Why you get cheated by friends and relatives



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One of my abiding memories of growing up in a small town is of my father and his friends talking about insurance agents and chit fund agents taking money and disappearing. Usually the agent used to be someone known to them. One story that I remember is of the local dhobi’s (washerman’s) son raising money for a chit fund and then disappearing.

The present day version of this plays out when people invest in wrong kind of insurance policies where the agent commissions are very high or in Ponzi schemes which promise high returns. Ponzi scheme are essentially financial frauds where the money being brought in by the new investors is used to pay off the older investors whose investment needs to be redeemed. They collapse the moment the money leaving the scheme becomes higher than the money entering it.

One version of the Ponzi scheme is a Ponzi scheme masquerading as a multi-level marketing scheme. Those who invest in such schemes end up investing through relatives, friends, neighbours etc. These are essentially people they know and they trust.

One reason why people end up investing money in such avenues is financial illiteracy. While people work hard at earning the money that they do (in most cases), they are very lazy when it comes to investing this hard earned money. They don’t like to carry out any basic research and just hand over their hard earned money to others who they trust.

Hence, trust is another factor at work. In many cases where individuals end up making wrong investments, they invest through an agent who is either a friend or a relative or perhaps someone known to them. This situation is termed as an affinity fraud.

Jason Zweig defines affinity fraud in his book The Devil’s Financial Dictionary as “a financial crime committed by someone with an affinity for doing terrible things to his friends, as when a crook promotes a bogus investment to members of his church, social club, ethnic group, or other close-knot community.” In the Indian context Ponzi schemes masquerading as chit funds or multi-level marketing schemes and being sold to members of a closely knit community are a very good example.

So why do people become victims of the affinity fraud. As Zweig writes about people who victims of the affinity fraud: “They trust him [the agent/the crook] because they know him so well. In return, he trusts them not to notice that he is stealing their money.”

In fact, the human need to trust others and be social is a direct impact of evolution and the fact that human beings are born prematurely in comparison to other animals. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens—A Brief History of Mankind: “Humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it’s just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education.”

And this led to a situation where human beings have had to be social and in the process trust the people around them. As Harari writes: “Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal.”

Hence, for human beings to survive and progress in the society, they need to be social and trust the people around them. And this as Harari writes “has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems”.

One of these social problems is the affinity fraud where we trust others with our money. And sometimes this turns out be a huge blunder. So, the next time you lose money by making a wrong investment through someone know you know, you can blame evolution for it.

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

The column was originally published in the Bangalore Mirror  on December 30, 2015.

Why smart people fall for Ponzi schemes

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Sometime back a friend called and had a rather peculiar question. He wanted to know how he could go about stopping one of his friends from peddling a Ponzi scheme.

This was a rather tricky question. Just explaining to someone selling a Ponzi scheme that he is selling a Ponzi scheme, does not really work. The first question I asked my friend was how was his friend doing in life? “He is doing well for himself,” said my friend with a chuckle. “He works in a senior position with a corporate and has managed to sell the scheme to at least ten people in the housing society that he lives in.”

“If he is working at a senior position, why is he doing this?” I asked my friend, and immediately realised that I had asked a rather stupid question. “I was hoping you would be able to answer that,” my friend replied.

This column is an outcome of that conversation.

Over the last ten years of writing on Ponzi schemes I have come to the realisation that many people who sell and in the process invest in Ponzi schemes are not just victims of greed or a sustained marketing campaign, as is often made out to be.

There is much more to it than that. Many individuals selling and investing Ponzi schemes (like my friend’s friend) come from the upper strata of the society, are well educated and know fully well what they are doing. In case of my friend’s friend he was selling a multilevel marketing scheme for which the membership fee is more than Rs 3 lakh. So, the scheme is clearly aimed at the well to do.

On becoming a member you are allowed to sell products, some of which cost as much as a lakh. Of course, you will also be making new members as well. The bulk of the membership fee paid by the new members you make, will be passed on to you. Hence, the more people you get in as members, the more money you make. Selling products is just incidental to the entire thing, given that a membership costs more than Rs 3 lakh.

This is a classic Ponzi scheme in which money being brought in by the new investors (through membership fee) is being used to pay off old investors (who had already paid their membership fee), with the business model of selling products providing a sort of a façade to the entire thing.

So, the question is why does the smart lot fall for Ponzi schemes? As John Kay writes in Other People’s Money—Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People: “Even if you know, or suspect, a Ponzi scheme, you might hope to get out in time, with a profit. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

People feel that the money will keep coming in. Or what the financial market likes to call ‘liquidity,’ won’t dry up. And this is the mistake that they make.
Kay defines liquidity as the “capacity of the supply chain to meet a sudden or exceptional demand without disruption…This capability is achieved…in one or both of two ways: by maintaining stocks, and by the temporary diversion of supplies from other uses.”

Kay in his book compares the concept of liquidity to the daily delivery of milk in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland where he grew up. As he writes: “In the Edinburgh of fifty years ago fresh milk was delivered everyday…At ordinary times our demand for milk was stable. But sometimes we would have visitors and need extra milk. My mother would usually tell the milkman the day before, but if she forgot, the milkman would have extra supplies on his float to meet our needs. Of course, if all his customers did this, he wouldn’t have been able to accommodate them.”

What is the important point here? That people trusted the milkman to deliver every morning. And given that they did not stock up on milk, more than what was required on any given day. If the trust was missing then the system wouldn’t have worked.

Take the case of how things were in the erstwhile Soviet Union. As Kay writes: “In the Soviet economy there was no such confidence, and queues were routine, not just because there was an actual insufficiency of supply – though there often was – but because consumers would rush to obtain whatever supplies were available.”

And how does that apply in case of Ponzi schemes? As I mentioned earlier, the individual selling Ponzi schemes feel confident that the money will keep coming in. Those they sell the scheme also become sellers. And for the Ponzi scheme to continue, the new lot also needs to have the same confidence.

In the milk example shared above, if people of Edinburgh had started hoarding milk, the liquidity the system had would have broken down. The confidence that milk would be delivered every day kept the system going. Along similar lines, the confidence that money will keep coming into a Ponzi scheme, gets smart people into it as well.

Of course, this confidence can change at any point of time. And if a sufficient number of people stop feeling confident, then the scenario changes. The money coming into the Ponzi scheme stops and the moment the money coming into the scheme becomes lesser than the money going out, it collapses. So that’s the thing with liquidity, it is there, till it is not there.

In my friend’s friend case, members down the line would stop making more members. Also, members who had bought the membership from my friend’s friend are likely to turn up at his doorstep and demand their money back.

And given that he has told membership to many people in his housing society, he can’t just get up and disappear, given that he is essentially not a scamster. He is a family man with a wife, children and parents, who stay with him.

Hence, he will have to refund them, if he has continue living in the housing society in a peaceful environment. How will he do that? Let’s go back to the definition of liquidity as explained above. Liquidity is maintained by “by maintaining stocks, and by the temporary diversion of supplies from other uses.” So my friend’s friend can pay up from the money he has already accumulated by selling these Ponzi schemes. If that is not enough, he can dip into his savings. And if even that is not enough, he can hopefully take the money being brought in by the new members (if at all there are people like that) and hand them over to the members demanding their money back.

Of course, by doing this he will only be postponing the problem, given that he would have to later deal with the new members.

Long story short—he is screwed!

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Oct 13, 2015

The Great Indian banking Ponzi scheme

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One of the themes that I have regularly explored in The Daily Reckoning newsletters is the mess that the Indian banking sector currently is in. This newsletter is another one in the series.

The RBI Financial Stability Report released in June earlier this year pointed out: “Five sub-sectors, namely, mining, iron & steel, textiles, infrastructure and aviation, which together constituted 24.8 per cent of the total advances of scheduled commercial banks, had a much larger share of 51.1 per cent in the total stressed advances. Among these five sectors, infrastructure and iron & steel had a significant contribution in total stressed advances accounting for nearly 40 per cent of the total.”

Within the infrastructure sector, the power sector is a big defaulter. Loans to the power sector form around 8.3% of the total loans. But at the same time they form around 16.1% of the stressed advances.

The stressed advances or loans are arrived at by adding the gross non-performing assets (or bad loans) plus restructured loans divided by the total assets held by the Indian banking system. The borrower has either stopped to repay this loan or the loan has been restructured, where the borrower has been allowed easier terms to repay the loan by increasing the tenure of the loan or lowering the interest rate.

So what would typically happen in such a scenario? Banks would go slow on lending to sectors that have been defaulting on their loans. But is that really the case? The sectoral deployment of credit data released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) earlier this month suggests otherwise. This despite the fact that banks claim every quarter that they continue to stay away from the sectors that have given them pain in the past.

People may not always tell the right story but numbers do. And here are the numbers. The RBI sectoral deployment data suggests that between July 2014 and July 2015 banks lent a total of Rs 1,20,900 crore to industry as a whole. The lending to industry went up by 4.8%, in comparison to 10.2% growth between July 2013 and July 2014.

The situation gets even more interesting when we take a closer look at the numbers. The bank lending to the infrastructure sector between July 2014 and July 2015 grew by Rs 71,600 crore. Within the infrastructure sector lending to the power sector grew by Rs 59,400 crore.

Lending to the iron and steel sector grew by Rs 27,100 crore during the course of the year. Loans to the iron and steel sector form around 4.5% of the total loans and 10.2% of the total stressed advances.

What does this tell us? In the last one year banks gave Rs 98,700 crore of the Rs 1,20,900 crore that they lent to industry to the two most troubled sectors of infrastructure and iron and steel. This means that 81.6% of all industrial lending carried out by banks in the last one year went to the two most troubled sectors of infrastructure and iron and steel.

These sectors form around 19.5% of the total lending carried out by banks and 40% of their stressed assets. The overenthusiasm of banks to lend to these sectors comes even after the RBI in the Financial Stability Report had raised a red flag.

The report had warned that the “the debt servicing ability of power generation companies[which are a part of the infrastructure sector] in the near-term may continue to remain weak given the high leverage and weak cash flows. Banks, therefore, need to exercise adequate caution while dealing with the sector and need to continue monitoring the developments very closely.”

With regard to the iron and steel sector the report had said that “the sector holds very good long term prospects, though it is currently under stress, necessitating a close watch by lenders.” But the July numbers on the sectoral deployment of credit clearly suggest that banks are not listening to the RBI.
What does this really mean? By lending more and more money to sectors which are in trouble, banks are essentially kicking the can down the road.

The banks are giving new loans to companies operating in these troubled sectors so that they can repay their old loans. They are effectively running a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is essentially a fraudulent investment scheme where money being brought in by new investors is used to pay off old investors.
Over and above this conversations I have had with some industry insiders I have come to know that banks(in particular public sector banks) have been using the 5/25 scheme in order to postpone dealing with the bad loans issue, in the hope that these loans will become viable in the years to come.

The 5/25 scheme allows banks to extend the loans given to infrastructure projects to up to 25 years while refinancing them every five to seven years. As a December 2014 newsreport in the Mint newspaper points out: “Banks were typically not lending beyond 10-12 years. As a result, cash flows of infrastructure firms were stretched as they tried to meet shorter repayment schedules.”

In fact when the scheme was first introduced it was available only for new projects. However, in December 2014, it was also extended to existing projects as well. Banks were allowed to increase the repayment tenure for companies which had borrowed money for infrastructure projects and come up with fresh amortisation schedules for repayment of loans.

Such an increase in the tenure of repayment would not be treated as a restructuring of assets. An increase in tenure brought down the amount of money that the companies had to pay during the course of a year, in order to repay the loan. And this increased their chances of continuing to repay the loan.

This 5/25 scheme is also available for projects lending against which has already been classified as a restructured asset (i.e. its repayment schedule has already been extended or the interest rate has been lowered). When such a loan is brought under the 5/25 scheme it continues to be classified as a restructured asset up until the project gets upgraded on the satisfactory servicing of the loan.

RBI’s rationale behind extending the 5/25 scheme to existing projects was that that instead of giving up on an asset under stress, if efforts were made to make it viable, then the loan could be paid back and therefore the pressure of bad loans could be eased.

As RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said on August 4, 2015, while addressing a press conference: “We have said that there is no problem to lend to a project even if it is a non-performing asset, so long as it has done something to bring the project back on track and not for evergreening the loan.” But is that really the way banks also look at it?

Rajan further said in a speech on August 24, 2015: “To deal with genuine problems of poor structuring, it has allowed bankers to stretch repayment profiles…to infrastructure and the core sector (the so-called “5/25” rule), provided the project has reached commercial take-off, has a genuinely long commercial life, and the value of the NPV of loans is maintained. RBI is undertaking periodic examination of randomly selected “5/25” deals to ensure they are facilitating genuine adjustment rather than becoming a back-door means of postponing principal payments indefinitely.”

I sincerely hope that RBI is carefully examining the 5/25 loans. As Rajan said, the RBI making it “easy for banks to “extend and pretend”, is not a solution.” I agree.

The column originally appeared in The Daily Reckoning on Sep 11, 2015

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 

Why real estate Ponzi scheme will continue despite new Real Estate Bill


On April 7, 2015, the union cabinet cleared the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill. The Bill essentially mandates that every state needs to set up a Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), to protect consumer interests.
Every commercial as well as residential real estate project needs to be compulsorily registered with the RERA of the concerned state. Real estate companies need to file project details, design and specifications, with the concerned RERA. They need to put up details concerning the approvals from various authorities regarding the project, the design and the layout of the project, the brokers selling the project etc., on the RERA’s website.
Consumers will be able to check these details on the website of the real estate regulator. Further, only once a project is registered with the RERA will it be allowed to be sold. Also, like is the case currently, a real estate company will not be able to go about arbitrarily changing the design of the project midway through the project. In order to do this the company will need approval of two thirds of the buyers.
If the real estate company makes incorrect disclosures or does not follow what it has stated at the time of filing the project with the RERA, it will have to pay a penalty. There are other provisions also that seek to protect consumer interests. Real estate companies will have to clearly state the carpet area of the home/office they are trying to sell, instead of all the fancy jargons that they come up with these days. Further, the bill allows buyers to claim a refund along with interest, in case the real estate company fails to deliver.
So on paper the bill actually looks great. But there is one provision that essentially makes all these provisions meaningless in a way. The Bill requires real estate companies to compulsorily deposit half of the money raised from buyers for a particular project into a monitorable account. This money can then be spent only for the construction of that project against which the money has been raised from prospective buyers.
This is an improvement from the way things currently are. The way things currently work are—a real estate company launches a project, collects the money and then uses that money to do what it feels like. This might mean repaying debt that it has accumulated or diverting the money to complete the projects that are pending. Given this, at times there is no money left for the project against which the money has been raised. In order to get the money for that, another project will have to be launched. Meanwhile the prospective buyers are stuck.
Developers love launching new projects simply because it is the cheapest way to raise money. Money from the bank or the informal market, means paying high interest. Hence, they raise money for the first project and use it to pay off debt or the interest on it. To build homes under the first project, a second project is launched. Money from this is then used to build homes for the first project.
Now, to build homes promised under the second project, a third project is launched and so the story goes on. In the process, all the buyers get screwed and the builder manages to run a perfect Ponzi scheme. A perfect Ponzi scheme is one where money brought in by the newer investors is used to pay off older investors. In this case money brought in by the newer buyers is used to build homes for the older buyers.
The Real Estate Bill seeks to stop real estate companies from running such Ponzi schemes. As explained above, half the money raised for a particular project needs to be deposited in a monitorable bank account and be spent on the project against which the money has been raised.
The thing is when the Bill was first presented in the Parliament in 2013, the real estate companies had to deposit 70% of the money raised against a particular project in a monitorable account and spend that money on that particular project.
Between then and now the real estate lobby has been able to dilute the 70% level to 50%. What this means that the real estate companies can still use 50% of the money raised against a particular project for other things. And this will essentially ensure that the real estate Ponzi scheme will continue.
Real estate companies will continue to launch new projects to raise money and use half of that money for things other than building the project for which they have raised the money for.
Also, this provision will allow the real estate companies to continue to hold on to their existing inventory and not sell it off at lower prices in order to pay off their debt, given that they can continue to raise money by launching a new project.
The question to ask here is why should a ‘new’ regulation allow money being raised for a particular project to be diverted to other things? It goes totally against the prospective buyers who are handing over their hard earned money(or taking on a big home loan) to the real estate company, in the hope of living in their own home.
A possible answer lies in the fact that if the government had regulated that the money raised for a project should used to build that project, it would have closed an easy way that the real estate companies have of raising money. This would have ultimately led to real estate prices coming down. And any crash in real estate prices would have hurt politicians who run this country, given that their ill-gotten wealth is stashed in real estate.

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

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Apr 21, 2015