Banking

The Nirav Modi Fraud Tells Us That the Business of Govt Should Not Be Business

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The government of India owns 21 public sector banks. We have been advocating over the years that the government doesn’t really need to own so many banks. It just adds to the economic mess.

In the aftermath of the Nirav Modi fraud, many other economists, businessmen and analysts, have been making this rather obvious point.

The finance minister Arun Jaitley ruled this out recently, when he said: “This (privatisation) involves a large political consensus. Also, that involves an amendment to the law (Banking Regulation Act). My impression is that Indian political opinion may not find favour with this idea itself. It’s a very challenging decision.”

The total bad loans of public sector banks as on September 30, 2017, were at Rs 6,89,806 crore. The bad loans rate was at 13.5% i.e. of every Rs 100 lent by public sector banks, Rs 13.5 had not been repaid by the borrowers.

The Nirav Modi fraud is pegged at $1.8 billion (or around Rs 11,400 crore). If the total Rs 11,400 crore is assumed as a bad loan, then the total bad loans of public sector banks will be a little over Rs 7,00,000 crore. Hence, the fraud is simply a drop in the ocean of bad loans of public sector banks.

This means that the problem is somewhere else. If we look at data as of March 31, 2017, the total bad loans of public sector banks were at Rs  6,19,265 crore. Of this around 69% or Rs 4,24,434 crore, was on account of lending to corporates. And this is where the problem lies.

One Nirav Modi and his companies are not the problem, it is the corporate sector as a whole which has been abusing the public sector banks in the country.

Of course, with such a huge amount of bad loans, the government has to constantly keep infusing capital into the public sector banks, in order to keep them going.

The hope is that with the government infusing money into these banks, they will gradually get back to full-fledged lending and in the process help the economy. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this hope but the economic incentive it creates for politicians, is totally different.

As Thomas Sowell writes in Basic Economics—A Common Sense Guide to the Economy: “Nothing is easier than to have good intentions but, without an understanding of how an economy works, good intentions can lead to counterproductive, or even disastrous, consequences for a whole nation. Many, if not most, economic disasters have been a result of policies intended to be beneficial—and these disasters could often have been avoided if those who originated and supported such policies had understood economics… [There is a] crucial importance of making a distinction between intentions and consequences. Economic policies need to be analysed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.”

Long story short—while implementing an economic policy, we need to be able to differentiate between what the policy hopes to achieve and the economic incentives it creates. It is ultimately, the economic incentives that are created which will decide how people react to the policy, making it effective or ineffective.

A major reason why politicians love the idea of owning public sector banks (or public sector enterprises for that matter), is that it allows them to bestow favours on their favourite industrialists (read crony capitalists).

In terms of public sector banks, this means forcing them to give out loans to businessmen, who either are not in a position or do not have any intention of repaying the loan. Hence, the government may be recapitalising banks with the hope of letting them operate at their full strength, but the real incentive for the politicians is somewhere else.

The only way of breaking this nexus between businessmen and politicians, is to privatise a bulk of the banking sector in India. If that is not possible due to regulatory hurdles (as Jaitley talked about), a bulk of public sector banks should not be lending to corporates. There activities should be limited to raising money as deposits and lending them out in the form of retail loans.

This “narrow banking” model is likely to work better simply because with a bulk of public sector banks not being allowed to give corporate loans, the politicians will not be in a position to direct lending towards their favourite corporates. With this taken out of the equation, public sector banks might just about manage to operate much more efficiently.

Also, with politicians having one lesser issue to deal with, they might just pay more attention to the other major problems that the country faces and get their heads together on tackling them.

The trouble is that the decision to get public sector banks out of lending to corporates, is to be made  by politicians. And as we saw in the column, they do not have an incentive to do anything like that. How do you deal with a problem like that?

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on Equitymaster on Feb 26, 2018.

 

For their size, Public Sector Banks Have Had Fewer Frauds Than Private Sector Ones.

 

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A lot has been written on the jeweller Nirav Modi defrauding Punjab National Bank to the tune of $1.8 billion (or Rs 11,400 crore). One line of thought that has been pursued is that of the difference between the public sector banks and the private sector banks.

The logic offered here is that frauds happen only in public sector banks and not private sector banks. And even if they happen at private sector banks, the taxpayer does not pick up the tab. The taxpayer did pick up the tab when the private Global Trust Bank went belly up and had to be merged with the Oriental Bank of Commerce. If the bank is big enough and is going bust, the government has to ultimately come to the rescue, irrespective of whether it is privately owned or government owned. No bank of any significant size can be allowed to go bust.

Now let’s look at the first point I raised, whether public sector banks are defrauded more?

In a recent answer to a question raised in the Lok Sabha, the ministry of finance pointed out that between 2014-2015 and 2016-2017, the total number of bank frauds were 12,778.
Of these 8,622 frauds happened in public sector banks and the remaining 4,156 at private sector banks. The ratio of the total number of frauds at public sector banks to the total number of frauds at private sector banks is 2.07.

The ratio of the average assets of public sector banks to the average assets of private sector banks, between 2014-2015 and 2016-2017, is 2.95. If the ratio of frauds between the two types of banks were to be the same at 2.95, the total number of frauds at public sector banks would have amounted to 12,260 (4,156 multiplied by 2.95). This is not the case. The number of frauds is significantly lower than that. Hence, this basically means that public sector banks are having fewer frauds in terms of their size in comparison to their private sector counterparts in India.

Having said that what is true about public sector banks in general may not necessarily be true for the Punjab National Bank in particular. Punjab National Bank is the second largest public sector bank in the country. As of March 31, 2017, it had total assets worth Rs 7,20,331 crore.

In July 2017, the ministry of finance had provided some very interesting data points with regard to bank frauds. Between 2012-2013 and 2016-2017, a period of five years, the Punjab National Bank faced 942 bank frauds with losses amounting to Rs 8,999 crore.
The only other public sector bank bigger than Punjab National Bank, is the State of Bank of India. As of March 31, 2017, it had assets worth Rs 33,23,191 crore, making it significantly bigger than the Punjab National Bank.

Between 2012-2013 and 2016-2017, the State Bank of India, faced 2,786 frauds with losses amounting to Rs 6,228 crore. Even though the State Bank of India faced more frauds, its total losses were 30.8% lower than that of Punjab National Bank.

Further, of the 78 banks that data was offered on, the Punjab National Bank faced the highest losses due to frauds. It’s average loss on a fraud was also three times the overall average loss on a fraud.

This tells us very clearly that the control systems at the Punjab National Bank were weaker than in comparison to the other banks, and that allowed bigger frauds to happen. In comparison, other banks were placed better than Punjab National Bank. Does this mean that if the bank had better control systems, Nirav Modi wouldn’t have been able to defraud the bank, to the extent that he did? On that your guess is as good as mine.

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on February 20, 2018.

Taxpayer Funded Bailouts of Public Sector Banks Will Only Get Bigger

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In the first column that we wrote this year, we said that even the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is not sure of how deep the bad loans problem of India’s public sector banks, runs. And from the looks of it, the central bank has finally gotten around to admitting the same and doing something about it.

Up until now, the banks (including public sector banks) could use myriad loan restructuring mechanisms launched by the RBI and available to them, and in the process, postpone the recognition of a bad loan as a bad loan. Restructuring essentially refers to a bank allowing a defaulter more time to repay the loan or simply lowering the interest that the defaulter has to pay on the loan. Bad loans are essentially loans in which the repayment from a borrower has been due for 90 days or more.

These mechanisms came under fancy names like the strategic debt restructuring scheme to the 5/25 scheme. Banks, in particular public sector banks, used these mechanisms to keep postponing the recognition of bad loans as bad loans. This allowed banks to spread out the problem of bad loans over a period of time, instead of having to recognise them quickly.

This has led to a situation where the bad loans of public sector banks in particular, and banks in general, have kept going up, with no real end in sight.

We have seen senior bankers say, the worst is behind us, for more than a few years now. And that is clearly not a good sign.

The bad loans of banks jumped to 10.2 per cent as on September 30, 2017, up by 60 basis points from 9.6 per cent as on March 31, 2017. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

This basically means that for every Rs 100 that banks have lent, more than Rs 10 has been defaulted on by borrowers. The situation is worse in case of public sector banks. For every Rs 100 lent by these banks, Rs 13.5 has been defaulted on by borrowers. For private sector banks, the bad loans stood at 3.8 per cent.

This has led to the RBI, having to revise its future projections of bad loans, over and over again. In fact, in every Financial Stability Report, published once every six months, the RBI makes a projection of where it expects the bad loans to be in the time to come. And in every report over the past few years, this figure has been going up.

As the latest Financial Stability Report points out: “Under the baseline scenario, the GNPA ratio [gross non-performing assets ratio] of all scheduled commercial banks may increase from 10.2 per cent in September 2017 to 10.8 per cent by March 2018 and further to 11.1 per cent by September 2018.”

In the Financial Stability Report published in June 2017, the RBI had said: “Under the baseline scenario, the average GNPA ratio of all scheduled commercial banks may increase from 9.6 per cent in March 2017 to 10.2 per cent by March 2018.”

In June 2017, the RBI expected the bad loans figure in March 2018 to be at 10.2 per cent. Now it expects it to be at 10.8 per cent. This is an increase of 60 basis points. This revision of forecasts had been happening for a while now. This is a problem that needed to be corrected. The bad loans of Indian banks need to be recognised properly, once and for all. The farce of the bad loans increasing with no end in sight, needs to end.

Earlier this week, the RBI did what it should have done a while back. But, as they say, it is better late than never. India’s central bank has done away with half a dozen loan restructuring arrangements that were in place and which allowed banks to keep postponing the recognition of their bad loans as bad loans.

As per a notification issued on February 12, 2018, a bank has to start insolvency proceedings against a defaulter with a default of Rs 2,000 crore or more, if a resolution plan is not implemented within 180 days of the initial default. The banks will have to file an insolvency application, singly or jointly (depending on how many banks, the borrower owes money to), under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 (IBC) within 15 days from the expiry of 180 days from the initial default.

The resolution plan can be anything from lowering of interest rate, to converting a part of the loan into equity or increasing the repayment period of the loan. The banks have a period of 180 days to figure out whether the plan is working or not. If it is not working, then insolvency proceedings need to be initiated.

This particular change will not allow banks to keep postponing the recognition of bad loans, as they have been up until now. One impact of this move will be that the bad loans of public sector banks will shoot up fast in the near future. While that is the bad part, the good part is that now we will have a better understanding of how bad the bad loans problem of Indian banks really is. The farce of every increasing bad loans is likely to end quickly.

In addition to this, the notification has also asked the banks to report to the Central Repository of Information on Large Credits (CRILC), all details of borrowers who have defaulted and have a loan exposure of Rs 5 crore or more. This has to be done weekly, every Friday. This will give the RBI a better understanding of the bad loans problem. And with more information at its disposal, it will also be in a position to see, whether banks are recognising bad loans as bad loans, or not.

While this is a good move, it does not solve the basic problem of the public sector banks i.e. they are public sector banks. With these changes made by the RBI, the real extent of the bad loans problem is expected to come out. With more bad loans, more capital will have to be written off in the days to come. This means that the government, as the major owner of public sector banks, will have to infuse more capital into these banks, if it wants to maintain its share of ownership in these banks. And from the looks of it, there is no reason to suggest otherwise. This means that the taxpayer funded bailout of public sector banks, is likely to get bigger in the days to come.

As we have been saying for a while, the government only has so much money going around, and if the taxpayer funded bailouts of public sector banks bailout are likely to get bigger, that money has to come from somewhere.

Where will that money come from? The money will come from lesser government spending on agriculture, education, health etc. That is something which has been happening for the last few years. It will also come from more farcical decisions like LIC buying shares in other public sector enterprises, and companies like ONGC having to borrow money to buy a big stake, in companies like HPCL, with the overall government ownership not changing at all.

As we like to say very often, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on February 14, 2018.

Who is Benefitting from Lower Interest Rates?

 

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Over the last one year, bank interest rates have fallen majorly, at least in theory (it will become clear later in the column, why I say this). The question is, who is benefitting from the lower interest rates? The savers, whose fixed deposits have matured, have had to reinvest them at significantly lower interest rates. This includes retirees who have seen interest rates on their deposits, fall from nine per cent to six per cent in a short period of time. In the process, their incomes have crashed by a third. Not surprisingly, they are having a tough time.

People have suggested that senior citizens should invest with the post office where higher interest rates are on offer. Anyone who has actually invested money with the post office for generating a regular income, would never suggest anything like this. Their service levels are abysmally low. They can give a thorough run around to anyone looking to get paid regularly on the investment he has made with the post office.

In fact, I know of several retirees who have reluctantly moved their investments into mutual funds (both equity and debt), given the low after-tax returns on fixed deposits. Even if the returns on mutual funds are the same as bank fixed deposits, the different tax treatment for both these forms of investing, helps generate higher after-tax returns in case of mutual funds.

This investing strategy has worked well for retirees in the last one year, given that the stock market has rallied massively. Nevertheless, is this a sustainable strategy in the long-term for anyone who is looking to generate a regular income out of his accumulated corpus, given the volatility that comes with investing in a mutual fund?

In a country with almost no social security and a health care system which keeps getting expensive by the day, this is a fair question to ask.

Another set of savers who has lost out due to low interest rates are people saving for their future, the wedding and education of their kids, and their own retirement. These people now need to save more in order to meet their long-term investment goals. Of course, these people still have the option of discovering the power of compounding by investing in mutual funds through the systematic investment plan (SIP) route.

But given the abysmal levels of financial literacy that prevail in the country, the chances that they will be mis-sold a unit linked insurance plan(ULIP) by a private insurance company or an endowment or a money-back policy by Life Insurance Corporation of India, remain very high. These forms of investing remain the worst way you can invest your money.

Also, consumption growth and interest rates are closely linked. Conventional economic logic tells us that at lower interest rates people borrow and spend more, and this increases private consumption growth and in turn helps economic growth. QED.

While that may be true for developed countries, it doesn’t quite work like that in India. In India, if interest rates fall, the retirees need to cut down on their regular expenditure because their regular income also falls. People who are saving for the long-term also need to save more in order to meet their investment goals.

Given that most household financial savings get invested in fixed deposits, a fall in interest rates makes people feel less wealthy and this has an impact on their consumption. Due to these reasons people end up cutting down on their expenditure. This is reflected to some extent in Figure 1, which plots the growth in private consumption expenditure over the last few years.

Figure 1: 

As interest rates have fallen through 2017, the growth in private consumption expenditure has collapsed from 11.1 per cent to 6.5 per cent. As of December 2016, private consumption expenditure formed 59 per cent of the Indian gross domestic product. Since then, it has fallen to 54 per cent. So, much for lower interest rates.

There are two sides to interest rates, the saving side which I was talking about up until now, and the borrowing side, which I will talk about in the remaining part of this column.

The total non-food lending carried out by Indian banks has actually contracted during this financial year. But weren’t lower interest rates supposed to help increase lending? Now only if economic theory and reality played out same to same, the world would be such a different place.

Banks are extremely quick to cut interest rates on their fixed deposits, as well as raising interest rates on their loans. Nevertheless, the same cannot be said about a situation where they need to pass on the benefit of lower interest rates to their borrowers.

Let’s take the example of people who have taken on home loans from banks as well as housing finance companies. Over the last one year, the interest rate on a home loan has fallen from 80 to 100 basis points. One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage.

The trouble is in many cases the banks and the housing finance companies haven’t bothered to inform the borrower, about the lower interest rate. And the borrower has unknowingly continued to pay the higher EMI. This never happens when the banks and the housing finance companies need to raise interest rates on their home loans. In that case, the letter/sms/email arrives right on time.

In fact, I have heard cases where people have pointed this dichotomy out to a leading housing finance company, and they have been told that they are expected to come to the office of the housing finance company and keep checking. So much for market competition which is supposed to lower interest rates. Of course, the stock market rewards such companies with a higher price to earnings ratio, given that they can do these things, get away with it, and make more money in the process.

The media which is quick to announce lower EMIs whenever RBI cuts the repo rate, never goes back to check whether EMIs have actually fallen. This is simply because it is easier to take the theoretical way out and announce lower EMIs when RBI cuts the repo rate, whereas actual checking would involve doing some legwork and speaking to banks, housing finance companies and borrowers. And who wants to work hard? It’s worth pointing out here that banks are huge advertisers in the media.

The question is when higher interest rates are passed on immediately, why is the same not true with lower home loan interest rates? What are the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the National Housing Bank (the RBI subsidiary which regulates housing finance companies) doing about this? Aren’t the regulators also supposed to take care of the consumers? Or are they just there to bat for those who they regulate? Or is it a case of “regulatory capture” where those who are regulated (i.e. the banks and the housing finance companies) given that they are organised, manage to get their point of view to the regulator, but the borrowers, given that they are not organised, cannot do that.

Whatever it is, it is not fair. And the RBI and the National Housing Bank need to do something about it. Consumer protection is something that should be high on their agenda, even though it may be the most unglamorous of things that they are supposed to do.

The column originally appeared in Equitymaster on December 14, 2017.

Using Deposits to Rescue Banks is a Bad Idea; It Needs to Be Nipped in the Bud

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I have been travelling for the past two weeks and a question that has been put to me, everywhere I have gone is: “will fixed deposits be used to rescue banks that are in trouble?”

People have been getting WhatsApp forwards essentially saying that the Modi government is planning to use their bank deposits to rescue all the banks that are in trouble. As is usually the case with WhatsApp, this is not true. The truth is a lot more nuanced.

Let’s try and understand this in some detail.

Where did the idea of fixed deposits being used to rescue troubled banks come from?
The government had introduced The Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance(FRDI) Bill, 2017, in August 2017. This Bill is currently being studied in detail by a Joint Committee of members belonging to the Lok Sabha as well as the Rajya Sabha.

The basic idea behind the FRDI Bill is essentially to set up a resolution corporation which will monitor the health of the financial firms like banks, insurance companies, mutual funds, etc., and in case of failure try and resolve them.

The Clause 52 of the FRDI Bill uses a term called “bail-in”. This clause essentially empowers the Resolution Corporation “in consultation with the appropriate regulator, if it is satisfied that it necessary to bail-in a specified service provider to absorb the losses incurred, or reasonably expected to be incurred, by the specified service provider.”

What does this mean in simple English? It basically means that financial firms or a bank on the verge of a failure can be rescued through a bail-in. Typically, the word bailout is used more often and refers to a situation where money is brought in from the outside to rescue a bank. In case of a bail-in, the rescue is carried out internally by restructuring the liabilities of the bank.

Given that banks pay an interest on their deposits, a deposit is a liability for any bank.
The Clause 52 of FRDI essentially allows the resolution corporation to cancel a liability owed by a specified service provider or to modify or change the form of a liability owed by a specified service provider.

What does this mean in simple English? Clause 52 allows the resolution corporation to cancel the repayment of various kinds of deposits. It also allows it to convert deposits into long term bonds or equity for that matter. Haircuts can also be imposed on firms to which the bank owes money. A haircut basically refers to a situation where the borrower negotiates a fresh deal and does not payback the entire amount that it owes to the creditor.

But there are conditions to this…
The bail-in will not impact any liability owed by a specified service provider to the depositors to the extent such deposits are covered by deposit insurance. This basically means that the bail-in will impact only the amount of deposits above the insured amount. As of now, in case of bank deposits, an amount of up to Rs 1 lakh is insured by the Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC). This amount hasn’t been revised since 1993.

Typically, anyone who has deposits in a bank tends to assume that they are 100 per cent guaranteed. But that is clearly not the case. Over the years, the government has prevented the depositors from taking a hit by merging any bank which is in trouble with another bigger bank.

So, to that extent the situation post FRDI Bill is passed, is not very different from the one that prevails currently. It’s just that the government has come to the rescue every time a bank is in trouble and I don’t see any reason for that to change, given the pressure on the government when such a situation arises and the risk of the amount of bad press it would generate, if any government allowed a bank to fail.

Over and above this, Clause 55 of the FRDI Bill essentially states that “no creditor of the specified service provider is left in a worse position as a result of application of any method of resolution, than such creditor would have been in the event of its liquidation.” This basically means that no depositors after the bail-in clause is implemented should get an amount of money which is lesser than what he would have got if the firm were to be liquidated and sold lock, stock and barrel.

While, this sounds very simple in theory, it will not be so straightforward to implement this clause.

So why is the government doing this?
In late 2008 and early 2009, governments and taxpayers all over the world bailed out a whole host of financial institutions which were deemed too big to fail. In the process, they ended up creating a huge moral hazard.

As Mohamed A El-Erian writes in The Only Game in Town: “[It] is the inclination to take more risk because of the perceived backing of an effective and decisive insurance mechanism.”

If governments and taxpayers keep rescuing banks what is the signal they are sending out to bank managers and borrowers? That it is okay to lend money irresponsibly given that governments and taxpayers will inevitably come to their rescue.

In order to correct for this moral hazard, in November 2008, the G20, of which India is a member, expanded the Financial Stability Forum and created the Financial Stability Board. The Board came up with a proposal titled “Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions”. This proposal suggests to “carry out bail-in within resolution as a means to achieve or help achieve continuity of essential functions”. India has endorsed this proposal. Hence, unlike what WhatsApp forwards have been claiming this proposal has been in the works for a while now.

But does this really prevent moral hazard?
A bulk of the banking sector in India is controlled by the government owned public sector banks. As of September 30, 2017, these banks had a bad loans rate of 12.6 per cent (for private banks it is at 4.3 per cent).  Bad loans are essentially loans in which the repayment from a borrower has been due for 90 days or more. The bad loans rate when it comes to lending to industry is even higher. In case of some banks it is close to 40 per cent.

This is primarily because banks over the years, under pressure from politicians and bureaucrats, lent a lot of money to crony capitalists, who either siphoned off this money or overborrowed and are now not in a position to repay. This is a risk that remains unless until the banking sector continues to primarily remain government owned in India.

Also, the rate of recovery of bad loans of banks in 2015-2016, stood at 10.3 per cent.  This does not inspire much confidence. In this scenario, having a clause which allows the resolution corporation to get depositors to pay for the losses that banks incur, is really not fair. The moral hazard does not really go away. The bankers, politicians and crony capitalists, can now look at bank deposits to rescue banks. As of now, the government and the taxpayers have kept rescuing public sector banks, by infusing more and more capital into them. Now the depositors can take over, if FRDI Bill becomes an Act.

It is worth pointing out here that the other G20 countries which have supported this proposal have some sort of a social security system in place, which India lacks. Given this, deposits are the major form of savings and earnings for India’s senior citizens and clearly, they don’t deserve to be a part of any such risk.

While, any government will think twice before using depositor money to rescue a bank, this is not an option that should be made available to governments or bureaucrats in India. It is a bad idea. It needs to be nipped in the bud.

These are my initial thoughts on the issue. Depending on how the situation evolves, I will continue to write on it.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on December 11, 2017.