Category: Financial Crisis | Page 3

15 January, 2016

Dear Mr Modi who will sort out the mess at Food Corporation of India?

Data released by the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell(PPAC) suggests that on January 13, 2016, the price of Indian basket of crude oil touched $27.32 per barrel. I expect the government to increase the excise duty on petrol and diesel soon, to capture the benefit of this ‘further’ fall in the price of oil.

If and when this happens this will be the eight such rise since November 2014. While the government has been quick to increase excise duty on petrol and diesel in order to shore up its finances, the same enthusiasm has been missing when it comes to controlling wasteful expenditure.

Let’s take the case of the Food Corporation of India(FCI). Last week the Supreme Court was hearing a case concerning the loaders at FCI and the exorbitant salaries they draw. As the judges reacted: “The report shows that in August 2014, 370 labourers received more than Rs 4 lakh in salary. Around 400 others got between Rs 2 lakh and 2.5 lakh in the same month…How is that possible?”

The judges were essentially referring to the Report of the High Level Committee on Reinventing the Role and Restructuring of Food Corporation of India (better known as the Shanta Kumar committee report). This report was released in January 2015.

In fact, as the Shanta Kumar committee report points out: “Some of the departmental labours (more than 300) have received wages (including arrears) even more than Rs 4 lakhs/per month in August 2014. This happens because of the incentive system in notified depots.”

Interestingly, even those who did not get paid Rs 4 lakh in August 2014, get paid quite a lot. The average salary of an FCI worker was Rs 79,588 per month between April and November 2014, which is seven to eight times higher than what a contract labourer gets paid. As can be seen from the following table the average salary of a worker has more than doubled between 2009 and 2014.

Financial year	Average Salary
2009-10	38459
2010-11	53389
2011-12	63763
2012-13	71358
2013-14	78549
April to Nov 2014	79588
Source: Shanta Kumar Committee Report

As the Shanta Kumar committee report points out: “FCI engages large number of workers (loaders) to get the job of loading/unloading done smoothly and in time. Currently there are roughly 16,000 departmental workers, about 26,000 workers that operate under Direct Payment System (DPS), some under no work no pay, and about one lakh contract workers. A departmental worker (loader) costs FCI about Rs 79,500/per month (Apri-Nov 2014 data) vis-a-vis DPS worker at Rs 26,000/permonth and contract labour costs about Rs 10,000/per month.”

There are a few points that need to be made here. First, is the fact that workers are paid different wages depending on how they are categorised, even though the do the same work. Hence, an FCI worker gets paid eight times that a contract worker gets paid. This is not fair.

The second point is why pay workers close to Rs 80,000 per month for loading and unloading stuff, when the same job can be carried out at the cost of Rs 10,000 or Rs 26,000 per month? This is a clear waste of money. The Supreme Court judges put the loss at Rs 1800 crore. This doesn’t sound much on its own, given the big numbers we are used to when we talk about the government.

But compare this with the plan outlay of the ministry of environment for 2015-2016, which is at Rs 1,446.60 crore. As the budget document points out: “The Plan outlay of Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change is Rs 1,446.60 crore. An Amount of Rs 758.16 crore is allocated for Ecology and Environment which, inter alia, includes Rs 63.14 crore Conservation of Natural Resources and Ecosystems, and Rs 213.05 crore for Research and Development, Rs 100 crore for National Coastal Management Programme and Rs 76.10 crore for Environmental Monitoring and Governance. Rs 150 crore has been provisioned for National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change.”
The point being there are better ways of spending money than paying an FCI worker Rs 79,500 per month.

Also, it is not surprising that those making Rs79,500 per month or more, get cheaper contract labour to do their work. If I was earning Rs 4 lakh per month and was in a position to outsource my work to someone at the cost of Rs 10,000 per month, I would do the same thing.

As the Shanta Kumar committee report points out: “Some of the departmental labours (more than 300) have received wages (including arrears) even more than Rs 4 lakhs/per month in August 2014. This happens because of the incentive system in notified depots, and widely used proxy labour. This is a major aberration and must be fixed, either by de-notifying these depots, or handing them over to states or private sector on service contracts, and by fixing a maximum limit on the incentives per person that will not allow him to work for more than say 1.25 times the work agreed with him. These depots should be put on priority for mechanization so that reliance on departmental labour reduces.”

The Supreme Court judges have given the government a time of 10 days to respond on how this daylight robbery of the country can stop. “Labourers in FCI have an aggressive past. Officers have been murdered. There is a clique that is operating there and FCI has become a hen that lays golden eggs for them. The FCI is literally held to ransom by the labourers and their unions and there is something seriously wrong with it,” the Supreme Court judges said.

The prime minister Narendra Modi before he became the prime minister talked a lot about “minimum government maximum governance”. This is one area where the slogan can be put into practice. The loot of the nation by a few thousand workers of the FCI needs to stop. The money thus saved needs to be put to better use.

The question is will this stop? The trouble is that after being elected Modi has continued with the maximum government handed down to him. Any elected official (or for that matter even any individual) has limited time and mind-space to tackle things. This is even more true for this government, where the lack of ministerial talent is glaringly obvious and the government is run more and more by the prime minister’s office.

The prime minister’s office is busy with many things, propping up loss making units like Air India and MTNL, being among them. In this environment does it have the time and the mind-space to tackle the mess that FCI is in?

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul’s Diary on Equitymaster

13 January, 2016

George Soros Has Got a Backache Again and This Time It’s Because of China

George Soros has got some of the biggest macro calls right over the years. How does he do it? If you were to get around to reading all the books that Soros has written over the years, you will come to realise that he follows something known as the theory of reflexivity to get in and out of financial markets.

Nevertheless, his son Robert, offers another explanation for his success in Michael Kaufman’s Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. As Robert puts it “My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit, I mean, you know the reason he changes his position in the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s his early warning sign.”

Soros himself has had his doubts about how he makes money. As he writes in The New Paradigm for Financial Markets – The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means: “To what extent my financial success was due to my philosophy is a moot question because the salient feature of my theory is that it does not yield any firm predictions. Running a hedge fund involves the constant exercise of judgement in a risky environment, and that can be very stressful. I used to suffer from backaches and other psychosomatic ailments, and I received as many useful signals from my backaches as from my theory. Nevertheless, I attributed great importance to my philosophy and particularly my theory of reflexivity.”

And from the looks of it, seems like George Soros has had a few backaches of late. This time his worries are coming from China. Speaking at an economic forum in Sri Lanka, Soros recently said: “When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008…Unfortunately China has a major adjustment problem and it has a lot of choices and it can actually transfer to the rest of the world its own problems by devaluing its currency and that is what China is doing.”

Over the years, the Chinese yuan has been largely pegged against the American dollar. The People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank, has ensured that the value of the yuan has fluctuated in a fixed range around the dollar. This has been primarily done in order to take away the currency risk that the Chinese exporters may have otherwise faced.

In a world where so many things have changed in the aftermath of the financial crisis which started in September 2008, the value of the Chinese yuan against the dollar has been one of the few constants.

Over the last few months, the value of the Chinese yuan against the dollar has gradually been allowed to fall. In August 2015, the People’s Bank of China pushed the value of the dollar against the yuan, from 6.2 to around 6.37. In November 2015, one dollar was worth around 6.31 yuan. By the end of the year, one dollar was worth 6.48 yuan, with the yuan gradually depreciating against the dollar.

In the new year, the yuan has depreciated further against the dollar and one dollar is now worth around 6.58 yuan. So what is happening here? It is first important to understand how the People’s Bank of China has over the years maintained the value of the yuan against the dollar.

When Chinese exporters bring back dollars to China or when investors want to bring dollars into China, the Chinese central bank buys these dollars. They buy these dollars by selling yuan. This ensures that at any given point of time there is no scarcity of yuan and there are enough yuan in the market, in order to ensure that the value of the yuan is largely fixed against the dollar.

Where does the People’s Bank get the yuan from? It can simply create them out of thin air, by printing them or creating them digitally.

The situation has reversed in the recent past. Money is now leaving China. Hence, the total amount of dollars leaving China is now higher than the dollars entering it. And this has created a problem for the Chinese central bank. Between July and September 2015, the net capital outflows reached $221 billion. “[This] occurred for the sixth straight quarter and reached a new record of $221 billion,” wrote Jason Daw and Wei Yao of Societe Generale in a recent research note.

The fact that more dollars are now leaving China than entering it, changes the entire situation. When investors and others, decide to take their money out of China, what do they do? They sell their yuan and buy dollars. This pushes up the demand for dollars. In a normal foreign exchange market this would mean that the dollar would appreciate against the yuan, and the yuan would depreciate against the dollar.

But remember that the Chinese foreign exchange market is rigged. The People’s Bank of China likes to maintain a steady value of the yuan against the dollar. What does the Chinese central bank do when more dollars are leaving China? In order to ensure that there is no scarcity of dollars in the market, it buys yuan and sells dollars. This is exactly the opposite what it has been doing all these years, when more dollars where entering China than leaving it.

The trouble is that China cannot create dollars out of thin air, only the Federal Reserve of the United States can do that. China does not have an endless supply of dollars. The foreign exchange reserves of China as of December 2015 stood at $3.33 trillion. In December 2015, the foreign exchange reserves fell by $107.9 billion. They had fallen by $87.2 billion in November. In fact, between December 2014 and December 2015, the Chinese foreign exchange reserves have fallen by a huge $557 billion, in the process of defending the value of the yuan against the dollar.

While, China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world, it is worth asking what portion of these reserves are liquid? The Chinese central bank has invested these reserves in financial securities all over the world. As of October 2015, $1.25 trillion was invested in US government treasuries.

The question is how quickly can these investments be sold in order to defend the value of the yuan against the dollar? As economist Ajay Shah wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard: “For a few months, reserves have declined by a bit less than $100 billion a month. We may think that, with $3 trillion of reserves, the authorities can handle this scale of outflow for 30 months. Things might be a bit worse. Questions are being raised about the liquidity of the reserves portfolio. There are only a few global asset classes where the Chinese government can easily dispose of $100 billion of assets per month. A lot of the reserves portfolio might not be in these liquid asset classes.”

Given this, China does not have an endless supply of dollars and cannot constantly keep defending the yuan against the dollar. This explains why it has gone slow in defending the yuan against the dollar, in the recent past, and allowed its currency to depreciate against the dollar.

The question is why is all this worrying the world at large, Soros included? A weaker Chinese yuan will make Chinese exports more competitive. This will mean a headache for other export oriented economies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, and so on. They will also have to push the value of their currencies down against the dollar. Hence, the global currency war which has been on a for a while, will continue. Further, a weaker yuan might lead to China exporting further deflation (lower prices) all over the world.

But what is more worrying is the fact that residents and non-residents are primarily the ones withdrawing their money out of China. The non-residents withdrew $82 billion during the period July to September 2015. The residents withdrew $67 billion, after having withdrawn $102 billion between March and June 2015.

When any economy is in trouble it is the locals who start to withdraw money first. This is clearly happening in China. And that has got the world worried. Also, China is a major consumer of commodities and any economic slowdown in China, will lead to a fall in commodity demand. This isn’t good news for many commodity exporting countries in particular and global economic growth in general.

The column originally appeared on the Vivek Kaul’s Diary on January 13, 2016

18 December, 2015

Janet Yellen raises interest rates. What happens next?

In the column dated December 16, 2015, I had said that the Federal Reserve of the United States would raise the federal funds rate, at the end of its meeting which was scheduled on December 15-16, 2015. That was the easy bit given that Janet Yellen, chairperson of the Federal Reserve of the United States, had more or less made this clear in a speech she made on December 3, 2015.

The Federal Open Market Committee(FOMC) of the Federal Reserve of the United States raised the federal funds rate by 25 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) to be in the range of 0.25-0.5%. Earlier, the federal funds rate moved in the range of 0-0.25%. FOMC is a committee within the Federal Reserve which runs the monetary policy of the United States

The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which one bank lends funds maintained at the Federal Reserve to another bank on an overnight basis. It acts as a sort of a benchmark for the interest rates that banks charge on their short and medium term loans. This is the first time that the FOMC has raised the federal funds rate since mid-2006.

I had also said that the Yellen led FOMC would make it very clear that the increase in the federal funds rate would happen at a very gradual pace. The statement released by the FOMC said that it expects the “economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant only gradual increases in the federal funds rate; the federal funds rate is likely to remain, for some time, below levels that are expected to prevail in the longer run.”

As Yellen put it in central banking parlance in the press conference that followed the Federal Reserve meeting: “The monetary policy will continue to remain accomodative”. In fact, the members of the FOMC expect the federal funds rate to be at 1.4% in a year, 2.4% in two years and 3.3% in three years.

If the federal funds rate has to be at 1.4% one year down the line, then it means that the FOMC will have to raise the federal funds rate by around 25 basis points each (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) four times next year. This seems to be a little difficult given that the presidential elections are scheduled in the United States next year. Also, there are other problems that this could create.

The low interest rate policy was unleashed by the Federal Reserve in the aftermath of the financial crisis which started in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank on Wall Street went bust. The hope was that both households and corporations would borrow and spend more and in the process, economic growth would return.

What has happened? The household debt to gross domestic product(GDP) ratio has been falling since the beginning of 2009 as can be seen from the accompanying chart.

The household debt to GDP ratio has fallen from around 98% of the GDP at the beginning of 2009, around the time the financial crisis had just started to around 79.8% of the GDP now. What this tells us is that the household debt as a proportion of the total economy has come down. This despite low interest rates being prevalent when at least theoretically people should have borrowed and spent more money.

Take a look at the following chart. It shows that the proportion of the disposable income that Americans are paying to service their debts has also improved. In end 2007, Americans were spending 13.1% of their disposable income to service debt. It has since fallen to 10.1%, though it has jumped a little in the recent past. But the broader trend is clearly down.

What these two graphs tell us clearly is that the household debt in the United States has come down in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So if households have not been borrowing who has? The answer is corporates.

As Albert Edwards of Societe Generale wrote in a research note in November: “The primary driver for the rapid rise in bank lending…has been borrowing by US corporates and we all know they have been using the Fed’s free money not to invest in capacity expanding expenditures, but rather to buy back mountains of their own shares…Corporate debt borrowing at an $674bn annual rate [is] closing in rapidly on the all-time borrowing splurge of 2007!”

In another note released after the FOMC decision to raise the federal funds rate Edwards writes that “the real rate of corporate borrowing is even greater than was seen during the late 1990s tech bubble.”

American corporates have borrowed at rock bottom interest rates not to expand their capacities by building more factories among other things, but to buy back their shares. When a corporate buys back and extinguishes its own shares, fewer number of shares remain in the open market. This pushes up the earnings per share of the company. This in turn pushes up the share price. A higher earnings per share leads to a higher market price.

As a result of all this borrowing, the US corporate debt has reached 70% of the GDP, around the level it was at the time the financial crisis started. A Goldman Sachs research note points out that between 2007 and now, the total borrowing of the US corporates has doubled.

Nevertheless, all this money needs to be repaid. And this will become increasingly difficult with sales of US corporates falling. As Edwards writes in his latest research note: “It doesn’t help that both corporate profits and revenues are now falling…Nominal business sales have been contracting all year. Originally, it was put down to unseasonably cold weather – but the chilly data has just not gone away, as a combination of unit labour costs and weak pricing power have led to a typical late cycle decline in profit margins.”

If the Federal Reserve keeps increasing the federal funds rate, the interest rate that American corporates need to pay on their debt will keep going up as well.

The interest rate that the American corporates have been paying on their debt has fallen from 6% in 2009 to around 4% in 2015. A higher interest rate would mean a further fall in the profit made by American companies. Lower earnings would lead to lower stock prices and lower broader index levels.

And this is not something that the Federal Reserve would want. A falling stock market because of higher interest rates would jeopardise the American economic recovery.

As Yellen said in her speech earlier this month: “Household spending growth has been particularly solid in 2015, with purchases of new motor vehicles especially strong….Increases in home values and stock market prices in recent years, along with reductions in debt, have pushed up the net worth of households, which also supports consumer spending. Finally, interest rates for borrowers remain low, due in part to the FOMC’s accommodative monetary policy, and these low rates appear to have been especially relevant for consumers considering the purchase of durable good.”

Once we factor in all this, it is safe to say that the Federal Reserve will go really slow at increasing interest rates. In fact, I don’t see it increasing the federal funds rate to 1.4% by the end of next year. This means good news for Indian stock and bond markets, at least for the time being.
The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on December 18, 2015

16 December, 2015

Why The Rupee Is Falling Despite The Oil Price Collapse

As I write this one dollar is worth around Rs 67.1. The last time the rupee went so low against the dollar was sometime in late August 2013. Is this a reason to worry?

In August 2013, the oil prices were at a really high level. The price of the Indian basket of crude oil on August 23, 2013, had stood at $109.16 per barrel. As on December 14, 2015, the price of the Indian basket stood at $34.39 per barrel, down by 68.5% since then.

One of the reasons for the fall of the rupee back then was the high oil price. India imports 80% of the oil that it consumes. Oil is bought and sold internationally in dollars. When Indian oil marketing companies buy oil they pay in dollars. This pushes up the demand for dollars and drives down the value of the rupee against the dollar. This happened between May and August 2013, as the price of oil shot up by close to 11%.

Further, those were the days of high inflation. The consumer price inflation in August 2013 had stood at 9.52%. In order to hedge against this high inflation people had been buying gold. India produces very little gold of its own.

In 2013-2014(April 2013 to March 2014) India produced 1411 kgs of gold. In contrast, the country imported 825 tonnes of gold during 2013. Gold, like oil, is bought and sold internationally in dollars. When Indian importers buy gold, like is the case with oil, it pushes up the demand for dollars and in the process drives down the value of the rupee. This phenomenon also played out in 2013.

Hence, the high price of oil and the demand for gold, drove down the value of the rupee against the dollar, between late May 2013 and late August 2013. But these reasons are not valid anymore. The price of the Indian basket of crude oil is less than $35 per barrel. And the demand for gold is subdued at best.

So what exactly is driving down the value of the rupee against the dollar? In order to understand this, we need to go back to the period between May 2013 and August 2013. While gold and oil played a part in driving down the value of the rupee against the dollar, there was a third factor at work as well. And this was the major factor.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis which started in the September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust, Western central banks led by the Federal Reserve of the United States, cut their interest rates to close to zero percent. Ben Bernanke, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, was instrumental in this.

The idea was that at low interest rates people will borrow and spend more, and economic growth would return in the process. While that happened, what also happened was that financial institutions borrowed money at low interest rates and invested it in financial markets all over the world.

In May 2013 just a few months before his term as the Chairman of the Fed was coming to an end Bernanke hinted that the “easy money” policy being followed by the Federal Reserve could come to an end. This meant that interest rates would go up in the months to come.

If the interest rates went up, the financial institutions would have had to pay a higher rate of interest on their borrowings. This would mean that the trade of borrowing at low interest rates in the United States and investing across the world, wouldn’t be as profitable as it was in the past.

This led foreign financial institutions to start selling out of financial markets around the world including India. Between June and August 2013, the foreign institutional investors sold stocks and bonds worth Rs 75,291 crore in the Indian stock market as well as debt market.

They were paid in rupees when they sold their investments in stocks as well as bonds. They had to convert these rupees into dollars. In order to do that they had to sell rupees and buy dollars. When they did that, the demand for the dollar went up. In the process the value of the rupee against the dollar crashed. One dollar was worth around Rs 55 in middle of May 2013. By late August it had almost touched Rs 69.

In the end the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates, the Reserve Bank of India got its act together and the value of the rupee against the dollar stabilised in the range of Rs 58-62 to a dollar.

What did not happen in May 2013 is likely to happen on December 16, 2015 i.e. tomorrow. It is likely that Janet Yellen, the current Chairperson of the Federal Reserve, will raise interest rates. This means that the financial institutions which have borrowed in the United States and have invested across the world, would have to pay a higher rate of interest on their borrowings. This may make their trades unviable.

Also, financial markets do not wait for central banks to make decisions. They try and guess which way the decision will go and make their investment decisions accordingly. It is now widely expected that the Fed will raise interest rates tomorrow. Given that, the foreign financial investors have been selling out of the Indian financial markets since November. Between November and now, the foreign institutional investors have sold stocks and bonds worth Rs 15,035 crore. In the process of converting this money into dollars, the value of the rupee has been driven down against the dollar.

At the beginning of November, one dollar was worth around Rs 65, now it is worth more than Rs 67. Also, as the rupee loses value, the foreign institutional investors lose money. Let’s say an investment is worth Rs 65 crore. If one dollar is worth Rs 65, then this investment is worth $10 million. If one dollar is worth Rs 67, then this investment is worth only $9.7 million. In order to prevent such losses, bonds investors are selling out of Indian stocks and bonds. And this is pushing down the value of the rupee. So after a point, the rupee loses value because the rupee loses value.

The trouble is that Indian politicians have turned the value of the rupee against the dollar into a prestige issue. But what is worth remembering here is that we live in a word where things are connected and given that the value of a currency is bound to fluctuate. Sometimes the fluctuation will be higher than usual. But that doesn’t mean that things are going wrong.

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

The column originally appeared on Huffington Post India on December 15, 2015

16 December, 2015

Yellen led Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, but very gradually

Up until now every time the Federal Open Market Committee has had a meeting, I have maintained that Janet Yellen, the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve of the United States, will not raise interest rates. The latest meeting of the FOMC is currently on (December 15-16, 2015) and I feel that in all probability Janet Yellen and the FOMC will raise the federal funds rate at the end of this meeting.

So why do I think that the Yellen led FOMC will raise the interest rate now? Two major economic indicators that the FOMC looks at are unemployment and inflation. Price stability and maximum employment is the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve.

There are various ways in which the bureau of labour standards in the United States measures unemployment. This ranges from U1 to U6. The official rate of unemployment is U3, which is the proportion of the civilian labour force that is unemployed but actively seeking employment.
U6 is the broadest definition of unemployment and includes workers who want to work full-time but are working part-time because there are no full-time jobs available. It also includes “discouraged workers,” or people who have stopped looking for work because the economic conditions the way they are make them believe that no work is available for them.

U6 touched a high of 17.2 percent in October 2009, when U3, which is the official unemployment rate, was at 10 percent. Nevertheless, things have improved since then. In October and November 2015, the U3 rate of unemployment stood at 5% of the civilian labour force. The U6 rate of unemployment stood at 9.8% and 9.9% respectively. This is a good improvement since October 2009, six years earlier.

In fact, the gap between U3 and the U6 rate of unemployment has narrowed down considerably. As John Mauldin writes in a research note titled Crime in the Job Report with respect to the unemployment figures of October 2015: “The gap between the two measures [i.e. U3 and U6] is now the smallest in more than seven years, a sign that slack in the labour market is diminishing. And as the Fed weighs a potential rate hike, what may be more important is the number of people working part-time who would prefer to work full-time – that number posted its biggest two-month decline since 1994. Janet Yellen has referred to this number as often as she has to any other specific number. It is on her radar screen.”

In fact, Janet Yellen seems to be feeling reasonably comfortable about the employment numbers. As she said in a speech dated December 2, 2015: “The unemployment rate, which peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, declined to 5 percent in October of this year…The economy has created about 13 million jobs since the low point for employment in early 2010.”

Another indicator that has improved is the number of people who want to work full time but can’t because there are no jobs going around. As Yellen said: “Another margin of labour market slack not reflected in the unemployment rate consists of individuals who report that they are working part time but would prefer a full-time job and cannot find one–those classified as “part time for economic reasons.” The share of such workers jumped from 3 percent of total employment prior to the Great Recession to around 6-1/2 percent by 2010. Since then, however, the share of these part time workers has fallen considerably and now is less than 4 percent of those employed.”

On the flip side what most economists and analysts don’t like to talk about is the fact that the labour force participation rate in the United States has fallen. In November 2015 it stood at 62.5%, against 62.9% a year earlier. It had stood at 66% in September 2008, when the financial crisis started.
Labour force participation rate is essentially the proportion of population which is economically active. A drop in the rate essentially means that over the years Americans have simply dropped out of the workforce having not been able to find a job. Hence, they are not measured in total number of unemployed people and the unemployment numbers improve to that extent.

This negative data point notwithstanding things are looking up a bit. With the U3 unemployment rate down to 5% and U6 down to less than 10%, companies, “in order to entice additional workers, businesses may have to think about paying more money,” writes Mauldin.

And this means wage inflation or the rate at which wages rise, is likely to go up in the days to come. The wage inflation will push up general inflation as well as buoyed by an increase in salaries people are likely buy more goods and services, push up demand and thus push up prices. At least that is how it should play out theoretically.

As Yellen said in a speech earlier this month: “Less progress has been made on the second leg of our dual mandate–price stability–as inflation continues to run below the FOMC’s longer-run objective of 2 percent. Overall consumer price inflation–as measured by the change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures–was only 1/4 percent over the 12 months ending in October.”

But a major reason for low inflation has been a rapid fall in the price of oil over the last one year. How does the inflation number look minus food and energy prices? As Yellen said: “Because food and energy prices are volatile, it is often helpful to look at inflation excluding those two categories–known as core inflation…But core inflation–which ran at 1-1/4 percent over the 12 months ending in October–is also well below our 2 percent objective, partly reflecting the appreciation of the U.S. dollar. The stronger dollar has pushed down the prices of imported goods, placing temporary downward pressure on core inflation.”

In fact, the fall in the price of oil has also brought down the fuel and energy costs of businesses. This has led to a fall in the prices of non-energy items as well. “Taking account of these effects, which may be holding down core inflation by around 1/4 to 1/2 percentage point, it appears that the underlying rate of inflation in the United States has been running in the vicinity of 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 percent,” said Yellen.

In fact, a careful reading of the speech that Yellen made on December 2, clearly tells us that she was setting the ground for raising the federal funds rate when the FOMC met later in the month.

On December 3, 2015, Yellen made a testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. In this testimony she exactly repeated something that she had said a day earlier in the speech. As she said: “That initial rate increase would reflect the Committee’s judgment, based on a range of indicators, that the economy would continue to grow at a pace sufficient to generate further labour market improvement and a return of inflation to 2 percent, even after the reduction in policy accommodation. As I have already noted, I currently judge that U.S. economic growth is likely to be sufficient over the next year or two to result in further improvement in the labour market. Ongoing gains in the labour market, coupled with my judgment that longer-term inflation expectations remain reasonably well anchored, serve to bolster my confidence in a return of inflation to 2 percent as the disinflationary effects of declines in energy and import prices wane.”

This is the closest that a Federal Reserve Chairperson or for that matter any central governor, can come to saying that he or she is ready to raise interest rates. My bet is that the Yellen led FOMC will raise rates at the end of the meeting which is currently on.

Nevertheless, this increase in the federal funds rate will be sugar coated and Yellen is likely to make it very clear that the rate will be raised at a very slow pace. This is primarily because the American economy is still not out of the woods.

The economic recovery remains fragile and heavily dependent on low interest rates. Net exports (exports minus imports) remain weak due to a stronger dollar. Yellen feels that this has subtracted nearly half a percentage point from growth this year.

In this environment economic growth in the United States will be heavily dependent on consumer spending, which in turn will depend on how low interest rates continue to remain. As Yellen said in her recent speech: “Household spending growth has been particularly solid in 2015, with purchases of new motor vehicles especially strong….Increases in home values and stock market prices in recent years, along with reductions in debt, have pushed up the net worth of households, which also supports consumer spending. Finally, interest rates for borrowers remain low, due in part to the FOMC’s accommodative monetary policy, and these low rates appear to have been especially relevant for consumers considering the purchase of durable good.”

This again is a clear indication of the fact that the federal funds rate in particular and interest rates in general will continue to remain low in the years to come.

As Yellen had said in a speech she made in March earlier this year: “However, if conditions do evolve in the manner that most of my FOMC colleagues and I anticipate, I would expect the level of the federal funds rate to be normalized only gradually, reflecting the gradual diminution of headwinds from the financial crisis.”

I expect her to make a statement along similar lines either as a part of the FOMC statement or in the press conference that follows or both.

(The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on December 16, 2015)