Mr Subramanian, Lower Interest Rates Do Not Always Lead to More Bank Loans

Arvind_Subrahmaniyam

“Lower interest rates lead to higher lending,” is something that most economists firmly believe in. The beliefs of Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the ministry of finance, are not an exception to this rule.

Hence, not surprisingly in a lecture a few days back he came out all guns blazing against the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) for not cutting the repo rate. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark to the interest rates that banks pay for their deposits and in turn charge on their loan. We say sort of a benchmark here because there are other factors which go into deciding what rate of interest that banks charge on their loans.

Subramanian wants the RBI to cut the repo rate further from its current level of 6.25 per cent. As he said: “Inflation pressures are easing considerably… the inflation outlook is benign because of a number of economic developments… Against this background, most reasonable economists would say that the economy needs all the macroeconomic policy support it can get: instead, both fiscal policy and monetary policy remain tight.

The point here being that current inflation is under control and from the looks of it, future inflation should also be under control. And given this, the RBI must cut its repo rate. The RBI last cut the repo rate in October 2016. And as and when it cuts the rate further, the hope is that the banks will cut their lending rates. Only then will people and industries both borrow and spend more. This will give a flip to the economy. QED.
Subramanian’s point is well taken. Nevertheless, does it make sense? We will deviate a little here before we arrive at the answer.

The RBI Monetary Policy Report released in early April 2017 points out that the decline in the one-year marginal cost of funds based lending rates (MCLRs) of banks between April and October 2016 was just 15 basis points. This when the repo rate was cut by 50 basis points. Hence, even though the RBI cut its repo rate by 50 basis points, the banks cut their lending rates by just 15 basis points, a little under a one-third. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

Post demonetisation “27 public sector banks have reduced their one-year median MCLR in the range of 50 to 105 bps, and 19 private sector banks have done so in the range of 25 to 148 bps.” This when the repo rate has not been cut at all. On an average the one year MCLRs of banks fell by 70 basis points to 8.6 per cent.

What has happened here? A cut in the repo rate barely makes any difference to the cost at which banks have already borrowed money to fund their loans. But demonetisation did. The share of the “low cost current account and savings account (CASA) deposits in aggregate deposits with the SCBs went up to 39.2 per cent (as on March 17, 2017) – an increase of 4.0 percentage points relative to the predemonetisation period”. This is because people deposited the demonetised notes into the banks and this money was credited against their accounts.

This basically meant that banks suddenly had access to cheaper deposits because of demonetisation. And this in turn led them to cut interest rates on their loans, despite no cut in the repo rate. The RBI’s repo rate continued to be at 6.25 per cent during the period.

A cut in lending rates is only one part of the equation. The bigger question has it led to higher borrowings? Are people and businesses borrowing more because lending rates are now lower than they were in the past? And this is where things become interesting.
The total deposits of banks between October 28, 2016 (before demonetisation) and December 30, 2016 (the last date to deposit demonetised currency into banks) went up by 6.41 per cent to Rs 10,568,17 crore. This was a huge jump during a period of two months. This sudden increase in liquidity led to banks cutting their deposit rates and then their lending rates.

Interestingly, the total deposits of banks have continued to remain stable and as of April 30, 2017, were at Rs 10,509,337 crore. This is a minor fall of 0.6 per cent since December 2016.

Between end October 2016 and end April 2017, only around 36 per cent of the incremental deposits raised by banks were loaned out. (We are looking at non-food credit here. The total bank loans that remain after we adjust for the loans that have been given to the Food Corporation of India and other state procurement agencies for the procurement of rice and wheat produced by farmers).

This means for every new deposit worth Rs 100, the bank loaned out just Rs 36, despite a cut in interest rates.

If we were to look the same ratio between end October 2015 and end April 2016, it projects a totally different picture. 116 per cent of the incremental deposits during the period were lent out. This means for every new deposit worth Rs 100, the bank loaned out Rs 116.  This means that deposits raised before the start of this period were also lent out.

Hence, a greater amount of lending happened at higher interest rates between October 2015 and April 2016. And this goes totally against Subramanian’s idea of the RBI needing to cut the repo rate. It also goes against the idea of banks lending more at lower interest rates.

Given this, low interest rates are only a part of the story. If that is not leading to higher lending, it doesn’t help in anyway. Lending isn’t happening due to various reasons, which we keep discussing. Demonetisation has only added to this issue.

Also, a fall in interest rates hurts those who depend on a regular income from fixed deposits to meet their expenditure. It also hurts those who are saving for their long-term goals. In both the cases, expenditure has to be cut down. In one case because enough regular income is not being generated and in another case in order to be able to save more to reach the investment goal. And this cut in spending hurts the overall economy. Interest rates are also about the saver and depositor.

We are yet to see a professional economist talk from this angle. To them it is always a case of garbage in garbage out i.e. lower interest rates lead to increased lending. This is simply because most professional economists these days get trained in the United States where the system is totally different and lower interest rates do lead to a higher borrowing by businesses and people.

But that doesn’t necessarily work in India. It is a totally different proposition here.

The column originally appeared in Equitymaster on May 15, 2017.

RERA: There’s no way home prices will go up anytime soon

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The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (RERA), came into force on May 1, 2017. After this those who make their living in the real estate industry have been suggesting that real estate prices will go up in the days to come.

The logic being offered is that this will be because of compliance costs of RERA which the buyers will ultimately have to pay for.

Given that India does not have any data which agglomerates real estate prices at the country level, those connected with the real estate industry can get away with such statements, because no one else has any idea anyway.

Data from PropEquity Research shows that unsold home inventories stood at close to 4.72 lakh units in the top eight cities across India, as on March 31, 2017. These are homes that have been built but not been sold.

During the period January to March 2017, the inventory of unsold homes came down by 3.12 per cent. Despite this fall, the unsold inventory overhang continues to be huge, across the country. Data from PropEquity suggests that overhang is 60 months in Noida, 43 months in Mumbai, 38 months in Chennai and 30 months in Bengaluru.

If this unsold inventory has to be sold, the home-prices cannot go up from where they are, RERA notwithstanding. The fact that so much inventory has accumulated in the first place tells us very clearly that people are not buying homes to begin with. The only reason for this is that homes across urban India are fairly expensive in comparison to the capacity of people to pay.

This is obvious from the rental yield (annual rent divided by the market price of the home). Typically, the rental yield currently varies between 1.5-2 per cent. This basically means that in order to buy a home right now, one has to pay 50 to 67 times the annual rent. This tells us very clearly that it makes more sense to rent a home and at the same time that home-prices are very expensive. Of course, rental housing comes with its own set of issues in India, with insecure landlords being the biggest one.

Data from PropEquity suggests that property prices fell by 1.7 per cent for January to March 2017. This is clearly not enough. If this inventory overhang has to clear, prices need to fall further. What will force the builder’s hand further is that with RERA in place, new launches to raise finance for previously delayed projects or to pay off debt, will not so be easy, anymore.

A careful look at home loan data of 2016-2017 also suggests that home-prices have fallen.

In 2015-2016, only 16.8 per cent of the home loans given by banks were given to the priority sector. A housing loan of up to Rs 28 lakh in a city with a population of 10 lakh or more, which finances the purchase of a home with a price of up to Rs 35 lakh, is categorised as a priority sector housing loan.

In 2016-2017, 23 per cent of the home loans given by banks were given to the priority sector. This basically means that banks are giving out more sub Rs 28 lakh home loans for financing more homes worth less than Rs 35 lakh, than they were in the past.

This basically means that home-prices have either come down or builders are building more of sub Rs 35 lakh homes. Either ways, this is a good trend. It is not so obvious given that no agency agglomerates real estate prices in India at a national level. But the home loan data from banks clearly suggests this.

Last week, Keki Mistry, the bossman at HDFC, the largest housing finance company in the country suggested that given the low interest rates and the time correction of prices that has happened, it is a good time to buy a house.

Of course, for a home loan lender, it is always a good time to buy a house. What does Mistry mean by time correction of prices? He basically means that even though home-prices haven’t fallen much in absolute terms, they have fallen once we adjust for inflation.

It is worth re-stating here that if the builders have to sell off their unsold inventory of homes, they need to cut prices. Even if they manage to hold on to the current prices, they will not be in a position to increase prices, over the next few years. Hence, the time correction of prices is likely to continue. Given this, those who want a home to live-in and are in a position to continue to wait, should do that.

As far as interest rates are concerned, what Mistry forgot to mention is that home loans have a floating rate of interest, which keeps changing. Hence, over the 15-20 year term of a home loan, interest rates can and will vary. And given this, low interest rates initially, does not make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. What is needed are lower home-prices.

The column originally appeared on business-standard.com  on May 9, 2017

Why We Complete Reading Books We Don’t Like

business-books

I love reading crime fiction. It’s my favourite weekend activity. It really relaxes me and gets me ready for the next week.

This weekend I happened to read this book called The Baltimore Boys by the Swiss author Joël Dicker. I read this book because I had particularly liked reading Dicker’s previous book The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, a couple of years back.

Other than being a thriller with a great plot and several twists at the right places, the book also examined what goes on in a writer’s mind while he is writing a book. And that is something I enjoyed tremendously.

With this background in mind, I started reading Dicker’s new book The Baltimore Boys. This book at the same time is a prequel as well as a sequel to The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

Fifty pages into it, I knew that this book was nowhere as good as Dicker’s first one. It didn’t have the one liners that the first one did. Neither did it have the kind of intricate plot that Harry Querbert Affair did.

This disappointment notwithstanding I continued reading the 444 page book and finished it over one and a half days. Why did I do that? One was because I had been extremely impressed by Dicker’s first book and kept thinking all along that the second book is also building towards something. That something never came.

But more importantly I had become a victim of what economists call the sunk cost fallacy. This, despite knowing about it. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman defines this fallacy as “the decision to invest additional resources in a losing account, when better investments are available”.

I could have easily given up reading The Baltimore Boys, 100 pages into it, and spent my time reading something else, or I could have slept more over the weekend, or I could have seen IPL matches a little more carefully than I currently do. But I chose to finish reading The Baltimore Boys. This for the simple reason that I did not want to feel that I had wasted the time I had already spent reading the book. In the process, I ended up wasting more time on it.

This phenomenon is clearly visible in other things we do in life as well. Like books, we continue watching a move till the end even though half way through it we know that the movie is not going anywhere. The last time this happened to me was when I saw Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon. Bhardwajs reputation from his previous films made sure that I watched the movie till the end, hoping that something substantial might come up and I would miss it, if I chose to walk out.

The sunk cost fallacy is also visible in bad marriages and relationships. People remain stuck in them. If they get out of it, they will feel that all the time they spent on it was basically a waste. And to avoid that feeling, they end up wasting more time on it than they should have in the first place.

As Kahneman writes: “The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one.”

In fact, sunk cost fallacy even leads to wars continuing longer than they should. As Richard Thaler writes in Misbehaving—The Making of Behavioural Economics: “Many people believe that the United States continued its futile war of in Vietnam because we had invested too much to quit.” This escalation of commitment led to the war lasting longer than it should have and in the process killed many more people. But that is not how things turned out.

To conclude, the funny thing is that you can become a victim of the sunk cost fallacy despite knowing about it, which is precisely what happened to me.

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on May 10, 2017.

The State of Real Estate, Six Months After Demonetisation: Falling Prices, Desperate Builders & Return of Black Money

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Housing and real estate is one area in India where writing anything is very difficult given the lack of data. Nevertheless, a few inferences can be made from the little data that is available.

In the last edition of the Letter we unveiled the Indian Economic Thermometer (IET). One of the inputs into the IET was retail loan growth. A major constituent of retail loans are housing loans. As of March 2017, housing loans formed around 53 per cent of the total retail loans given by banks.

By tracking the total amount of housing loans given by banks, we can make a few inferences regarding the state of the real estate sector in India. So, let’s take a look at Table 1. It shows the total amount of home loans given by banks during the course of a year, over the last few years.

Table 1:

Total Home Loans (in Rs crore)Increase/Decrease with respect to the previous year
2012-1359,647
2013-1481,90037.3%
2014-1589,9359.8%
2015-161,18,24531.5%
2016-171,13,323-4.2%

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

Table 1 makes for a very interesting reading. For the first time in five years, the total amount of home loans given by banks during the course of a year, has fallen. The total amount of home loans given out in 2016-2017 was around 4.2 per cent lower than the total amount of loans given out in 2015-2016. This is another data point that shows the largely moribund state of the real estate sector in India.

One point that needs to be kept in mind is the fact that home loans are also given out by housing finance companies. The trouble is that regular data on the home loans given by housing finance companies is not available. And this is ironical because housing finance companies are regulated by the National Housing Bank(NHB), which is a 100 per cent subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of India(RBI). It is worth asking that when the RBI can put out month on month data on loans given by banks, what is stopping the NHB?

The latest data I could find on this front was as of March 31, 2015 and that is really not of much help more than two years later, given that we are trying to look at the current state of home loans. In 2014-2015, housing finance companies gave out home loans worth Rs 75,488 crore. During the same year, banks gave out home loans amounting to Rs 89,935 crore. This means that in 2014-2015, housing finance companies gave out around 45.6 per cent of the total home loans. In an ideal world, this data should not be ignored. But given that we don’t have access to it, there is nothing really that we can do about it.

Getting back to the point. Let’s get into a little more detail into the home loans given by scheduled commercial banks during 2016-2017. Let’s look at March 2017. During the course of the month, banks gave out total home loans of Rs 39,952 crore. This basically means that 35.3 per cent of the total home loans given out during the course of the year, got disbursed during one month, which happens to be the last month of the financial year.

What is happening here? Before March 2017, Rs 18,900 crore worth of home loans were disbursed in September 2016. This amounted to 17 per cent of the total home loans disbursed during the course of the year. Hence, between the two months, more than half of the home loans disbursed during the year, were disbursed.

It is well known that builders have got a huge amount of unsold inventory with them. This inventory has been in various stages of construction. At the same time, the builders have been trying to sell this inventory for a while now, by offering a better price as well as goodies on the side.

As some of this inventory has achieved completion stage, it has become slightly attractive for homebuyers given that people prefer buying finished homes these days in comparison to under-construction ones. Also, with builders wanting to show good year end numbers they have gone easy on the price in the month of March 2017, is what bankers tell me.

There is another phenomenon at work. These days people don’t apply for a home loan just at the point of time short-listing and buying a home. They apply for it in advance and get the loan sanctioned but not disbursed. The moment they get a good price for a home, they get the loan disbursed. That is another explanation for a jump in home loan numbers in March 2017.

Also, once people buy a ready to move in new home, there is activity in the secondary home market as well. They may want to sell the homes they were living in, and that also leads to more people taking on home loans. This phenomenon is likely to play out more in the coming months, if the basic assertion I am making turns out to be correct.

Another point mentioning here is that between November 2016 and February 2017, banks barely gave out any home loans. During the period, the banks gave out home loans worth Rs 8,851 crore. In March 2017, they gave out total home loans of Rs 39,952 crore, which was 4.5 times the home loans given out in the previous four months.

A major reason why people weren’t taking on home loans between November 2016 and February 2017 was demonetisation. There simply wasn’t enough currency going around. With this, the real estate transactions came to a standstill because without currency it wasn’t possible to fulfil the black part of the real estate transaction. Those who owned homes(builders and investors) were not ready to sell homes, without being paid for a certain part of the price, in black.

By March 2017, nearly three-fourths of the demonetised currency was replaced.

This basically means that by March 2017, there was enough currency in the financial system for the black part of the real estate transactions to start happening all over again. Also, the Rs 2,000 note makes this even more convenient.

This availability of currency ensured that the black part of any real estate transaction could be easily paid, which had become difficult between November 2016 and January 2017. Once the black transactions became possible, real estate started getting bought and sold again, and this in turn ensured that home loans started to be disbursed again.

Between builders desperate to end the financial year on a good note and currency finding its way back to the financial system, people started taking on home loans again. The interesting question is whether this revival in home loans will continue. For that we will have to wait for the home loan data of April 2017.

The big question here is that are real estate prices falling? If you listen to what the real estate industry has been saying you would feel that real estate prices have either not been falling or will not fall more.

Ashutosh Limaye, Head-Research & REIS, JLL India, told ET Now thatprices have come down but by and large prices are holding.” Or as Getamber Anand told Moneycontrol.com:  “I feel prices in most markets have bottomed out and stabilised with little or no margin for further reduction.”

Let’s look at some data to see if this is true. As I mentioned earlier, real estate data is not easy to get. The simple way to figure out whether prices are going up or down or are flat, would be to look at the prices at which deals are happening. But given that there is no such data at an agglomerated level, one has to try and look at this in a slightly different way.

Every bank has to carry out what the RBI calls priority sector lending. What kind of lending gets categorised as priority sector lending in case of home loans? As per a RBI circular dated April 23, 2015, a priority sector housing loan is defined as: “Loans to individuals up to Rs 28 lakh in metropolitan centres (with population of ten lakh and above) and loans up to Rs 20 lakh in other centres for purchase/construction of a dwelling unit per family provided the overall cost of the dwelling unit in the metropolitan centre and at other centres should not exceed Rs 35 lakh and Rs 25 lakh respectively.”

This is how priority sector home loans continue to be defined. Hence, housing loans of up to Rs 28 lakh in a city with a population of Rs 10 lakh or more, and financing the purchase of a home with a price of up to Rs 35 lakh, is categorised as a priority sector housing loan. In other centres, a priority sector housing loan is a loan of up to Rs 20 lakh used to finance the purchase of a house with a price of up to Rs 25 lakh.

Let’s look at Table 2. It shows the priority sector loans as a proportion of total home loans given by banks.

Table 2:

Total Home Loans (in Rs Crore)Priority Sector Home Loans (in Rs Crore)Proportion
2012-1359,6471,3492.3%
2013-1481,90034,80042.5%
2014-1589,93520,38622.7%
2015-161,18,24519,89016.8%
2016-171,13,32326,08223.0%

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

What does Table 2 tell us? We are interested only in the years 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, when the definition of priority sector housing loans was the same. What we can see is that in 2016-2017, nearly 23 per cent of the loans given out were priority sector home loans. In 2015-2016, this figure was at just 16.8 per cent. In absolute terms, 31.1 per cent more priority sector home loans were disbursed in 2016-2017 than in 2015-2016.

What does this mean? It means that banks have financed more homes with an official registered price of Rs 35 lakh or lower in metropolitan cities and Rs 25 lakh or lower in other centres. We use the term official registered price, simply because a black component always gets paid in cash, over and above the official price.

With banks financing more homes of Rs 35 lakh or lower in metropolitan cities and Rs 25 lakh or lower in other centres, it basically means that either prices have come down or more homes have been built in that segment (which builders like to call affordable housing). Hence, more homes have become available in the sub-Rs 35 lakh segment in the metropolitan centres and in the sub-Rs 25 lakh segment, in other centres.

In fact, in the month of March 2017, when the maximum amount of home loans were given out in comparison to any other month during the last financial year, 28 per cent of the loans were priority sector home loans.

Given this, home loan data does suggest that home prices have fallen. Of course, there is no way of figuring out to what extent have the prices fallen. The answer would be different for different parts of the country.

But how does all this work at a personal level? One technique of driving down the price is to keep talking to the representative of the builder over a period of time, keep him interested and keep driving down the price. Of course, this needs a lot of patience and depends on how desperate the builder is to sell what he has already built.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on May 10, 2017

Six Months After Demonetisation Cash is King Again and Questions Still Remain

narendra_modi

On November 8, 2016, the prime minister Narendra Modi announced his government’s decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, to an unsuspecting nation. The decision came into effect from the midnight between November 8 and November 9, 2016, and suddenly rendered 86.4 per cent of the nation’s currency in circulation, useless.

It’s been six months since then and more than four months since December 30, 2016, the last date for depositing the demonetised Rs 500 an Rs 1,000 notes, into bank accounts. But even after this period as far as the government is concerned, a few basic points remain.

a) How much demonetised money finally made it into bank accounts? When demonetisation was first announced, this number was shared regularly. Nevertheless, the last announcement on this front from the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) came on December 13, 2016. As of December 10, 2016, Rs 12.44 lakh crore of demonetised currency had made it back into the banks.
Given that Rs 15.44 lakh crore worth of currency notes had been demonetised, nearly 80.6 per cent of the currency had found its way back into banks, nearly three weeks before the last date to deposit demonetised notes into bank accounts.
Neither the Reserve Bank nor the government has told the nation how much money eventually made it back into the banks. This is an important question and needs to be answered.

b) The initial idea behind demonetisation was to curb fake currency notes and eliminate black money.
As far as fake currency goes the minister of state for finance Arjun Ram Meghwal told the Lok Sabha in early February 2017 that the total number of fake notes deducted in the currency deposited into banks after demonetisation stood at 2.46 lakhs. This amounted to a total value of Rs 19.5 crore.
As mentioned earlier, the total value of demonetised notes had stood at Rs 15.44 lakh crore. Given this, the proportion of fake notes deducted is almost zero and can be ignored. Hence, as far as detecting and eliminating fake notes was concerned, demonetisation was a total flop.
How did it do as far as eliminating black money is concerned? The hope was that the black money held in the form of cash will not make it back into the banks, as people wouldn’t want to get caught by declaring it. But by December 10, 2016, more than four-fifth of the demonetised notes had already made it back into the banks. Since then the government and the RBI have not given out any fresh numbers. It’s surprising that it has been more than four months since December 30, 2016, and this number is still not out in the public domain.
Also, it is important to point out here: “High denomination notes are known to facilitate generation of black money. In this connection, it may be noted that while the total number of bank notes in circulation rose by 40% between 2011 and 2016, the increase in number of notes of Rs.500/- denomination was 76% and for Rs.1,000/- denomination was 109% during this period.”
If high denomination notes facilitate generation of black money, then why replace Rs 1,000 notes with Rs 2,000 notes. Given that a Rs 2,000 note is twice the value of a Rs 1,000 note, it makes black market transactions even more easier. It also makes storage of black money in the form of cash easier, given that it takes less space to hide the same amount of money.
Again, this is a basic disconnect in what the government planned to achieve through demonetisation and what it eventually did. No effort has been made to correct this disconnect.

c) The government has still not offered a good explanation of what prompted it to demonetise. There has been no similar decision taken by any other country in a stable financial situation like India currently is, in the modern era. The best that the government has done is blamed it on the RBI. As Meghwal told the Lok Sabha in early February 2017: “RBI held a meeting of its Central Board on November 8, 2016. The agenda of the meeting, inter-alia, included the item: “Memorandum on existing banknotes in the denomination of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 – Legal Tender Status.””
Anybody who has studied the history of the RBI would know that the RBI would never take such an extreme step without extreme pressure from the government.

d) Other than eliminating black money and fake currency notes through demonetisation, in the aftermath of demonetisation, the government wanted to promote cashless transactions. As Modi said in the November 2016 edition of themann ki baat radio programme: “The great task that the country wants to accomplish today is the realisation of our dream of a ‘Cashless Society’. It is true that a hundred percent cashless society is not possible. But why should India not make a beginning in creating a ‘less-cash society’? Once we embark on our journey to create a ‘less-cash society’, the goal of ‘cashless society’ will not remain very far.”

How are things looking on that front? Look at the following table. It shows the volume of digital transactions over the last few months.

MonthVolume of digital transactions (in million)
Nov-16671.5
Dec-16957.5
Jan-17870.4
Feb-17763.0
Mar-17893.9
Apr-17843.5

Source: Reserve Bank of India

While digital transactions picked up in December, they have fallen since then. The total number of digital transactions in April 2017 is higher than it was in November 2016. Nevertheless, it is worth asking, whether this jump of 25 per cent was really worth the trouble of demonetisation.

e) Falling digital transactions since December 2016 tell us that cash as a mode of payment is back in the system. There is another way this can be shown. Between November 2016 and February 2017, banks barely gave out any home loans. During the period, the banks gave out home loans worth Rs 8,851 crore. In March 2017, they gave out total home loans of Rs 39,952 crore, which was 4.5 times the home loans given out in the previous four months. It also amounted to 35 per cent of the home loans given out during the course of 2016-2017.

A major reason why people weren’t taking on home loans between November 2016 and February 2017 was demonetisation. There simply wasn’t enough currency going around. With this, the real estate transactions came to a standstill because without currency it wasn’t possible to fulfil the black part of the real estate transaction. Those who owned homes (builders and investors) were not ready to sell homes, without being paid for a certain part of the price, in black.

By March 2017, nearly three-fourths of the demonetised currency was replaced. This basically means that by March 2017, there was enough currency in the financial system for the black part of the real estate transactions to start happening all over again. Also, the Rs 2,000 note makes this even more convenient.

To conclude, six months after the declaration of demonetisation it is safe to say that demonetisation has failed to achieve what it set out to achieve i.e. if it set out to achieve anything on the economic front.

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on May 9, 2017