Easy Money

The extortionate privilege of the dollar

3D chrome Dollar symbolVivek Kaul

On May 31, 2014, the total outstanding debt of the United States government stood at $17.52 trillion. The debt outstanding has gone up by $7.5 trillion, since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008. On September 30, 2008, the total debt outstanding had stood at $10.02 trillion.
In a normal situation as a country or an institution borrows more, the interest that investors demand tends to go up, as with more borrowing the chance of a default goes up. And given this increase in risk, a higher rate of interest needs to be offered to the investors.
But what has happened in the United States is exactly the opposite.
In September 2008, the average rate of interest that the United States government paid on its outstanding debt was 4.18%. In May 2014, this had fallen to 2.42%.
When the financial crisis broke out money started flowing into the United States, instead of flowing out of it. This was ironical given that the United States was the epicentre of the crisis. A lot of this money was invested in treasury bonds. The United States government issues treasury bonds to finance its fiscal deficit.
As Eswar S Prasad writes in The Dollar Trap—How the US Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance “From September to December 2008, U.S. securities markets had net capital inflows (inflows minus outflows) of half a trillion dollars…This was more than three times the total net inflows into U.S. securities markets in the first eight months of the year. The inflows largely went into government debt securities issued by the U.S. Treasury[i.e. treasury bonds].”
This trend has more or less continued since then. Money has continued to flow into treasury bonds, despite the fact that the outstanding debt of the United States has gone up at an astonishing pace. Between September 2008 and May 2014, the outstanding debt of the United States government went up by 75%.
The huge demand for treasury bonds has ensured that the American government can get away by paying a lower rate of interest on the bonds than it had in the past. In fact, foreign countries have continued to invest massive amounts of money into treasury bonds, as can be seen from the table.
foreign debt US
Between 2010 and 2012, the foreign countries bought around 43% of the debt issued by the United States government. In 2009, this number was slightly lower at 38.1%.
How do we explain this? As Prasad writes “The reason for this strange outcome is that the crisis has increased the demand for safe financial assets even as the supply of such assets from the rest of the world has shrunk, leaving the U.S. as the main provider.”
Large parts of Europe are in a worse situation than the United States and bonds of only countries like Austria, Germany, France, Netherlands etc, remain worth buying. But these bonds markets do not have the same kind of liquidity (being able to sell or buy a bond quickly) that the American bond market has. The same stands true for Japanese government bonds as well. “The stock of Japanese bonds is massive, but the amount of those bonds that are actively traded is small,” writes Prasad.
Also, there are not enough private sector securities being issued. Estimates made by the International Monetary Fund suggest that issuance of private sector securities globally fell from $3 trillion in 2007 to less than $750 billion in 2012. What has also not helped is the fact that things have changed in the United States as well. Before the crisis hit, bonds issued by the government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were considered as quasi government bonds. But after the financial mess these companies ended up in, they are no longer regarded as “equivalent to U.S. government debt in terms of safety”.
This explains one part of the puzzle. The foreign investors always have the option of keeping the dollars in their own vaults and not investing them in the United States. But the fact that they are investing means that they have faith that the American government will repay the money it has borrowed.
This “childlike faith of investors” goes against what history tells us. Most governments which end up with too much debt end up defaulting on it. Most countries which took part in the First World War and Second World War resorted to the printing press to pay off their huge debts. Between 1913 and 1950, inflation in France was greater than 13 percent per year, which means prices rose by a factor of 100. Germany had a rate of inflation of 17 percent, leading to prices rising by a factor of 300. The United States and Great Britain had a rate of inflation of around 3 percent per year. While that doesn’t sound much, even that led to prices rising by a factor of three1.
The inflation ensured that the value of the outstanding debt fell to very low levels. John Mauldin, an investment manager, explained this technique in a column he wrote in early 2011. If the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank, printed so much money that the monetary base would go up to 9 quadrillion (one followed by fifteen zeroes) US dollars. In comparison to this the debt of $13 trillion (as it was the point of time the column was written) would be small change or around 0.14 percent of the monetary base2.
In fact, one of the rare occasions in history when a country did not default on its debt either by simply stopping to repay it or through inflation, was when Great Britain repaid its debt in the 19th century. The country had borrowed a lot to finance its war with the American revolutionaries and then the many wars with France in the Napoleonic era. The public debt of Great Britain was close to 100 percent of the GDP in the early 1770s. It rose to 200 percent of the GDP by the 1810s. It would take a century of budget surpluses run by the government for the level of debt to come down to a more manageable level of 30 percent of GDP. Budget surplus is a situation where the revenues of a government are greater than its expenditure3.
The point being that countries more often than not default on their debt once it gets to unmanageable levels. But foreign investors in treasury bonds who now own around $5.95 trillion worth of treasury bonds, did not seem to believe so, at least during the period 2009-2012. Why was that the case? One reason stems from the fact nearly $4.97 trillion worth of treasury bonds are intra-governmental holdings. These are investments made by various arms of the government in treasury bonds. This primarily includes social security trust funds. Over and above this around $4.5 trillion worth of treasury bonds are held by pension funds, mutual funds, financial institutions, state and local governments and households.
Hence, any hint of a default by the U.S. government is not going to go well with these set of investors. Also, a significant portion of this money belongs to retired people and those close to retirement. As Prasad puts it “Domestic holders of Treasury debt are potent voting and lobbying blocs. Older voters tend to have a high propensity to vote. Moreover, many of them live in crucial swing states like Florida and have a disproportionate bearing on the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections. Insurance companies as well as state and local governments would be clearly unhappy about an erosion of the value of their holdings. These groups have a lot of clout in Washington.”
Nevertheless, the United States government may decide to default on the part of its outstanding debt owned by the foreigners. There are two reasons why it is unlikely to do this, the foreign investors felt.
The United States government puts out a lot of data regarding the ownership of its treasury bonds. “But that information is based on surveys and other reporting tools, rather on registration of ownership or other direct tracking of bonds’ final ownership. The lack of definitive information about ultimate ownership of Treasury securities makes it technically very difficult for the U.S. government to selectively default on the portion of debt owned by foreigners,” writes Prasad.
Over and above this, the U.S. government is not legally allowed to discriminate between investors.
This explains to a large extent why foreign investors kept investing money in treasury bonds. But that changed in 2013. In 2013, the foreign countries bought only 19.6% of the treasury bonds sold in comparison to 43% they had bought between 2010 and 2012.
So, have the foreign financiers of America’s budget deficit started to get worried. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations “When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has been brought about at all, has always been brought about by a bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretended payment [i.e., payment in an inflated or depreciated monetary unit].”
Have foreign countries investing in treasury bonds come around to this conclusion? Or what happened in 2013, will be reversed in 2014? There are no easy answers to these questions.
For a country like China which holds treasury bonds worth $1.27 trillion it doesn’t make sense to wake up one day and start selling these bonds. This will lead to falling prices and will hurt China also with the value of its foreign exchange reserves going down. As James Rickards writes in The Death of Money “Chinese leaders realize that they have overinvested in U.S. -dollar-denominated assets[which includes the treasury bonds]l they also know they cannot divest those assets quickly.”
It is easy to see that the United States government has gone overboard when it comes to borrowing, but whether that will lead to foreign investors staying away from treasury bonds in the future, remains difficult to predict. As Prasad puts it “It is possible that we are on a sandpile that is just a few grains away from collapse. The dollar trap might one day end in a dollar crash. For all its logical allure, however, this scenario is not easy to lay out in a convincing way.”
Author Satyajit Das summarizes the situation well when he says “Former French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing used the term “exorbitant privilege” to describe American advantages deriving from the role of the dollar as a reserve currency and its central role in global trade. That privilege now is “extortionate.”” This extortionate privilege comes from the fact that “if not the dollar, and if not U.S. treasury debt, then what?” As things stand now, there is really not alternative to the dollar. The collapse of the dollar would also mean the collapse of the international financial system as it stands today. As James Rickards writes in The Death of Money “If confidence in the dollar is lost, no other currency stands to take its place as the world’s reserve currency…If it fails, the entire system fails with it, since the dollar and the system are one and the same.”

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

The article appeared originally in the July 2014 issue of the Wealth Insight magazine

1T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014)

2 Mauldin, J. 2011. Inflation and Hyperinflation. March 10. Available at http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/inflation-and-hyperinflation, Downloaded on June 23, 2012

3T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014)

Of financial inequality and the financial crisis

thomas piketty

Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has taken the world by storm. His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been the second bestselling book on Amazon.com for a while now. Originally written in French, the book was translated into English and released a few months back in the United States.
Piketty’s Capital is not like some of the recent popular books in economics like Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist. It is a book running into 577 pages (if we ignore the notes running into nearly 80 pages) and is not exactly a bedtime read.
My idea is not to summarize the book in this column. That would be doing grave injustice to the book. Nevertheless I wanted to discuss an important point that the book makes.
A major but not so well discussed reason behind the financial crisis was the increasing inequality in the United States. Piketty discusses this in great detail in Capital.
The top 10% of the American population earned a little more than 50% of the national income on the eve of the financial crisis and then again in the early 2010s. In fact, if we look at income without capital gains, the top 10% earned more than 46% of the national income in 2010, which is already significantly higher than the income level attained in 2007, before the financial crisis started. The trend continued in 2011-2012 as well. In 1976, the top 10% of households earned around 33% of the national income.
The situation becomes even more grim when we look at the top 1% of the population. The top 1% of the households accounted for only 7.9% of total American wealth in 1976. This would grow to 23.5% of the income by 2007. This was because the incomes of those in the top echelons was growing at a much faster rate. The rate of growth of income for the period for those in the top 1% was at 4.4% per year. The remaining 99% grew at 0.6% per year.
A major reason for this inequality has been the pace at which the salaries of the top management of American companies have gone up. As Piketty writes“We’ve gone from a society of rentiers to a society of managers…Top managers[who Piketty calls supermanagers] have the power to set their own remuneration…or by corporate compensation committees whose members usually earn comparable salaries…in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is very difficult to estimate in a large organization.” This phenomenon was seen mainly in the United States, writes Piketty. But it was seen to a lesser extent in Great Britain and other English speaking developed countries in both the financial as well as non financial sectors.
In fact, Piketty even calls this phenomenon of senior managers being paid very high salaries as a form of “meritocratic extremism” or the need of modern societies, in particular the American society, to reward certain individuals deemed to be as “winners”. Interestingly, research shows that these winners got paid for luck more often than not. It shows that salaries went up most rapidly when sales and profits went up due to external reasons.
The solution to this increasing inequality of income was to some extent more education. But that is something that would take serious implementation and at the same time results wouldn’t have come overnight. How does a politician who has to go back to the electorate every few years deal with this? He needs to plan and think for the long run. But at the same time he needs to ensure that his voters keep electing him. If the voters don’t keep electing him in the short run there is nothing much he can do to improve things in the long run.
This is precisely what happened in the United States. Politicians addressed the issue of inequality by making sure that easier credit was accessible to their voters. Raghuram Rajan, currently the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, explains this very well in his award winning book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy: “Since the early 1980s, the most seductive answer has been easier credit. In some ways, it is the path of least resistance…Politicians love to have banks expand housing credit, for all credit achieves many goals at the same time. It pushes up house prices, making households feel wealthier, and allows them to finance more consumption. It creates more profits and jobs in the financial sector as well as in real estate brokerage and housing construction. And everything is safe—as safe as houses—at least for a while.”
Hence, the palliative proposed by politicians for the increasing income inequality in America was easy credit. As Michael Lewis writes in The Big Short – A True Story “How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.”
While, the government and the politicians worked towards making borrowing easier, there is another point that needs to be made here. As income levels stagnated at lower levels, a large section of the population had to resort to taking on debt and this contributed to the financial instability of the United States. As Piketty writes in Capital “One consequences of increasing inequality was virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes…which inevitably made it more likely that modest households would take on debt, especially since unscrupulous banks and financial intermediaries….eager to earn good yields on enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms.”
So, it worked both ways. The government made it easier to borrow and the people were more than willing to borrow. As author Satyajit Das puts it “Borrowing became a substitute for rising incomes.”
This wasn’t surprising given that the minimum wage in the United States when measured in terms of purchasing power reached its maximum level in 1969. At that point of time the wage stood at $1.60 an hour or $10.10 in 2013 dollars, taking into account the inflation between 1968 and 2013. At the beginning of 2013, it was at $7.25 an hour, lower than that in 1969, in purchasing power terms.
The easy money strategy that has been followed in the aftermath of the financial crisis has again worked led to increasing inequality. The American stock market has rallied by more than 150% in the last five years and this has benefited the richest Americans.
In the five year bull run, the stock market generated a paper wealth of more than $13.5 trillion. In fact, in 2013, the market value of listed stocks in the United States went up by $4 trillion. This benefited the top 10% of Americans who own 80% of the shares listed on stock exchanges.
A similar thing happened in the United Kingdom, where the Bank of England admitted in 2012 that its quantitative easing program boosted the value of stocks and bonds by 25% or about $970 billion. Almost 40% of these gains went to the richest 5% of the British households.
Interestingly, the salaries of CEOs in the United States have continued to go up, even after the financial crisis. If one considers the Fortune 500 companies, the average CEOs salary is 204 times that of their rank and file workers. This disparity has gone by 20% since 2009.
At the same time, the income of the median American household fell to $51,404 in February 2013. This was 5.6% lower than what it was in June 2009. Further, the average income of the poorest 20% of the Americans has fallen by 8% since 2009. Given this, more than 100 million Americans are receiving some form of support from the government.
In fact new research carried out by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty reveals that between 2009 and 2012, the top 1% of income earners in the United States enjoyed a real income growth of 31%. Income for the bottom 90% of the earners shrank.
The point being that the Western world does not seem to have learnt from its past mistakes. As George Akerlof and Paul Romer wrote in a research paper titled Looting: The Economic Un­derworld of Bankruptcy for Profit, “If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself.”If only that were the case!

Note: Not all data has been sourced from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Some numbers have been sourced from Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines.

The article originally appeared in the June 2014 edition of the Wealth Insight magazine

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

'The Federal Reserve Learnt the Lessons Of The Great Depression'

Prof Randall Kroszner..

R Jagannathan and Vivek Kaul

Randall S Kroszner served as a Governor of the Federal Reserve System from March 2006 until January 2009. During his time as a member of the Federal Reserve Board, he chaired the committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutions and the committee on Consumer and Community Affairs. Kroszner was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2001 to 2003. Currently he is the Norman R Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is an expert on international financial crises and the Great Depression. He was recently in India for the opening of The University of Chicago Center in Delhi. In this interview Kroszner tells Forbes India on how the Federal Reserve managed to avoid another Great Depression in 2008 and why it had to let the investment bank Lehman Brothers go bankrupt.

You were a governor at the Federal Reserve between 2006 and early 2009. That must have been a very tough and an exciting time…
Three easy years…(laughs). I am joking.
Can you give us some flavour of how those years were?
It was an incredibly challenging time because the markets were moving so rapidly. The economy was also moving rapidly downward. So we had to take important decisions in real time. We would often get into situations where we would try to survive until Friday and then try to do the resolution by Sunday, before the Asian markets opened. So we had a lot of board meetings late on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. And it was a time where having an economic framework was very useful because when you have to make decisions in real time, you need to have a framework to understand what the priorities are.
You and Ben Bernanke are scholars of the Great Depression. How did that help?
A number of us were quite familiar with the economic history. Three out of the five of us on the board had written papers on the Great Depression. And we were all pretty much influenced by Milton Friedman and Anna Scwartz’s magisterial A Monetary History of the United States. Their study squarely put the blame on the inaction of the Federal Reserve, turning a depression into the Great Depression. Those were very important lessons for us and gave us both an economic and historical framework for looking into the kind of price distress we were having at that point of time, so that we could act quickly and boldly to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression.
Did you all really believe that if the fiscal side and the monetary hadn’t acted as they did in 2008, you were really seeing a repeat of the Great Depression?
There was a certainly a risk of that because clearly there was a lot of turmoil in the financial markets. There was a potential for failure of many financial institutions, if the Fed did nothing and did not provide liquidity to the market and some institutions. It was by no means a certainty. Even if the probability was low, it’s a risk that I and other members of the Federal Reserve board were reluctant to take.
In the meetings at the Fed before September 2008 what was the atmosphere like? Did Chairman Bernanke and other governors have a clue of what was to come?
If you see the verbatim transcripts of 2008 many of us including myself were very concerned about the fragility of the market and the economy. We undertook some very bold action in terms of a very rapid interest rate cut. This was at a time when the European central banks were raising interest rates because oil prices were rising throughout 2008. But our forecast was that demand was likely to go down significantly and that the rise in oil prices was just a temporary price shift not suggesting an underlying increase in inflation. And that is why we had interest rates very low during that time period while other central banks were raising interest rates.
Being the Chair of the committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutionsyou must have been in the room when a decision to let Lehman Brothers go bust would have been made. What was the atmosphere like?
So, there was no meeting where a go/no go was made. It was a series of processes. Remember we were dealing with independent investment banks having significant funding troubles and having great concerns about their ability to survive. And so we were exploring whether there could be merger partners for organisations like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Bank of America decided to buy Merrill Lynch. There were others who were looking at Lehman Brothers and we thought that we would be finding a merger partner. But it then emerged over that weekend[the weekend of September 13-14, 2008] that a merger partner was not available for Lehman Brothers. The market had known that they were in trouble for a while. And Lehman Brothers had not been willing to merge with a number of other institutions that had proposed merger over the summer. Hence, it was in an effectively weak capital position. Its business model was imploding and so, the Fed was not able to do a capital infusion.
Why was that the case?
The Fed can only lend against good collateral to a solvent organisation. It was very difficult to make an assessment at that time. There was a merger partner avaialble for Merrill Lynch and Bank of America could provide capital infusion and support. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs had sufficient capital and sufficiently functional business models, that we felt comfortable granting them bank charters on an emergency basis. But Lehman Brothers did not have that wherewithal.
But two days later Federal Reserve stepped into rescue AIG. How do you explain that?
Well remember that the Fed could lend against good collateral. The problematic part of AIG was the financial products subsidiary of the holding company. But AIG had other operations in many states and in many countries that were not associated with the challenges that were there in the financial products division. And also AIG had sufficient collateral to be able to post against the loan.
You are also a scholar of the Great Depression. What were the mistakes made during the Great Depression that haven’t been made during the period of what is now called the Great Recession?
As you know a number of us including Bernanke, myself and one of the other governors, were students of the Great Depression and had done work on it. Milton Friedman and Anna Scwartz’s in their magisterial book on the monetary history of the United States had said that depression of the late twenties and early thirties was turned into the Great Depression precisely because the Fed did not act. The Fed stood by as the money supply collapsed, and as deflation came in. The prices fell by a third, GDP fell by 30%, and unemployment went up to 20%, and there was no action.
And that was the lesson?
Yes. That was a very important lesson for those of us who had studied the Great Depression, to make sure that we did not make that mistake of inaction because the central bank can prevent deflation. Broadly, we certainly learned the lessons of the Great Depression at the Fed, to make sure that we didn’t make the same mistakes. We didn’t just sit ideally and allow the price level to fall significantly and allow the GDP to contract. Honestly, we were able to avoid a significant to recession. It is really something very different from what happened in the 1930s.
You also managed to avoid a deflation…
Deflation can be very destructive as we saw in the thirties. Even a mild deflation can be very problematic as we have seen over the last fifteen years in Japan. It was the strong commitment on the part those of us who studied the 1930s as supposed to the others, to make sure to not allow a state of inaction, where a central bank did not act as the lender of the last resort, which is actually what it was created to do. Further, central banks around the world have to be vigilant against the threat of deflation.
International financial crises is an area of your expertise. Why are economists unable to spot bubbles. Your colleague and Nobel laureate Eugene Fama has even gone to the extent of saying that “I don’t even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don’t think they have any meaning.”
It is easy ex-post to say that aha that price did not make any sense or it was clear that price would be coming down. But when in you are real time it is very difficult to be able to tell whether there is some sort of dislocation of the market or a fundamental change. We had the same challenge after the Asian, Russian and the Latin American crisis in the 1990s. The World Bank, IMF and many economists looked for indicators, so called red flags, which you could look at and tell when the economy is is getting overheated. They tried to figure out which are the indicators that can tell us that credit growth is too fast, or that there is a “bubble” in a particular sector. Despite a lot of work by a lot of very smart people on the policy side and the academic side, we really haven’t come up with a simple set of indicators or any indicator where you can have confidence and say just look at x, y and z, and you know that there is some sort of dislocation here, that is going to be reversed.
In a recent interview you said that the Fed’s approach to communication has changed through the years. Could you elaborate on that?
The communication has become more complete and more transparent and also the words have changed over time. They are sometimes called forward guidance. They are sometimes called open mouth operations because its talking about what kind of purchases and sales that the open market operations are going to do. In my last meeting at the Federal Open Market Committee(FOMC) we brought interest rates to approximately zero and said that we would keep them there for an extended period of time. That gradually changed into a particular date, and Fed would describe dates like 2014/2015. That changed to a description of 6.5% unemployment threshold. And most recently the Fed has said that it would not be focusing on a particular unemployment threshold.
What is the aim here?
I think all of the statements are trying to get at the same thing. It’s different words in different circumstances, around the same idea about the desire of the Fed to provide liquidity support to monetary accommodation to make sure that the economy fully recovers before it decides to take the punchbowl away. In these uncharted waters, giving a little bit more guidance about what the Federal Reserve thinks about policy making and how is it going to react to data is helpful because the past behaviour may not be that useful because we haven’t had these kinds of circumstances before.
In a recent interview when you were asked that when do you think the time will come when the Federal Reserve will start to raise interest rates, you had replied “I do think it will come sometime in my lifetime”. Does that mean the era of low interest rates in the US is here to stay? That was a bit of flip comment. I hope you understand that it was not meant seriously. We have had low interest rates for five to six years now. There is a hope that the economy will be strong enough sometime in 2015, and rates will be able to go up. You can see from most recent FOMC documents all of the FOMC members believe that the interest rates will be higher by the end of 2015 than they are now. And that sounds to me as reasonable.
A lot of gold bulls have been thinking that some point gold should have some role in money making. Do you see gold ever having any kind of role in monetary policy in future?
It’s narrow to pull this in any particular commodity because then the value of the currency will rise and fall depending on the vagaries of the particular market. So, like a flood in a mine in South Africa will have a big impact. And that is like putting too many eggs into one basket. The least you would want is a broader commodity based basket that would be well diversified and would be able to withstand these kind of shocks. So certainly thinking about alternative benchmarks for units of account are worthwhile to do. But I wouldn’t want to put all of my eggs in one particular commodity basket, particularly a market like gold which is a very small one. Small shocks like a flood in a mine in South Africa could have a big impact on money supply. Hence, it doesn’t seem like a very stable system.
The near zero interest rates and the QEs have had a bigger impact on the assets markets than the credit markets and the real economy. Would you say it is building up some problem?
It is important that the Fed is aware about this and is looking into this. Jeremy Stein one of the governors of the Fed has been at the forefront trying to think about what indicators to look at, indicators that might raise red flags. Jeremy as well as his staff are thinking very carefully about that. Monitoring this very very closely is very important and I know that the Fed is. To be able to predict which markets will have a dislocation, it is impossible to do that. No one has that kind of foresight. But I do think there is much more focus on that today than there was in the past.
In another five six months it will be six years since the Lehman Brothers went bust. How long do you think the easy money policies will continue?
As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke had said, whatever it takes, a corollary of that is as long as it takes. We have had a slow recovery than anyone had hoped for and that has been true not only in the US but many other countries as well. Some countries like India and some emerging markets that had done very well in the late 2000s have seen a significant fall in growth more recently. As the FOMC and Janet Yellen have said they are now on a path of tapering. It is very important to draw the distinction between tapering and tightening. The Fed had made a commitment to buy $85 billion worth of additional assets every month and that added nearly $1 trillion to the balance sheet every year. And with tapering now it is going to reduce the pace of that increase. So, it is not a tightening it just reducing the pace of additional accommodation. The additional accommodation is likely to wind down by the fourth quarter of this year and then depending on economic conditions, around six to nine months after that, the Fed might actually begin the process of tightening. But this is sort of a very gentle lengthy process. This is not a sudden shift of policy.

The interview originally appeared in the Forbes India magazine dated Jun 27, 2014

 

What Modi can do to bring acche din for home buyers

India-Real-Estate-Market
Vivek Kaul


People have taken the Bhartiya Janata Party’s election slogan “acche din aane waale hain”a little too literally. I have often been asked on the social media over the past few weeks whether real estate prices will fall, now that Narendra Modi government is in power. I wish I had a definitive answer for that.
Nevertheless, there are many things that the Modi government can do so that home prices start to mirror the actual demand from people looking to buy homes to live in. Right now, a major part of home demand comes from investors and speculators looking to park their money. How can this be taken care of?
There are a number of steps that can be taken.
a) The Modi government wants to get back the black money Indians have stashed away internationally. As per data from Global Financial Integrity, this amounted to a whopping $644 billion as of 2011. While the intention to get back all this black money is certainly noble, how practical is it? Also, if the idea is to recover black money then why discriminate between those who have managed to transfer the money abroad and those who haven’t.
It will be certainly easier to recover black money that is still there in the country. Also, the amount of black money that has remained in the country is likely to be significantly more than what has left the shores. A lot of this money has been diverted into buying real estate. This link between black money and real estate needs to be broken.
Former finance minister in the budget speechhe made on February 28, 2013, said “There are 42,800 persons – let me repeat, only 42,800 persons – who admitted to a taxable income exceeding Rs 1 crore per year.” This number is totally unbelievable given that nearly 27,000 luxury cars are sold in India each year. Over and above this estimates made KPMG suggest that there around 1.25 lakh high networth individuals in India who have an investible wealth of at least a million dollars(around Rs 6 crore), and also own a house and other durables.
What this clearly tells us is that as a nation we barely pay taxes. This means we are generating a lot of black money. A large amount of this money goes into real estate, and ensures that real estate prices remain firm. This wouldn’t have been possible without the cooperation of the highly corrupt Income Tax department.
In fact, the Modi government could do some out of the box thinking like the Greek government, to recover this black money. The Greek government used Google Earth to track those who have swimming pools and then cross indexed their address with the amount of tax they are paying. Ideas along similar lines need to be come up with. The property dealers of the National Capital Region and the amount of taxes they pay, will be a good target to start with.
If real estate prices need to fall, more and more people need to be forced to report their income properly and made to be paid a tax on it.
b)One of the most well kept secrets of the Income Tax Act is that it actually encourages people to speculate in real estate. There is no restriction on the number of homes against which you can claim a tax deduction on the interest paid on the home loan to fund the property. Only one of these properties needs to categorized as a self-occupied property. On this self-occupied property, an interest of up to Rs 1.5 lakh can be claimed as a tax deduction.
But this limit does not apply to the remaining homes that an individual may choose to buy. Any amount of interest paid on home loans can be claimed as a deduction as long as a “notional rent” is added to the income. We all know that these days “rents” are relatively low in comparison to the EMIs that need to be paid in order to repay the home loan. Hence, the interest component tends to be massive during the initial years and helps people with two or more homes, claim huge tax deductions.
This “loophole” has been used effectively by well paid corporate employees to bring down their taxable income over the years. People who use this deduction are more interested in claiming the deduction than actually making money from an increase in price. Hence, they are likely not to sell, even in a scenario where prices may be falling.
While offering a tax deduction on a self occupied property makes some sense, there is no logic to offering a tax deduction on a home, one is not living in. This “loophole” needs to be plugged immediately.
c) The Modi government needs to work towards building a credible real estate index. Currently, there is no way of figuring out which way the real estate market is heading. Are prices rising? Are they flat? Or are they falling? These are important questions for anyone looking to buy a home to live in. Brokers will always tell you that prices are going up. Real estate consultants bring out reports on home prices, now and then. But given that they make their money from real estate companies, these reports needed to treated with a pinch of salt.
The National Housing Bank does have a real estate index. But not many people know about it. Also, it is a quarterly index, and by the time the data actually comes out, it is not of much use. As of now the datafor up to December 2013 is available. But we are already in June 2014. The government needs to look at building an index along the lines of the Case-Shiller real estate indices in the United States. This will not lead to results immediately but will really help over a long term.
d) In the short term the government needs to look at the real estate lending of banks closely. Most recent data released by the Reserve Bank of India shows that between April 19, 2013 and April 18, 2014, the overall bank lending grew by 13.9%. During the same period the lending to commercial real estate grew by a significantly higher 19.8%.
This, in an environment where real estate companies have huge inventories. So, why are banks lending money to real estate companies? And what are real estate companies doing with that money? One possible explanation is that banks have been giving fresh loans to real estate companies so that the companies can repay their old loans. This has allowed real estate companies to not cut prices on their unsold inventory and ensure that prices do not fall.
This is something that needs to be looked into closely.
e) These days more and more real estate companies seem to be interested in launching new projects, rather than delivering the homes that they have already sold to the consumer. Companies use the money they raise for new projects to pay off interest on debt as well as repay debt that they have taken on over the years. Hence, there is no money left to build homes.
In this situation, the only way left for the company to raise more money to build homes is by launching newer projects. The money raised for one project is used to pay off interest on outstanding debt as well repay debt that is maturing. In order to build homes promised under the project, another project needs to be launched. This leads to the first project being delayed. To build homes promised under the second project a third project needs to be launched.
And so the cycle continues. In order break this cycle, the idea of a real estate regulator had been proposed a while back. That does not seem to have gone anywhere. It needs to be re-considered, even though it may not lead to immediate results.
If these steps are taken in the days to come, there might be some relief for people looking to buy homes to live in.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on June 13, 2014 

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

Easy money: Will the ECB have no choice but to be a copycat of the US?

 Special Address: Mario Draghi

Vivek Kaul 

In July 2012, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB) had said that “the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”
Yesterday, the ECB cut its deposit rate to – 0.1%. European banks need to maintain a certain portion of their deposits with the ECB as a reserve. This is a regulatory requirement. But banks maintain excess reserves with the ECB, over and above the regulatory requirement. This is because they do not see enough profitable lending opportunities.
In April 2014, the European banks had excess reserves amounting to € 91.6 billion. This was over and above the reserve of €103.6 billion that they needed to maintain as per regulatory requirement. The ECB currently pays no interest on the excess reserves of banks. With effect from June 11, 2014, it will pay an interest of – 0.1% on the excess reserves. What this means is that the ECB will charge the banks for any excess reserve that they maintain with it.
This has been done to ensure that the banks do not maintain any excess reserves with the ECB and go out and lend that money instead. The lending to the private sector in Europe has been declining at the rate of 1.8%. Over and above this, the economic growth in the Euro Zone (18 countries in Europe which use Euro as their currency) has been very slow.
During the period of January to March 2014, the economic growth was at a minuscule 0.2%. The Eurzo Zone managed to avoid an economic contraction primarily due to a strong performance by the German economy.
What this means is that economies of certain countries in Europe are contracting. Economies of Italy, Holland and Portugal contracted during January-March 2014. The economy of France did not grow at all. What makes the situation worse is the latest inflation number. In May 2014, the inflation in the Euro Zone fell to 0.5%. It was at 0.7% in April 2014. This is well below the ECB’s target inflation of 2%.
If inflation keeps falling, the Euro Zone will soon be experiencing a deflationary scenario in which prices will keep falling. In such a scenario people will postpone consumption in the hope of getting a better deal in the days to come. And this will further impact economic growth.
Due to these factors the Draghi led ECB has decided to cut the deposit rate to – 0.1%. The hope is that banks will withdraw their excess reserves from the ECB and lend that money. But how good are the chances of something like that happening? The ECB had cut the interest rate on excess deposits to 0% in July 2012. Its been around two years since then and as mentioned earlier the lending to the private sector in Europe has been going down at the rate of 1.8%.
Also, banks always have the option of maintaining their excess reserves in their own vaults than depositing it with the ECB. They can always exercise that option and still not lend. Interestingly, in July 2012, the central bank of Denmark had taken interest rates into the negative territory. The lending by Danish banks fell after this move. Banks will go slow on lending unless they feel that their lending will turn out to be profitable. And that is something the ECB or for that matter any central bank, cannot do much about.
So, that brings us back to the question of why did the ECB take interest rates into the negative territory? The only possible answer seems to be that ECB wants to weaken the euro against other currencies. The euro has appreciated against the yen since October 2012. In October 2012, one euro was worth around 100 yen. Currently, one euro is worth around 140 yen. This has happened because of the massive money printing carried out by by the Bank of Japan, the Japanese central bank, since early 2013.
Germany is the export powerhouse of Europe and competes directly with Japan in many hi-tech sectors. Nevertheless, despite the euro appreciating against the yen, the Eurozone as a whole has been running a trade surplus i.e. its exports have been greater than its imports. In February 2013, the Eurozone ran a trade surplus of €13.6 billion.
This is primarily because a collapse in demand in many Eurozone countries has led to a significant cut down in imports. Also, with a collapse in internal demand businesses have been forced to look for external growth.
Now with the ECB looking to cheapen the euro, it will lead to German exports becoming more competitive than they were in the past and this in turn will push up the trade surplus of the Eurozone further. Whether this will benefit countries in the Eurozone other than Germany, remains to be seen.
In a press conference yesterday, Mario Draghi said “We think this is a significant package…Are we finished? The answer is no. If required, we will act swiftly with further monetary policy easing. The Governing Council is unanimous in its commitment to using unconventional instruments within its mandate should it become necessary to further address risks of prolonged low inflation ”
Speculation is rife that the Draghi led ECB will soon enter the full blown quantitative easing territory and print money to buy bonds, something that the Federal Reserve of the United States and the Bank of Japan have been doing for a while now.
But it may not be so easy to initiate quantitative easing in the Eurozone, given that 18 countries of the Eurozone will have to support the decision. But as Guntram B. Wolff, director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels told The New York Times “The conventional measures are all done…What remains is quantitative easing.”
In short, the era of “easy money” will continue. 

 The article originally appeared on www.firstbiz.com on June 6, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])