical dimension. There are arguments of fairness. There are arguments of proper incentives for achievement and skill. Each person will have a different view on that.”

But the economic argument is simpler. And what is that? As Das puts it: “First, empirical research suggests that an increase in income inequality by 1 Gini point decreases the annual growth in GDP per capita by around 0.2 percent.” Gini coefficient is a measurement of inequality where a gini coefficient of zero expresses perfect equality whereas a gini coefficient of one expresses maximal inequality.

To put it in simple English greater inequality of income leads to slower economic growth. And why is that? Das has an answer: “Higher income households have a lower marginal propensity to consume, spending a lower portion of each incremental dollar of income than those with lower incomes. US households earning US$35,000 have a marginal propensity to consume an amount from each additional dollar of income which is around three times that of a household with an income of US$200,000.”

Inequality comes with a huge social cost as well. As Das puts it: “Widening disparities in income level also impose direct costs such as life expectancy, crime levels, literacy and health. Rising inequality is associated with higher crime rates, particularly violent and property offences, poorer health, as well as family breakdowns and drug use. Unequal societies are affected by diseases of poverty, such as TB, malaria and gastrointestinal illnesses arising from poor nutrition and hygiene, inadequate housing, and a lack of
sanitation and access to timely health services.”

What all this clearly tells us is that income inequality is a problem. Is taxing the rich more really a solution to this?

It is worth asking here in the Indian context who are the rich when it comes to paying taxes? It is worth remembering here that in his February 2013 budget speech, the then finance minister P Chidambaram had estimated that India had only 42,800 people with a taxable income of Rs 1 crore or more.

As Piketty said in one of his interviews it is next to impossible to get hold of income statistics in India. Nevertheless, some progress has been made in the recent past. Akhilesh Tilotia of Kotak Institutional Equities, who is also the author of The Making of India, has done some excellent analysis on this front.

As Tilotia writes in a research note titled How Many Crorepatis in India released in early December 2015: “As e-filing of income taxes becomes the norm and the government gives out glimpses of data, it is now possible to estimate the number of entities in various slabs of incomes. Data suggests that over the four-year period of FY2011-14, the number of non-corporate entities reporting incomes > Rs10 million [or Rs 1 crore] has gone up 3 times to 63,589.” A non-corporate assesse includes “individuals, Hindu undivided families, partnerships, association of persons, etc.” This is around 0.5% of India’s population writes Tilotia.

What does this tell us? This tells us very clearly that very few of India’s rich actually pay taxes. So increasing the tax rates, as Piketty suggest, is really not a solution because the government will end up taxing the same set of people who are already paying a major part of India’s taxes.

Take the case of wealth tax. The finance minister Arun Jaitley abolished the wealth tax in the budget speech he made in February 2015. As Jaitley said during the course of his speech: “The total wealth tax collection in the country was Rs 1,008 crore in 2013-14.”

This basically means two things: a) Very few people in India bothered paying wealth tax. b) The income tax department was not in a position to get more people to pay wealth tax.

Also, it is worth remembering here that many Congress finance ministers since independence drove a substantial part of the Indian economy underground by having very high rates of income tax. The marginal rate of income tax even reached 97% at a certain point of time.

So a higher income tax rate is clearly not a solution to reduce income inequality in India. The solution is to bring more and more Indians who should be paying income tax, but do not, under the tax bracket. This means simplifying the income tax system. It also means making the income tax department more efficient through the use of information technology. And finally, it means reducing corruption in the department.

That is the solution to reducing income inequality in India. Higher tax rates are clearly not the way to go about it.

This column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul’s Diary on February 1, 2016.