Why Lalu Yadav had a change of heart towards Nitish Kumar

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Lalu Prasad Yadav has gulped “poison” but is still alive. As he told reporters yesterday: “I want to assure the secular forces and the people of India that in this battle of Bihar, I am ready to gulp everything. I am ready to consume all types of poison. I am determined to crush the hood of this snake, this cobra of communalism.”

The p-word is essentially a metaphor for Lalu accepting that Nitish Kumar, the current chief minister of Bihar, be projected as the chief ministerial candidate in the assembly elections scheduled in the state later this year. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader had resisted Nitish being projected as the chief ministerial candidate until now.

But with Nitish declaring on June 7 that he no longer wanted an alliance with the RJD for the forthcoming polls, Lalu had no other option but to agree to Nitish being projected as the chief-ministerial candidate.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, the president-designate of the proposed new Janata Party, welcomed this decision of Lalu and said: “I am very happy about the unity of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar. Kumar will be the chief ministerial candidate for Bihar. Laluji has proposed Nitish Kumar’s name for the chief ministership. Laluji said he will campaign.”

Lalu may want us to believe that he drank the poison to crush the cobra of communalism, but that is not really the truth. If Lalu had to continue to stay relevant in the years to come he needed to ally with Nitish. He had no other option.

The electoral numbers of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls give us the answer. Data from the election commission shows that the combine of Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) got 36.36 per cent (BJP = 29.86 per cent + LJP = 6.5 per cent) of the valid votes polled during the Lok Sabha elections last year.

The RJD and the Congress Party which fought the elections together got 20.46 per cent and 8.56 per cent of the valid votes respectively. Nitish’s Janata Dal(United)(JD(U)) which fought the elections separately got 16.04 per cent of the valid votes. Hence, the vote percentage of JD(U) + RJD at 36.5 per cent was slightly more than that of the BJP + LJP at 36.36 per cent. Further, RJD+JD(U)+Congress got more votes than BJP + LJP. Nevertheless, since RJD + Congress and JD(U) were not in alliance, these votes did not translate into Lok Sabha seats.

The RJD won only four seats in the state and its alliance partner the Congress party, won two seats. The JD(U) also won only two seats. The BJP on the other hand won 22 seats whereas its partner LJP won six seats.

As is obvious from the data, the LJP won six seats with 6.5 per cent of the votes polled, whereas the RJD won four seats with 20.46 per cent of the votes polled. This was simply because the LJP got its alliance right.

Obviously Lalu understands this electoral math well enough. And given this, he is ready to let Nitish be projected as the chief-ministerial candidate, his initial reluctance notwithstanding.

Interestingly, in the by-elections that happened for 10 assembly seats in August 2014, the JD(U) came together with the RJD+Congress and took on BJP+LJP. The data from the election commission shows that the RJD+Congress+JD(U) got 45.6 per cent of the total votes polled. The BJP+LJP got 37.9 per cent of the votes polled.

Given that, JD(U) was not fighting the elections separately, the votes polled translated into assembly seats as well, unlike the Lok Sabha polls. The RJD+Congress+JD(U) got six out of the ten Assembly seats. Hence, there is some evidence of the alliance working.

Lalu and Nitish have had an “edgy” relationship for the over four decades that they have known each other. Nitish became the chief minister of Bihar in 2005, after managing to dislodge Lalu, who had ruled directly as well as through proxy (through his wife Rabri) for a period of 15 years and brought the state to the point of an economic collapse.

Ironically, for the first half of his political career, Nitish propped up Lalu, even though he knew that Lalu wasn’t fit to govern. Journalist Sankarshan Thakur put this question to Nitish in his book Single Man: “Why did you promote Lalu Yadav so actively in your early years?” he asked.

And surprisingly, Nitish gave an honest answer. As Thakur writes “‘But where was there ever even the question of promoting Laloo Yadav?’ he mumbled…’We always knew what quality of man he was, utterly unfit to govern, totally lacking vision or focus.'” Given this, what Nitish thinks of Lalu is totally on record.

So why then did Nitish decide to support him? “‘There wasn’t any other choice at that time,’ Nitish countered…’We came from a certain kind of politics. Backward communities had to be given prime space and Laloo belonged to the most powerful section of backwards, politically and numerically.'”

It is now Lalu’s turn to return the favour to Nitish. Also, Lalu knows that with the alliance of three parties, his party will have as many seats in the Bihar assembly as Nitish’s JD(U) or probably even more. This will allow him to extract his pound of flesh on the pretext of allowing the alliance to survive. And that is what he is interested in. Hence, what Lalu has drank is an ‘elixir’ and not poison, as he would like us to believe.

The column originally appeared on DailyO on June 9,2015 

India’s real estate market is being run by crooks

Vivek Kaul

The real estate sector remains down in the dumps. Nevertheless, insiders(the builders, the real estate consultants, the housing finance companies etc.) would like us to believe that “acche din” will be here for the sector pretty soon and hence, we should be investing in it.

In a recent report JLL India, a real estate consultant, pointed out that: “Many home buyers as well as investors have been speculating about the movement of residential property prices in Mumbai…The market’s readings indicate that that it will start moving up later this year. An average price appreciation of around 6% is expected by the end of Q4 2015. Mumbai’s residential property market will start seeing a lot of buying activity in around six months, with buyers taking advantage of prevailing market conditions to get good deals. The increased market activity is expected to continue next year too.”

What the report does not point out is the fact that the Mumbai Metropolitan Region has an unsold inventory of homes of close to 46 months or 192.27 million square feet. This data was released by Liases Foras, another real estate consultancy, sometime back. What it means is that if homes continues to sell at the current rate it would take around 46 months for the current stock to sell out. A healthy market maintains an inventory of eight to 12 months.

JLL India may have its own estimates of unsold inventory but they can’t be significantly different from that of Liases Foras. And if there is so much ready supply available, how can real estate prices go up?

This is just one example of research reports that real estate consultants keep coming up with where the conclusion is that “real estate prices will continue to go up”. For them it makes sense to do this simply because they make more money if the real estate sector is doing well, given that there are more deals to execute and more commission to be made in the process. And if the real estate sector is not doing well then they need to tell the world at large that it will start to do well, soon. These positive reports are splashed across the media, given that real estate companies are huge advertisers and a healthy real estate sector is a boon for the media.

The trouble is that the real estate sector in India has a huge information asymmetry, or something that the Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof referred to as a “market for lemons”. In a 1970 research paper titled The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, Akerlof talked about four kinds of cars: “There are new cars and used cars. There are good cars and bad cars (which in America are known as “lemons”). A new car may be a good car or a lemon, and of course the same is true of used cars.”

Akerlof then went on to explain why trying to sell a lemon is very difficult. In an essay titled Writing the “The Market for ‘Lemons'”, Akerlof wrote: “I knew that a major reason as to why people preferred to purchase new cars rather than used cars was their suspicion of the motives of the sellers of used cars.” Long story short—a buyer will not buy without proof of the used car being in good shape and the seller did not have the proof.


And this led to the market for second-hand cars not working well. Tim Harford explains this phenomenon very well in his book The Undercover Economist: “Anyone who has ever tried to buy a second-hand car will appreciate that Akerlof was on to something. The market doesn’t work nearly as well as it should; second-hand cards tend to be cheap and of poor quality. Sellers with good cars want to hold out for a good price, but because they cannot prove that a good car is really a peach, they cannot get that price and prefer to keep the car for themselves. You might expect that the sellers would benefit from inside information, but in fact there are no winners: smart buyers simply don’t show up to play a rigged game.”

Hence, the market for second-hand cars has huge information asymmetry—one side has much more information(the seller) than the other(the buyer). And given that the market does not work well.
The real estate market in India is a tad like that. The insiders have all the information and there is no way to verify if the information they are putting out is correct. Take the case of something as simple as the prevailing price trend in a given locality.

There is no publicly available information. All you can do is ask the broker operating in that area and more often than not, he will tell you that “prices are on their way up”. If you are able to figure out a price, there is no way of figuring out whether there are deals happening at that price.

Hence, the system as it currently stands is totally rigged against the buyer. Even when the buyer buys an under-construction property there is no way of figuring out if the builder will deliver everything that he has promised at the time of the sale. There are regular cases of builders promising to build a swimming pool, taking money for it and then not building it. Then there are cases of parking lots being sold even though that is not allowed. In the recent past, builders have disappeared after taking on money and not completing the project.

As Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise –The Art and the Science of Prediction: “In a market plagued by asymmetries of information, the quality of goods will decrease and the market will be dominated by crooked sellers and gullible and desperate buyers.” And that is precisely what is happening in India.

In fact, the real estate market in India currently is like the stock market used to be in the 80s and the 90s. India’s biggest exchange the Bombay Stock Exchange(BSE) was run by and for brokers. Other stock exchanges operating in different cities ran along similar lines. Small investors investing in the market were regularly taken for a ride.

The Securities Exchange Board of India was given statutory powers in 1992. And it took time to crack the whip. The National Stock Exchange started operations in November 1994 and gradually took away business from the broker dominated BSE. The BSE has been trying to play catchup since then.

The real estate business in India needs to be cleaned up along similar lines. The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill, 2013, envisages setting up of a real estate regulator in each state. The builders need to be registered with the regulator and at the same time disclose essential details about the projects. These provisions if and when implemented are likely to reduce the information asymmetry which plagues the sector. But till then “caveat-emptor” will continue to prevail.

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

The column originally appeared on DailyO on May 25, 2015

When US can’t get its black money back, does India have a chance?

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Over the week, the Parliament passed the Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets (Imposition of New Tax) Bill, 2015, which up until now has been better know as the foreign black money Bill. Now it has become an Act. The ministry of finance 2012 white paper on black money defines black money as: “any income on which the taxes imposed by government or public authorities have not been paid.”
In my past columns on
DailyO I have maintained that while chasing black money that has left the shores of the country might seem possible it is not feasible. The reason for this is fairly simple. The money could be absolutely anywhere in the world.
In India, we like to believe that the money is stashed away in Swiss Banks. But that isn’t the case.
Data released by the Swiss National Bank, the central bank of Switzerland, suggests that Indian money in Swiss banks was at around Rs 14,000 crore in 2013. In 2006, the total amount had stood at Rs 41,000 crore.
There are around 70 tax havens all over the world and the black money that has left the shores of this country could be stashed almost anywhere. An estimate made by the International Monetary Fund suggests that around $18 trillion of wealth lies in international tax havens other than Switzerland, beyond the reach of any tax authorities.
A 2013 estimate in The Economist pointed out: “Nobody really knows how much money is stashed away: estimates vary from way below to way above $20 trillion.” Some of this money definitely originated in India.
And given that the black money that has left India could be absolutely anywhere, chasing it isn’t the best way of going about things. There would be more bang for the buck by concentrating on black money that is still in the country.
This, in short is the argument I have made against trying to get the black money that has left the Indian shores, back to India. A standard response to this on the social media is that if the United States can do it why can’t we. So here is the answer.
The foreign black money Act passed by the Parliament this week is inspired by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) of the United States. This Act was passed in 2010. The Act was brought in after it was revealed that Swiss banks were helping American citizens hide their earnings.
As per the Act, American taxpayers are required to file a new form (Form 8938) declaring their foreign financial assets with a value greater than $50,000. This form needs to be filled up along with the annual tax return. If the taxpayer does not file the Form 8938 , he can face a fine of $10,000, which can go up to $50,000 for subsequent offences. Any tax payer who pays lower tax because he does not disclose foreign financial assets could be subject to a penalty of 40%.
The provisions of the foreign black money Act passed by the Parliament are along similar lines. One of the provisions of the Act allows undisclosed foreign income as well as assets to be taxed at the rate of 30%, without allowing for any exemptions or deductions which are allowed under the Income-Tax Act, 1961. This will be accompanied by a penalty equal to three times the amount of tax.
Getting back to FATCA—as per the Act, every financial institution outside the United States needs to figure out whether it has American citizens as clients. Having done that it needs to report the information to the Internal Revenue Service of the United States
.
Due to this, the conventional view now seems to be coming around to the idea that tax havens are now cooperating with the United States and handing over information regarding their clients to the United States.
Hence, the question is, if the United States can do it, why can’t India? And the answer lies in the fact that the United States is a global superpower. In 2013, the military expenditure of the United States amounted to $640 billion. This was nearly 36.5 percent of the global military expenditure of $1.75 trillion. In comparison, the total budget for the Indian defence services in 2015-2016 is around $2.5 billion.
With so much money being spent by the United States, the military apparatus of the United States can drop bombs anywhere in the world at a few hours’ notice. As David Graeber writes in
Debt: The First 5000 Years: “The U.S. Military … maintains a doctrine of global power projection: that it should have the ability, through roughly 800 overseas military bases, to intervene with deadly force absolutely anywhere on the planet.” It is this military might of the United States that has led to the tax havens cooperating with it.
Nevertheless, as the Americans like saying: “show me the money”. Or to put it simply, how much revenue has the Internal Revenue Service of the United States managed to collect because of FATCA? Jane G. Gravelle writing in a research paper titled
Tax Havens: International Tax Avoidance and Evasion for the Congressional Research Service estimates that FATCA is expected to “have a relatively small effect, $8.7 billion over 10 years, when compared with estimated costs of international evasion of around $40 billion a year.” So on an average the United States expects to recover $870 million per year, when the international tax evasion by Americans is around $ 40 billion per year. Hence, the recover rate for FATCA is 2.2%.
What this clearly tells us is that even the United States does not expect much out of FATCA, initially. This, despite being the only global superpower. In this scenario, how much chance does India have of recovering the black money that has left its shores?
As Bob Dylan once said(or should I say sang): “
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind”.

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

The column appeared on DailyO on May 14, 2015

Dear Modi sarkar, what about domestic black money?

narendra_modi
The Lok Sabha passed the Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets (Imposition of New Tax) Bill, 2015 or the foreign black money Bill, yesterday. The ministry of finance 2012 white paper on black money defines black money as: “any income on which the taxes imposed by government or public authorities have not been paid.” The wealth that has been accumulated in this way “may consist of income generated from legitimate activities or activities which are illegitimate per se, like smuggling, illicit trade in banned substances, counterfeit currency, arms trafficking, terrorism, and corruption,” the white paper goes on to suggest.
Of course this wealth that has been accumulated through tax evasion has “neither been reported to the public authorities at the time of their generation nor disclosed at any point of time during their possession.”
Some portion of this black money over the years has managed to escape the Indian shores and has been invested abroad. An estimate made by Washington-based research and advocacy group Global Financial Integrity in a report titled Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2003-2012, suggests that around $439.6 billion of black money left the Indian shores, between 2003 and 2012. Through the foreign black money Bill the government is attempting to get this money back.
Also, given the penal provisions of the Bill, an attempt is being made to ensure that in the days to come, citizens pay tax on their income, instead of accumulating it as black money and then transferring it abroad.
As the finance minister Arun Jaitley put it yesterday: “All those who keep money outside — time is running out for them as the world is moving to an automatic information exchange and soon, when that is available, they will be penalised for their action.”
And what are these penalties like? The Bill states that undisclosed foreign income as well as assets will be taxed at the rate of 30%, without allowing for any exemptions or deductions which are allowed under the Income-Tax Act, 1961. This will be accompanied by a penalty equal to three times the amount of tax. Hence, the tax and penalty on undisclosed overseas income as well as assets can amount to as much as 120% (30% + 90%). Further, the amount of tax to be paid on foreign assets will be computed on the basis of its current market price and not the price at which it was bought.
Nevertheless, there is a way out of this. After the Bill becomes an Act, the government will offer a short compliance window, which will allow those with undisclosed foreign assets and income to declare them, pay a tax of 30% and a penalty of 30%.
The Bill also has a provision which allows the government to charge a penalty of Rs 10 lakh for the inaccurate disclosure of foreign assets, along with a rigorous imprisonment of six months to seven years, the first time around. Second and subsequent offences are punishable with fines of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1 crore and a rigorous imprisonment three to 10 years.
On the face of it, the Bill seems like an honest attempt to crack down on black money that has already left the country and that might leave the country in the days to come. But there are several questions that crop up here.
Why is a short compliance window being offered? It makes the taxpayers who have been honestly declaring their foreign income as well as assets till date, look a tad stupid. Just because someone is willing to pay a fine of 30% and declare his foreign assets, does that make his less guilty? Or is this another tax amnesty scheme in disguise being offered by the government?
Further, why is there a distinction being made between domestic and foreign black money? The definition of black money in the ministry of finance white paper does not make any distinction between black money in the country and black money that has left the shores. Ultimately, almost all black money originates in the country, when people earn an income and do not pay a tax on it. So why is this artificial distinction being made? Why couldn’t the government have come up with a law which covered both domestic as well as foreign black money? Its now been in office for close to one year.
The answer perhaps lies in the way political funding works in this country. An analysis carried out by the National Election Watch and Association of Democratic Reforms reveals that during the period 2004-2005 and 2011-12, the total income of the national political parties was Rs. 4,899.46 crores. The Congress party declared the highest income of Rs 2,365.02 crores. It was followed by the Bhartiya Janata Party which declared an income of Rs 1,304.22 crores.
Between 2004-05 and 2011-12, there were two Lok Sabha elections(in 2004 and 2009) and multiple state assembly elections. It doesn’t take rocket science to come to the conclusion that the amount of donations declared by the political parties were clearly not enough to fight so many elections.
Within 90 days of completion of the General Elections, political parties are required to submit their election expenditure to the Election Commission of India. The National Election Watch and Association of Democratic Reforms has analysed this expenditure for the last Lok Sabha election and it makes for a very interesting reading. This expenditure statement contains the “details of the total amount received as funds in the form of cash, cheques and demand drafts and the total amount spent under various heads.”
The total amount of funds collected by national political parties for the 2014 Lok Sabha election was at Rs 1158.59 crores. This was 35.5% higher than the funds collected for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The total declared expenditure of the national political parties was Rs 1308.75 crore, up by 49.4% from 2009.
Now compare this to an estimate made by the Centre for Media Studies in March 2014. It estimated that around Rs 30,000 crore would be spent during the 16th Lok Sabha elections which happened in April and May 2014. Of this amount, the government would spend around Rs 7,000-8,000 crore to conduct the elections. The remaining amount of around Rs 22,000-23,000 crore would be spent by the candidates fighting the elections.
Of course, national political parties are not the only parties fighting elections. Nevertheless, the difference between the officially declared expenditure and the ‘real’ expenditure to fight elections, is huge. Where does this money come from? The domestic black money essentially finances political parties and in the process elections in India. And given this, no government(and political party) can really go after it. Meanwhile, they will keep talking about foreign black money.

Moral of the story—You don’t kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

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

The column originally appeared on DailyO on May 12, 2015

Is Modi’s luck on oil running out?

narendra_modi
In mid April earlier this year, the finance minister Arun Jaitley spoke at the Peterson Institute, a Washington based think tank.
In his speech, Jaitley said that in late 2013, India was “teetering” and was “on the edge of a macro-economic crisis”. “Inflation was at double-digits, the current account deficit at 4 percent of GDP, growth was decelerating sharply, investor confidence was evaporating, capital was fleeing the country, the rupee was plunging; fiscal deficits were high; and India was reeking with the odour of corruption scandals and weak governance,” Jaitley went on to add.
After the Narendra Modi government came to power, most of these economic problems have been corrected, Jaitley said during the course of his speech. Jaitley further said that: “A budget…which reinivigorates growth by emphasizing public investment while maintaining fiscal discipline and protecting the vulnerable,” was passed.
What Jaitley, like a good politician, missed out on saying was that a lot of economic factors improved simply because the oil prices crashed. On May 26, 2014, when the Narendra Modi government took oath of office, the price of the Indian basket of crude oil was at $108.05 per barrel. It fell by around 60% to $43.36 per barrel by January 14, 2015.
This rapid fall in the price of oil helped set many economic factors right. India imports close to 80% of its oil requirements. As the oil price fell, oil imports came down in dollar terms bringing down the current account deficit. In technical terms, the current account deficit is the difference between total value of imports and the sum of the total value of its exports and net foreign remittances. Or to put it in simpler terms, it is the difference between outflow (through imports) and inflow (through imports and foreign remittances) of foreign exchange.
Further, oil is bought and sold in dollars. When Indian companies buy oil, they need to pay in dollars. This pushes up the demand for dollars and leads to the value of the rupee falling against the dollar. When oil prices rise, Indian companies need more dollars to buy oil. And this in turn puts a greater amount of pressure on the value of the rupee against the dollar. With oil prices falling dramatically, the total amount of dollars needed to buy oil also fell. This, to some extent, stabilized the value of the rupee against the dollar.
Falling oil prices even had an impact on the fiscal deficit. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. When the oil prices were rising the Congress led UPA government did not allow the oil marketing companies (Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum) which sell oil products, to sell them at a price at which it was financially viable for them to do so.
In the process they incurred under-recoveries. The government along with oil production companies like ONGC and Oil India Ltd, compensated the oil marketing companies for these under-recoveries. This led to the government expenditure going up and in the process the fiscal deficit also went up. A higher fiscal deficit leads to the government borrowing more, in the process pushing up interest rates, as the amount of money that others can borrow comes down.
Falling oil prices also had some impact on taming rampant double digit inflation.
In his Washington speech Jaitley took credit for all of the above economic factors improving because of the change in government. Nevertheless, falling oil prices had a huge role to play in the improvement on the economic front, Jaitley’s speech notwithstanding.
Oil prices have been rising in the recent past. On March 31, 2015, the last day of the financial year 2014-2015, the price of the Indian basket for crude oil was at $53.64 per barrel. On May 8, 2015 (the most recent data point available), the price of the Indian basket of crude oil was at $64.05 per barrel. Hence, the oil price has risen by close to 50% from mid January 2015 onwards.
What does not help is the fact that one dollar is now worth close to Rs 64. This means that the Indian companies buying oil will have to pay more. As long as they are able to pass this on to the end consumers of oil products like diesel and petrol, it does not really matter. But what if they are not?
In October 2014, the government had deregulated the price of diesel, allowing the oil companies to set the price of diesel depending on the prevailing international price of oil. Interestingly, the government used the fall in oil prices as an opportunity to shore up its revenues from oil by increasing the excise duty on petrol and diesel multiple times.
At close to $64 per barrel, the price of oil is still around 41% lower than where it was on May 26, 2014, when the Modi government took oath of office. Nevertheless, the price of petrol in Mumbai is at Rs 70.84 per litre, only 11.5% lower from the time when the Modi government came to power. The price of diesel is 12.8% lower.
The real test of deregulation will come if the price of oil keeps going up and the price of petrol and diesel cross the levels they were at when Narendra Modi came to power. In fact, the oil minister
Dharmendra Pradhan recently said: “The subsidy-sharing formula…can be extended…if the current market situation prevails.” He was referring to the compensation paid by the oil production companies like ONGC and OIL to the oil marketing companies. The compensation has come down because of the fall in the price of oil. The oil production companies still continue to compensate the oil marketing companies for the under-recoveries suffered on selling cooking gas etc.
But what Pradhan did not say is what happens if the current market situation does not prevail and the oil prices continue to go up? Will the compensation provided by the oil production companies go up? This would mean that the government would force the oil marketing companies to sell oil products like diesel and petrol at an unviable price.
It would also mean that the government would have to share the compensation provided to the oil marketing companies for their under-recoveries, with the oil production companies. It would lead to a higher fiscal deficit. Rising oil prices will also put pressure on the current account deficit as well as the value of the rupee against the dollar. Inflation will also go up to some extent depending on how much increase in the price of oil is allowed to be passed on to the end consumer. A higher inflation will mean that the Reserve Bank of India will not cut interest rates.
To conclude, the Modi government was very lucky with the price of oil falling by 60% between May 2014 and January 2015. That luck might now have started to run out, as it completes its first year in office.

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

The column originally appeared on DailyO on May 11, 2015