Month: March 2016

Rahul Gandhi Needs a Lesson in Inflation

rahul gandhi

Rahul Gandhi, in his new avatar, as the angry young man (yes at 45 he is still young), has a thing or two to say on most issues. Let’s take the latest decision of the Narendra Modi government to cut the interest rates on the public provident fund(PPF) and the small savings schemes like Kisan Vikas Patra(KVP) and National Savings Certificate(NSC). Interest rate cuts ranging from 40 basis points to 130 basis points have been carried out. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

Earlier the interest rates ranged from 8.4% to 9.3%. Now they are in the range of 7.1% to 8.6%. These interest rates come into effect from April 1, 2016.

Rahul Gandhi’s office tweeted to say that “slashing interest rates on small savings – on PPF and KVPs, is yet another assault by the Modi Govt on hard working middle class people.” He further said that “this Govt has failed farmers, failed the poor & now it’s failing the middle class. Modiji ppl are seeing through your event management politics.”

While the Modi government has taken the middle class for granted on other issues, like not passing on the benefits of the fall in oil prices in the form of lower petrol and diesel prices, or trying to tax the Employees’ Provident Fund corpus of private sector employees, the same cannot be said in this case. Before I get into explaining this, we first need to understand the meaning of inflation and how it impacts investment returns.

What is inflation? Inflation is essentially the rate of price increase. If the price of a product in March 2015 is Rs 100 per unit and it jumps to Rs 110 per unit by March 2016, the rate of inflation is said to be 10%. So far so good.

What does it mean when people say inflation  is falling? It doesn’t mean that the prices are falling. It means that the rate of increase in price rise is falling. Allow me to explain. Let’s extend the example considered earlier.

The price of a product in March 2016 is at Rs 110 per unit. Let’s say by March 2017, the price of the product has increased to Rs 115.5 per unit. This means that the price of the product has risen by Rs 5.5 or 5%. The inflation is 5%. Hence, the rate of price rise has fallen and the price of the product has gone up.

A fall in the price of the product would mean the price of the product going below Rs 110 per unit, by March 2017, which is a totally different thing.

This is a very important point which many people don’t understand and hence, it is worth repeating. A fall in the rate of inflation does not mean lower prices, it just means that the rate of price rise is falling or has slowed down.

Now let’s get back to Rahul Gandhi and the Modi government’s decision to cut interest rates on PPF and other small savings schemes.

The rate of interest on offer from April 1 onwards, ranges from 7.1% (on the one-year post office deposit) to 8.6% (on the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme and the Sukanya Samriddhi Account Scheme). What is the prevailing rate of inflation? Inflation as measured by the consumer price index in February 2016 had stood at 5.18%.

What does this tell us? It tells us that the rate of interest on offer on PPF as well as other small savings scheme is higher than the prevailing rate of inflation. This means that the money invested will “actually” grow and not lose its purchasing power. The real rate of return on these schemes is in positive territory. The same cannot be said for the period when Rahul Gandhi’s Congress Party was in power.

Inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 10% or higher between 2008 and 2013. In fact, the inflation during the period stood at an average of 10.1% per year. What was the interest that the Congress led UPA government was paying on PPF and other small savings schemes?

The rate of interest varied from anywhere between 8-9%. This, when the prevailing rate of inflation was greater than 10%. Hence, the money invested in these schemes was actually losing purchasing power.

This is not the case now. Investors are actually earning a “real” return on their investment. Some people told me on the social media that even with lower inflation, prices are not really falling. As I explained earlier, lower inflation does not mean falling prices. It just means that the rate of price increase has slowed down.

Also, it needs to be mentioned here that investments made into PPF and other schemes like Senior Citizens Savings Scheme, National Savings Certificate and Sukanya Samriddhi Account Scheme, enjoy a tax deduction under Section 80C. Hence, the effective rate of return on these schemes is higher than the interest that they pay.

I guess these are points that Rahul Gandhi needs to understand. Editors of media houses who have run headlines saying how the middle class will be hurt because of the cut in interest rates, also need to understand this. While “middle class hurt” makes for a sexy headline, that is really not the case.

Also, it is worth mentioning here that the Modi government is trying to introduce a certain method in the calculation of the interest to be paid on these schemes. The interest will now be linked to the rate of return on government securities and will be calculated every three months.

Indeed, this is a good move and brings a certain transparency to the entire issue. Further, people up until now have been used to interest rates on PPF and small savings schemes remaining unchanged for long periods of time. But now with a quarterly reset in these interest rates coming in, they need to get used to the idea of these interest rates changing on a regular basis.

This is something that needs a change in mental makeup and will happen if the government persists with this. Also, it is important in the days to come the government ensures that the rate of interest being paid on PPF and small savings schemes is higher than the rate of inflation. That to me is the most important thing than the current rate cut.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on March 21, 2016

Hold your fire! Govt cutting rates on PPF, small savings schemes is a good move; here’s why

rupee

The Narendra Modi government has cut the interest rates on offer on the public provident fund(PPF) and other small savings schemes run by the post office.

The new interest rates will come into play from April 1, 2016 and will be in effect until June 30, 2016. The interest rate on PPF has been cut from 8.7% to 8.1%. The interest on the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme has been cut from 9.3% to 8.6%.

InstrumentRate of interest w.e.f. 01.04.2015 to 31.3.2016Rate of interest w.e.f. 01.04.2016 to 30.6.2016
Savings Deposit4.04.0
1 Year Time Deposit8.47.1
2 Year Time Deposit8.47.2
3 Year Time Deposit8.47.4
5 Year Time Deposit8.57.9
5 Year Recurring Deposit8.47.4
5 Year Senior Citizens Savings Scheme9.38.6
5 Year Monthly Income Account Scheme8.47.8
5 Year National Savings Certificate8.58.1
Public Provident Fund Scheme8.78.1
Kisan Vikas Patra8.77.8 (will mature in 110 months)
Sukanya Samriddhi Account Scheme9.28.6

 

This decision to cut down interest rates hasn’t gone down well with the middle class. This has come soon after the Employees’ Provident Fund(EPF) fiasco where the government tried to tax the accumulated corpus of the private sector employees on contributions made after April 1, 2016.

While trying to tax EPF was incorrect, the hue and cry being made out on interest rates on PPF and small savings schemes being cut, is uncalled for. This is happening primarily because most people have become victims of what economists call the money illusion.

What is money illusion? As Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich write in Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: “[Money illusion] involves a confusion between ‘”nominal” changes in money and “real” changes that reflect inflation…Accounting for inflation requires the application of a little arithmetic, which…is often an annoyance and downright impossible for many people…Most people we know routinely fail to consider the effects of inflation in their finance decision making.”

Hence, money illusion is essentially a situation where people don’t take inflation into account while calculating their return on an investment.

How does this apply to the current context? Let’s consider the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme. The interest rate on offer on the scheme was 9.3%. The rate of inflation that prevailed between 2008 and 2013 was 10% or more. Hence, the real rate of return on the scheme was negative. This was the case with other small savings schemes as well as bank fixed deposits.

In fact, the real rate of return was well into the negative territory. The real rate of return for a senior citizen who did not have to pay income tax on the earnings from the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme stood at minus 0.7% (9.3% minus 10%).

For those who had to pay income tax, the real rate of return was even lower. For those in the 10% tax bracket the real rate of return was minus 1.63% per year. For those in the tax 20% and 30% tax brackets, the real rate of return was minus 2.56% and minus 3.49%.

But back then no one complained about the interest rate being low, even though almost everyone who invested in PPF and other small savings, was losing money. The purchasing power of their investment was coming down.

The situation is totally different now. Inflation as measured by the consumer price index stood at 5.2% in February 2016. Given this, the real rate of return is now in positive territory. Let’s repeat the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme example and see how the real returns stack up.

The interest rate on offer on the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme from April 1, 2016, is 8.6%. For those who do not have to pay any income tax, the real rate of return is 3.4% (8.6% minus 5.2%). For those in the 10%, 20% and 30% tax brackets, the real rate of return works out to 2.54%, 1.68% and 0.82% respectively.

Hence, the situation is substantially better than it was in the past. Investor are actually making a real rate of return on their investments. Also, for savings instrument like PPF, where no tax needs to be paid on accumulated interest, the real returns are higher.

But given that the nominal interest rate has been cut, people have an issue and a lot of noise is being made.

Given these reasons, the government was right in cutting the interest rates on offer on PPF and other small savings schemes. Also, it is important to understand that the high rates of interest on offer on these schemes has been preventing the banks from cutting their deposit as well as lending rates at the speed at which the Reserve Bank of India wants them to.

As RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had said in December 2015 “Since the rate reduction cycle that commenced in January [2015], less than half of the cumulative policy repo rate reduction of 125 basis points [one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage] has been transmitted by banks. The median base lending rate has declined only by 60 basis points.” Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks.

While RBI cut the repo rate by 125 basis points in 2015, the banks only managed to pass on less than half of that cut to their end consumers. One reason for this is that many public sector banks have had a huge problem with their corporate loans. Another reason has been the high interest rates on offer on small savings schemes.

The banks compete with these schemes for deposits and given the high interest on offer on post office savings schemes, banks could not cut interest rates beyond a point without losing out on deposits.

The hope now is that the RBI will cut the repo rate further, banks will cut the interest rates on their loans and deposits, and people will borrow and spend. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on March 19, 2016

Finally, an Economist Explains Why the Indian GDP Growth Number Is Wrong


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I was just joking to a friend the other day that if economists started writing their stuff in simple English, which everybody can understand, guys like me who make a living out of translating what economists think and write, into simple English, would be driven out of the business very quickly.

The question is why do economists write the way they do? As John Lanchester writes in How to Speak Money: “As your vocabulary becomes more specific, more useful, more effective, it also becomes more exclusive. You are talking to a smaller audience…There are a lot of things like that in the world of money, where the explanation is hard to hold on to because it compresses a whole sequence of explanations into a phrase, or even just into a single word.” This is precisely what happens when economists write, or talk for that matter.

Nevertheless, given the chances of economists writing in simple English are low, I guess I am likely to continue to be in business.

Moving forward, in this piece I wanted to look at a column which was recently published in the Mint newspaper. The column is titled Real GDP is growing at 5%, not 7.1% and has been written by economist Rajeswari Sengupta.

I think the column makes a very important point. Nevertheless, my only quibble with it is that it has not been written in simple English. An idea as important as this column communicates needs to reach a wider audience and not just other economists.

So what is the core idea of the Mint column? As Sengupta writes: “Are our gross domestic product (GDP) numbers credible? Many commentators have expressed their doubts. But no one has yet identified problems with the Central Statistical Organisation’s (CSO) methodology. This is because they have been looking in the wrong place.”

Sengupta essentially goes on to explain what is wrong with the Indian GDP growth numbers.

In January 2015, the CSO moved to a new way of calculating the GDP. The GDP is a measure of all goods and services produced within a country. It is a measure of the economic size of any country. And GDP growth is essentially a measure of economic growth.

After the CSO last January unveiled the new way of calculating the GDP, the Indian GDP numbers suddenly started to look better. The GDP growth as per the old method had stood at around 5%. With the new method, the GDP growth suddenly crossed 7%.

The CSO estimates that in 2015-2016 (the current financial year) the Indian economy is likely to grow at the rate of 7.6%. It is important to understand that the GDP is a theoretical construct. There are many high frequency economic data indicators which tell us very clearly that there is no way that the country is growing at the rate at which the CSO wants us to believe it is.

Exports are down. Two wheeler sales growth has been fairly insipid. Railway freight growth has been very slow. Bad loans of banks are rising at a fairly rapid rate and their lending growth has been very slow. Corporate earnings growth has been terrible.

Given these reasons, how can the GDP possibly grow at 7.6% during this financial year, is a question worth asking.

Sengupta in her column explains what is wrong with the GDP growth number of 7.6%. As she writes: “The problem is not, as many have suspected, in the nominal numbers. It lies in the system for constructing the deflators. This methodology is flawed, yielding exaggerated estimates of the speed at which the economy is growing.”

Let me explain this mumbo jumbo in simple English. The GDP growth number of 7.6% is essentially what economists call the real GDP growth. The real GDP growth is essentially GDP growth which has been adjusted for inflation. The nominal GDP is the GDP growth which hasn’t been adjusted for inflation.

Hence, real GDP growth is essentially nominal GDP growth minus the prevailing rate of inflation. So far so good.

Now Sengupta talks about something known as a deflator in her column. What is a deflator? Lanchester defines a deflator in his book as “the number you use when working out the value of money minus the effect of inflation.”

In Sengupta’s case, she is talking about what economists refer to as the GDP deflator, which is nothing but the rate of inflation used to come up with the real GDP growth number from the nominal GDP growth number.

The real GDP growth number is essentially the nominal GDP growth number minus the GDP deflator. Let’s understand this through an example. Let’s say the nominal GDP growth is 10%. The GDP deflator is at 3%. Then the real GDP growth is 7% (10% minus 3%). If the GDP deflator is 1%, then the real GDP growth is 9% (10% minus 1%). That is how it works

What is the problem with the GDP growth number? As Sengupta puts it: “The real numbers are derived by taking nominal data on the economy and deflating them by price indices. So, if inflation is understated, then real growth is going to be overstated. And this is what has been happening.”

Hence, the CSO seems to be using a lower GDP deflator to arrive at the real GDP growth number. This has led to a higher real GDP growth number, which seems unreal.

And this is precisely where the problem lies. If we look at the nominal growth number for the period October to December 2015, it stands at 7.9%. A deflator of 0.7% meant that the real growth came in at 7.1%. (The number should be 7.2% if we follow what I explained earlier, but there must be some rounding off errors here).

Sengupta’s contention is that the CSO is understating the GDP deflator at 0.7% and the number should be higher than this. As she writes: “Could India’s inflation be so low? In effect, the CSO is saying that despite India’s booming economy, producer inflation is lower than that of the recession-wracked economies of the West, or even that of Japan, which has been wrestling with deflation since the 1990s.”

This underestimation is happening primarily because the calculation of the GDP deflator closely tracks the inflation as measured by the wholesale price index, which has been in negative territory for some time now (16 months to be precise).

This explains why CSO feels that the Indian economic growth in 2015-2016 will be at 7.6%, even though the high speed economic indicators indicate otherwise. Sengupta shows that by using the right GDP deflator, the real GDP growth cannot be possibly more than 5%. And that is precisely the point I have been making over the last few months.

The column originally appeared on The 5 Minute Wrapup on Equitymaster on March 18, 2016

When Oil Price Falls, Excise Duty Goes Up. When It Rises, Petrol/Diesel Prices Go Up.

light-diesel-oil-250x250Petrol and diesel prices have gone up. This time the prices were increased by the oil marketing companies(OMCs).

The Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), one of the OMCs, said in a press release that it has decided to “increase in Retail Selling Price of Petrol by Rs. 3.07/litre at Delhi (including State levies) with corresponding price revision in other States.”

At the same time, it has decided to increase the “Retail Selling Price of Diesel by Rs. 1.90/litre at Delhi (including State levies) with corresponding price revision in other States.” The increase came in effect from the midnight of March 16-March 17, 2016.

The price of oil has been going up over the last few weeks. As on February 11, 2016 the price of the Indian barrel of crude oil was at $26.95 per barrel. Between then and March 16, the price of the Indian basket of crude oil has gone up by 34% to $36.10 per barrel.

In rupee terms also the increase in prices has been more or less similar. The price of one barrel of crude oil has one up by around 32.7% to Rs 2431.94.

This increase in price has forced the oil marketing companies to increase the price of petrol and diesel. As the IOC said in its press release: “The current level of international product prices of Petrol & Diesel and INR-USD exchange rate warrant increase in price of Petrol and Diesel, the impact of which is being passed on to the consumers with this price revision.”

In any other market this would have been a fair deal. If the price of the input goes up (i.e. oil in this case), the price of the output (i.e. petrol and diesel in this case) goes up as well. But the Indian oil products market is anything but fair.

When the price of oil was falling, the central government and the state governments captured the major portion of the fall, by increasing taxes which are built into the price of petrol and diesel. Since November 2015, the central government has increased the excise duty on petrol and diesel, five times.

This basically means that when the oil price falls, the governments capture the major part of the benefit. But when they go up, the consumer has to pay for it. How is this fair in any way? Also, what happens if oil prices continue to go up, will the entire increase in price be continued to be passed on to the consumers? If the government did not pass on the total fall in oil prices to the consumer, it is only fair that it doesn’t pass on the entire increase as well.

The point being that the consumer has to pay both ways, when the prices come down and when they are going up.

One logic offered by those who like to defend the government on anything and everything, is that the money coming in through the increase in excise duty on petrol and diesel, is being used for farmers. This conclusion possibly comes from the tone of the finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget speech. But is this true?

Economist Ashok Gulati exposes this sleight of hand by the government in a column in The Indian Express. As he points: “The allocation for the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers’ Welfare (DoA), is raised from the revised estimate (RE) of Rs 15,809 crore in FY16 to a budgeted estimate (BE) of Rs 35,983 crore for FY17, a whopping increase of 127 per cent! This would make anyone jump and conclude what a wonderful stroke the finance minister has played for farmers. But hold on. There’s a catch. Much of the increase (Rs 15,000 crore) is due to interest subsidy on short-term credit. Earlier, this subsidy was Rs 13,000 crore and was shown under the Department of Financial Services. Now, it’s transferred to the DoA.”

So where is the money raised through the increase in excise duties and the money saved because of a fall in oil prices essentially going? Jayant Sinha, the minister of state in the finance ministry, recently explained this in a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha.

Details of Subsidies (Rs. in crore)

Subsidy2012-132013-142014-152015-16 RE
Food8500092000117671139419
Fertilizer65613673397107672438
Petroleum96880853786026930000
Other95869915924215944
Total257079254632258258257801
RE=Revised Estimates

Source: http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=137493

Take a look at the above table. The petroleum subsidy has fallen from Rs 96,880 crore in 2012-2013 to Rs 30,000 crore in 2015-2016. The OMCs currently suffer under-recoveries every time they sell kerosene and domestic cooking gas. In March 2016, the under-recovery on kerosene stood at Rs 6.58 per litre. The government compensates the OMCs for these under-recoveries and this shows up under the petroleum subsidy head.

Despite the fall in petroleum subsidies, the total subsidy bill of the government has barely changed. It has slightly increased from Rs 2,57,079 crore in 2012-2013 to Rs 2,57,801 crore in 2015-2016.

What the table shows clearly is that the fall in petroleum subsidies has been more or less been made up for by an increase in food subsidies. The food subsidy bill of the government has jumped from Rs 85,000 crore to Rs 1,39,419 crore.

As I have discussed in previous columns, the food subsidy regime in India is very leaky. A major portion of the rice, wheat and sugar which are distributed through it, are siphoned off, by the owners of the fair price shops through which the distribution takes place. The government is trying to plug this leak by ensuring that in the days to come, the subsidy is paid directly into the bank account of the targeted beneficiaries.

As Sinha said: “In cash transfer, the benefit is transferred in the beneficiary’s account, preferably Aadhaar seeded. Presently, LPG subsidy is transferred directly in to the bank accounts of beneficiaries. Food subsidy in cash is disbursed in wo Union Territories viz, Puducherry and Chandigarh, directly in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, in kind, after biometric authentication, in 70000 fair price shops at present.”

The government also has plans to pay out fertilizer subsidy directly during the next financial year in a few districts across the country on a pilot basis. This is a good move and I sincerely hope that the government meets more and more success on this front. The subsidies will reach the intended beneficiaries and will benefit the Indian economy in the process.

The column originally appeared on Vivek Kaul’s Diary on March 18, 2016

The Halo Effect Around Prashant Kishor

prashant kishor

Prashant Kishor is currently the most famous backroom boy in Indian politics. To put it euphemistically, he is currently India’s most famous political strategist who helps Indian politicians win elections.

He helped Narendra Modi win the 2012 Gujarat state assembly elections and the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. In 2015, he helped Nitish Kumar win the Bihar state assembly elections. Given this success, currently there is a “halo effect” that has been built around Kishor, in the media.

The Bharatiya Janata Party fought the Bihar elections under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Modi was the main campaigner for the party, in the run-up to the election. The party lost badly in Bihar. Given this, Kishor is now seen as the man who first scripted Modi’s rise and then his fall. He is seen as the man who can do nothing wrong.

As Phil Rosenzweig writes in The Halo Effect…and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers: “Once people…believe the outcome is good, they tend to make positive attributions about the decision process; and when they believe the outcome is poor, they tend make negative attributions.”

How does this apply in Kishor’s case? Kishor has been a part of three successful election campaigns in India. Also, more than the 2014 Lok Sabha triumph, the 2015 win in Bihar has given an aura of invincibility to him, which is nothing but the positive attribution that Rosenzweig talks about.

Nevertheless, Kishor has just been a part of three successful elections in India, up until now. The point being that the sample size is very small. And small samples do give extreme results, as has been the case with Kishor.

As Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Large samples are more precise than small samples. Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples.”

What this means is that Kishor needs to be a part of more election wins till the tag of invincibility is ascribed to him. Also, until now he has had to hard-sell leaders like Modi, Kumar and Lalu Yadav, who were strong brands on their own.

In fact, the Bihar election win was more about Kumar and Yadav coming together, than anything else. The BJP did very well in 2014 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar because Kumar and Yadav fought the elections separately.

Of course, Kishor deserves credit for building a coherent marketing message around Kumar and Yadav, who are very distinct personalities.
Kishor’s real challenge will come in the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in 2017, where he will help the Congress party. The Congress has six members in a house of 404, in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. In Punjab it has been out of power for a while.

In these two states Kishor will have to construct a marketing message around Rahul Gandhi and the Gandhi family.  And this is where his real challenge will lie. Despite having been in active politics for close to twelve years now, Gandhi remains a weak leader and weak brand, who is not taken very seriously, in large parts of the country.

Will Kishor be able to rescue Gandhi and the Congress party? It is difficult to see the Congress party reviving in Uttar Pradesh. In Punjab, perhaps they stand a chance. Predicting how politics and elections go, is a difficult job. But one thing can be said here nonetheless, Kishor’s invincibility will surely take some beating in the days to come.

As Leonhard Mlodinow writes in The Drunkard’s Walk—How Randomness Rules Our Lives in the context of corporate executives: “Executives’ winning years are attributed to their brilliance, explain retroactively through incisive hindsight. And when people don’t succeed, we often assume the failure accurately reflects the proportions which their talents and their abilities fill the urn.”

Come 2017, something along similar lines will happen with Kishor as well. The media which is currently busy talking about his invincibility, will be busy writing about his weaknesses.

(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 March 16, 2016