Vivek Kaul
On July 3, 2013, the finance minister P Chidambaram asked government public sector banks to cut interest rates. There was nothing new about the finance minister’s diktat. He has asked public sector banks to cut interest rates, several times in the recent past. “Reduction in base (or floor) rate will be a powerful stimulus to boost credit growth,” said Chidambaram.
In a statement made today(July 5, 2013) D Subbarao, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, came out in support of Chidambaram. “When RBI cuts interest rates, expectation is that monetary transmission will take place and banks would respond. Some have responded and some haven’t,” Subbarao said. What Subbarao meant in simple English was that when RBI cuts interest rates, the expectation is that banks will also cut interest rates on loans.
But interest rates in India are much lower than they should be given the rate of consumer price inflation and the rate of economic growth. This is one of the well kept secrets of Indian banking.
The return on a 10 year government bond as of now is around 7.4%. A 10 year government bond is a bond sold by the Indian government to finance its fiscal deficit or the difference between what it earns and what it spends.
Anyone investing in a bond basically looks at three things: the expected rate of inflation, the expected rate of economic growth and some sort of risk premium to compensate for the risk of investing in the bond. These numbers are added to come up with the expected return on a bond.
The consumer price inflation in the month of May 2013 stood at 9.31%. As per most forecasts the Indian economy is expected to grow at anywhere between 5-6% during this financial year (i.e. the period between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014).
Lets assume that lending to the Indian government is considered to be totally risk free and hence consider a risk premium of 0%. Also to keep things simple, lets assume a consumer price of inflation of 9% and an expected economic growth of 5.5% during the course of the year. When we add these numbers we get 14.5%.
This is the rough return that a 10 year Indian government bond should give. But the return on it is around 7.4% or half of the projected 14.5%.
Why is that the case? The reason for that is very simple. Indian banks need to maintain a statutory liquidity ratio of 23% i.e. for every Rs 100 that a bank raises as a deposit, it needs to compulsorily invest Rs 23 in government bonds.
Hence, banks(and in turn citizens) are forced to lend to the government. Similarly, Life Insurance Corporation of India also invests a lot of money in government bonds. So there is a huge amount of money that gets invested in government bonds. This ensures that returns on government bonds are low in comparison to what they would really have been if people and banks were not forced to lend to the government.
The return on government bonds acts as a benchmark for interest rates on all other kind of loans. This is because lending to the government is deemed to the safest, and hence the return on other loans has to be greater than that, given the higher risk.
The 10 year bond yield or return is currently at 7.4%. The average base rate for banks or the minimum rate a bank is allowed to charge to its customers, is around 10.25%. So most loans are made at rates of interest higher than 10.25%. The difference between the 10 year bond yield and the average base rate of banks is around 285 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage).
If the 10 year bond yield would have been at 14.5%, then the interest rates on loans would have been greater than 17%(14.5% + 285 basis points). But since the government forces people to lend to it, the interest rates are lower. This act of the people being forced to lend to the government is referred to as financial repression.
Economist Stephen D King in his book When the Money Runs Out makes an interesting point about financial repression in the context of western economies. As he writes “our savings will increasingly be diverted to government interests, whether or not those interests really deliver a good rate of return for society.”
While this may happen in the Western societies as governments resort to financial repression to repay the huge amounts of debt that they have accumulated, it is already happening in India.
Financial repression is a major reason behind the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government going in for a large number of harebrained social programmes (the most recent being the right to food security, which has been brought in through the ordinance route). They know that money required for all these programmes can easily be borrowed because 23% of all bank deposits need to be invested in government bonds issued to finance the excess of government expenditure over revenue.
This is also why interest rates offered on bank fixed deposits are close to the rate of consumer price inflation, leading to a zero per cent real rate of return on investment. This is also makes people buy gold and real estate and invest in Ponzi investment schemes, in search of a higher rate of return. The cost of financial repression is being borne by the citizens of this country.
Also, the idea behind Chidambaram’s call for lower interest rates is that people are likely to borrow and spend more. And this in turn will get economic growth going again. Theoretically this just sounds perfect.
But then theory does not always match practice. Banks raise deposits at a certain rate of interest and then give out loans at a higher rate of interest. So unless the interest rate offered on deposits goes down, the rate of interest charged on loans cannot come down.
Banks are not in a position to cut interest rates on deposits as of now (As I have explained here). Hence, it is not possible for them to cut interest rates on loans. Any bank which cuts interest rates on loans will essentially end up with lower profits.
Also even if interest rates on loans are cut, it may not lead to people borrowing and spending money. There are several reasons for the same. Lets first consider car loans.
Car sales have fallen for the last eight months in comparison to the same period during the year before. High interest rates are a reason offered time and again for slowing car sales. But some simple maths tells us that can’t really be the case.
Lets consider the case of an individual who borrows Rs 5 lakh to buy a car at an interest rate of 12% repayable over a period of 7 years. The equated monthly instalment for this works out to Rs 8826. Lets say the bank is able to cut the interest rate by 0.5% to 11.5%. In this case the EMI works out to Rs 8693, or Rs 133 lower. Even if the bank cuts interest rates by 1%, the EMI goes down by Rs 265 only. If we consider a lower repayment period of 5 years, an interest rate cut of 0.5% leads to an EMI cut of Rs 126. An interest rate cut of 1% leads to an EMI cut of Rs 251. The point is that no one is going to go buy a car because the EMI has come down by a couple of hundred rupees.
This is something the people who run car companies seem to understand. As Arvind Saxena, managing director, Volkswagen Passenger Cars, told DNA in an interview carried out in late January 2013 “Fundamentally nothing has changed that should really prop up sales. If interest rates go down by 25 or 50 basis points, it doesn’t change anything overnight.”
RC Bhargava, a car industry veteran and the Chairman of Maruti Suzuki India was more vociferous than Saxena of Volkswagen when he told Business Standard in a recent interview “In India, over 70 per cent of car purchases are financed by banks. An interest rate reduction of, say, one percentage point doesn’t change a person’s decision of buying or not buying a car…With the uncertainties prevalent today, a consumer does not know what his job would be like after a year – whether or not he will have an incremental income, or even a job.”
Of course when people are not buying cars, it is unlikely they will buy homes, unless we are talking about those who have to put their black money to use. A cut in interest rates will bring down EMIs significantly on home loans. But even with lower EMIs people are unlikely to buy homes. This is because the cost of homes especially in cities has gone up big time making them totally unaffordable for most people.
The broader point is that just asking banks to cut interest rates doesn’t make any sense without trying to address the other issues at play.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 5, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Car Sales
Why cutting interest rates will have little impact on industrial production
Vivek Kaul
The index of industrial production (IIP), a measure of the industrial activity in the country, grew by a meagre 2% in April 2013, in comparison to the same period during 2012. The index was expected to grow by around 2.4% (source: India: Weak growth and sticky retail inflation. Sonal Varma and Aman Mohunta, Nomura). In the month of March 2013, the index had grown by 3.4%.
This slowdown of industrial growth reflected in the low IIP number is expected to lead to call for a cut in the repo rate by the Reserve Bank of India(RBI). Everyone from the Finance Minister to business lobbies to business leaders are expected to join the chorus. The logic is that at lower interest rates people will borrow and spend more, so will businesses. This will create demand and thus help revive overall industrial activity and in turn the overall economy. Repo rate is the interest rate at which the RBI lends to banks.
Naina Lal Kidwai, President of Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told The Economic Times “Consumer durables segment registered one of its highest falls since 2009 and calls for moderation in interest rates to stimulate demand.”
Similar statements were made by Presidents of CII and ASSOCHAM, the other two industry bodies.
But there are several reasons why a cut in interest rate by the RBI may not work.
During the last one year the banks have lent around Rs 83 out of every Rs 100 that they have borrowed. Ideally they should not be lending more than Rs 70 out of every Rs 100 that they borrow. This is because banks need to maintain a cash reserve ratio of 4% i.e. for every Rs 100 that they raise as a deposit, they need to deposit Rs 4 with the RBI.
Banks also need to maintain a statutory liquidity ratio of 23%. For every Rs 100 that banks raise as a deposit, Rs 23 needs to be compulsorily invested in government securities. Government securities are essentially bonds issued by the central and the state governments to borrow money to make up for the difference between what they earn and what they spend.
What this means is that for every Rs 100 that banks raises as a deposit, Rs 27 gets taken out of the equation straight away (Rs 23 as SLR and Rs 4 as CRR). That leaves around Rs 73 to lend (Rs 100 – Rs 27). So in a healthy situation a bank shouldn’t be lending more than Rs 70 out of every Rs 100 that it raises as a deposit.
But as we see above, banks have lent Rs 83 out of every Rs 100 that they have raised as a deposit during the last one year. This means they haven’t been able to raise deposits as fast as they gone around lending money. Hence, interest rates on deposits cannot be brought down because banks need to correct this mismatch between deposits and loans, by raising deposits at a faster rate.
So even if the RBI cuts the repo rate, the question is will the banks be able to match that cut? As explained above that seems unlikely.
But for the sake of argument lets assume that the RBI cuts the repo rate and the finance ministry is at least able to push the public sector banks to cut interest rates. And if public sector banks cut interest rates on loans, chances are even the private sector banks may have to match them to remain competitive.
This may or may not happen, and at the cost of reiterating let me state that I am only trying to make a point here. Lets consider the car industry, which is a very good representation of overall industrial activity. As TN Ninan wrote in a column in Business Standard in January 2013, “The car industry is a key economic marker, because of its unmatched backward linkages – to component manufacturers, tyre companies, steel producers, battery makers, glass manufacturers, paint companies, and so on – and forward linkages to energy demand, sales and servicing outlets, et al.”
As is well known by now car sales have been slowing down over the last seven months. In the month of May 2013, car sales were down by 12.3%. When car sales are down it obviously means that car companies will report lower sales and profits, unless they manage to cut costs dramatically, which is not possible beyond a point. What it also means is that car companies will not produce as many cars as they can given their production capacity. As has been reported on Firstpost, Maruti, India’s largest car maker, did not make any cars on June 7, 2013. This for a company which makes 5000 cars every day.
When a car-maker does not make cars it obviously slows down industrial activity. It also slows down the production of every company which provides inputs to a car company. This ranges everyone from steel companies to paint companies to tyre companies to battery manufacturers to steering manufacturers and so on. And this in turn slows-down the overall industrial activity.
To revive industrial activity, hence it is important that more cars are sold. And more cars will be sold when loans are available at low interest rates, goes the logic. But lets try and understand why this logic doesn’t work hold.
Lets consider the case of an individual who borrows Rs 4 lakh to buy a car at an interest rate of 12% repayable over a period of 7 years. The equated monthly instalment for this works out to Rs 7061. Lets say the bank is able to cut the interest rate by 0.5% to 11.5%. In this case the EMI works out to Rs 6955, or Rs 106 lower.
Even if the bank cuts interest rates by 1%, the EMI goes down by Rs 212 only.
If we consider a lower repayment period of 5 years, an interest rate cut of 0.5% leads to an EMI cut of Rs 100. An interest rate cut of 1% leads to an EMI cut of Rs 200.
So the bottomline is that an individual will not go and buy a car just because the EMI has come down by Rs 100 or Rs 200. There is something else at work here. And the logic that people are not buying cars because interest rates are high just doesn’t hold.
As RC Bhargava, a car industry veteran and the Chairman of Maruti Suzuki India told Business Standard in a recent interview “In India, over 70 per cent of car purchases are financed by banks. An interest rate reduction of, say, one percentage point doesn’t change a person’s decision of buying or not buying a car…With the uncertainties prevalent today, a consumer does not know what his job would be like after a year – whether or not he will have an incremental income, or even a job.”
So people are not buying cars simply because they are insecure and are not sure whether they will be able to hold on to their jobs in order continue paying their EMIs. And given that they wan’t to avoid the risk of defaulting on their EMIs. Hence, cutting interest rates are in no way going to help kick-start car sales. Also, if the logic of cutting interest rates leading to people buying cars does not hold, there is no question of it working for consumer durables as well, Kidwai’s statemnt notwithstanding.
Real estate is another sector which has strong linkages with other sectors like steel and cement. A cut in interest rates will bring down EMIs significantly on home loans. But even with lower EMIs people are unlikely to buy homes. This is because the cost of homes especially in cities has gone up big time. And even the lower EMIs will be very high for most people. Hence the sector continues to be in a dump and is likely to continue to be in one.
Given this, all the talk about lower interest rates improving the industrial activity and in turn economic growth, is at best just talk, and needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on June 13, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Why car sales are falling but not realty prices
Car sales for the month of February 2013 are down dramatically. For the month of February 2013 they fell by 25.71% to 1,58,513 units in comparison to the same month last year.
In this column yesterday, this writer argued that falling car sales is a reflection of the overall economy slowing down. People expect the bad times to either continue or to get even worse in the months to come. And this makes them hold onto the money they would have otherwise used to buy high cost items like a car. It also means that they do not want to commit to an EMI right now. Given these reasons car sales have slowed down.
The question that immediately cropped up was that if car sales are falling, using the same logic real estate sales should also be falling and that should lead to a fall in real estate prices. If cars are a big ticket purchase, then buying a house is the biggest expenditure that most people incur during their lifetime. Also the price of cars over the last few years hasn’t risen much whereas the price of homes has gone through the roof, making them terribly expensive.
So why are people ready to buy homes but not cars? The answer of course is not straightforward. But before I come to that allow me to deviate a little.
The economist George Akerlof wrote a research paper titled The Market for Lemons in 1970. For this paper, Akerlof ultimately received the Nobel Prize. In this paper he discusses the market for second hand cars (or used cars) and the problem people have in selling them.
Akerlof divided the second hand car market into two types of cars, peaches and lemons. Peaches were cars which were in a good shape where as lemons were cars which were in a bad shape. The individual selling the car obviously knows whether his car is a peach or a lemon but the individual buying the car doesn’t. So seller has what economists refer to as ‘insider information’ which the buyer doesn’t have.
The point is that in this transaction one side has much more information than the other side. So there is an asymmetry of information. As Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise – The Art and the Science of Prediction “In a market plagued by asymmetries of information, the quality of goods will decrease and the market will be dominated by crooked sellers and gullible and desperate buyers.”
The real estate market in India is a tad like that. The sellers have all the information in the world and buyers have very little of it, almost next to nothing. And this manifests itself into situations which do not benefit the buyers at all.
Allow me to explain. Everyone talks about how real estate prices have been going up. This writer was recently told by someone that the flat he had bought in 2002 for around Rs 20-25 lakh was now going for Rs 2 crore. Fair point. But are there transactions happening at such an expensive price point? And if they are happening how are they in comparison to the past?
The point is that just looking at the price doesn’t give us the answer. One also has to look at the number of buyers looking to buy at that price point because only that can tell us how strong the trend is.
Unfortunately such kind of information is not available to most buyers in India. Hence, people who sell real estate, all the brokers and property dealers of the world, deal with buyers from a position of strength and always try to project a scenario where prospective homes are scarce. The buyers have no clue of whether deals are actually happening or not and hence tend to believe the brokers.
A real estate index which tell us the broad direction of the market would be a great thing to have. While attempts have been made in the past to launch a real estate index, nothing robust has come out till date.
There are reasons to believe that people are not buying as much real estate as they were in the past. This is not conclusive evidence but some evidence nevertheless. Try reading any newspaper article which makes a pitch for the Reserve Bank of India cutting interest rates, the CEOs of real estate companies come across as the most desperate of the lot. This tells you at some level that they are not selling as much as they are building. But how will an interest rate cut of 25-50 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) lead to people buying homes is beyond me.
Newspapers provide another indicator. Every week the front page of one newspaper or another has an advertisement for a new real estate launch happening somewhere, where the buyer has to put a minuscule portion of the cost of the home upfront. This money that is raised is typically used by the builder to payoff money that is due instead of building the homes that he has advertised. A story in The Carvan Magazine makes this point by quoting a property dealer : “If these builders were suddenly asked not to sell any more projects, I’m telling you, most of them couldn’t balance their books tomorrow.” So in effect most real estate companies are running Ponzi schemes where they are using money being brought in by the newer investors to pay off the older investors. As long as this Ponzi scheme keeps going real estate prices will continue to be high. If newer investors stop bringing in money, the builders will have to start selling the homes that they have built in order to pay off people who they owe money to.
Another interesting number is the proportion home loans form out of total loans given by banks. Home loans peaked at 12.9% of total banking credit in March 2006. As on December 28, 2012, they formed around 9.3% of total banking credit. And this in a scenario where housing prices have gone up many times between March 2006 and December 2012. Hence, it would only fair to assume that people are buying a fewer number of homes, at least by taking on home loans.
So if people are buying fewer homes why are the prices not falling? Those who work in the real estate industry would like us to believe that the cost of constructing a house has gone up. While that may be true to some extent the argument doesn’t justify the astonishing levels of price rise.
The material used in construction of a house and other forms of real estate was and continues to be easily available. Lumber which is used in large amounts is a renewable resource. Glass is made out of quartz, the second most common mineral on earth. Gypsum, which is the main constituent of plaster as well as wall board is very commonly available mineral. Cement is made out of limestone which forms 10% of all sedimentary rock formations on earth. (Source: The Subprime Solution by Robert Shiller). That leaves out the price of land on which the homes are constructed. We will just come to that.
A major reason for home prices not coming down despite the stagnant demand for homes is the fact that the market is dominated by investors/speculators and not real buyers who buy homes because they want to live in them. Anybody who has doubts about this can take a walk through the newer areas of the National Capital Territory. Most of the flats remain empty, giving an eerie feeling of a ghost town. All these flats are owned by investors/speculators. And it is these people who keep playing a game of passing the parcel among themselves and in a way ensure that prices of homes do not fall. Also they have made so much money in the past (and given that most of it is black money) they are in no hurry to sell these homes.
The story in The Caravan quotes a property dealer to make a similar point. “There isn’t a bubble of real homes…If all these apartments were actually built, and built fairly to schedule, I guarantee you that they would find real buyers. The demand is out there. But there is a huge bubble in imaginary homes—in homes that will be delayed indefinitely or just never get built.”
Also most of the black money in India finds its way into property one way or another. Most of the ill-gotten wealth of politicians is also deployed in property. And any fall in price of real estate would mean the value of their wealth coming down.
But at the end of the day there is only so much black money going around as well. What creates the illusion of the real estate prices continuing to remain high is the supply of land. While India does not have a scarcity of land like Japan does, the problem is that politicians control the supply of land. Every state and central and politician has land held in benami. And this is the real bubble that has kept home prices high.
As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations “Lately Indian businessmen have been regaling one another with accounts of a leading politician from Mumbai who is known to have amassed a huge wealth through property deals. At a private screening of a new Bollywood movie, this politician asked the producer to replay a particular song-and-dance number, over and over. When the producer asked if he was taken with the leading lady, the politician said no, he was eyeing the location and wondering where the producer had found such an attractive stretch of open space in Mumbai.”
If home prices have to come down, it is this link that needs to be broken.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on March 14, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Why falling car sales is bad news for almost everybody
Vivek Kaul
The great film director Alfred Hitchcock started making films in the early 1920s in Great Britain. This was the era of silent movies. But Hitchcock really came into his own once he moved to Hollywood, where he first made the very dark Rebecca in 1940. For the next twenty years Hitchcock was at his peak churning out one hit film after another. This lasted till he made his scariest movie Psycho in 1960.
Among the many classics that he made during the period was a movie called Rear Window (which Ashutosh Gowariker before he became a director of epic movies tried to copy as Pehla Nasha). The movie tells a story of a photographer Jeff who has broken his leg and is bed ridden. A nurse called Thelma is taking care of him.
Jeff and Thelma are shown to be having conversations throughout the movie. One such conversation is reproduced below.
Stella: You heard of that market crash in ’29? I predicted that.
Jeff: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?
Stella: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” Overproduction, I says; collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.
In the conversation above Stella tells Jeff that she had predicted the stock market crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression, once she figured out that General Motors was in trouble because they were not selling enough and as a result overproducing.
While Stella’s claim of having predicted the stock market crash was a little far fetched, the conversation in a very simple way shows the clear link that exists between the automobile industry of a country and its overall economy. General Motors got into trouble only when the American economy was in trouble and this in turn added to the troubles of the American economy further. So when car sales are down dramatically it is a reflection of the overall economy being in a bad shape and the stiuation probably worsening in the days to come.
The domestic passenger car sales in India hit a twelve year low for the month of February 2013 when they fell by 25.71% to 1,58,513 units in comparison to the same month last year. In February 2012, domestic passenger car sales were at 2,13,362 units. This is the biggest decline in domestic passenger car sales since December 2000, when sales had declined by 39.9%.
In fact for the period between April 2012 and February 2013, car sales were down by 4.6%. This is a reflection of the overall state of the Indian economy, which is slowing down considerably.
Lets look at the points one by one. Household savings have gone down from 25.2% of the GDP in 2009-2010(the period between April 1, 2009 and March 31, 2010) to 22.3% of the GDP in 2011-2012(the period between April 1, 2011 and March 31, 2012). While the household savings number for the current year is not available, the broader trend in savings has been downward.
So people have been saving lesser over the last few years. A straightforward explanation for this is the high inflation that has prevailed over the last few years. The consumer price inflation for the month of February 2013 stood at 10.91% in comparison to 10.79% for the month of January 2013. Food prices in February 2013 rose at a much faster 13.73%.
People are possibly spending greater proportions of their income to meet the rising expenses due to high inflation and this has in turn led to a lower savings rate. High inflation would not have been a problem if incomes also had been growing at a fast rate. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Estimates released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation clearly point that out. As a release dated February 7,2013, states “The per capita income in real terms (at 2004-05 prices) during 2012-13 is likely to attain a level of Rs.39,143 as compared to the First Revised Estimate for the year 2011-12 of Rs. 38,037. The growth rate in per capita income is estimated at 2.9 per cent during 2012-13, as against the previous year’s estimate of 4.7 per cent.”
So prices have been growing at a very fast rate and incomes haven’t. In this scenario people have been cutting down on the consumption of high costs items like cars as they struggle to save the same amount of money as they had been doing in the past.
High inflation and lower household savings has also led to higher interest rates, which in turn has meant higher EMIs on automobile loans. This also has had its impact on car sales. And high inflation is here to stay. As Ruchir Sharma, a Managing Director & Head of Emerging Markets and Global Macro, Morgan Stanley Investment Managemen, recently said “The whole issue is that inflation is symptomatic of a wider problem in India.”
What has not helped is the fact that the government borrowing to finance its increased fiscal deficit(the difference between what it earns and what it spends) has also gone up over the last few years. Banks have had a lower pool of money to borrow from because of this and have had to offer higher interest rates to attract depositors. Higher interest rates on deposits have meant higher interest rates on loans and thus higher EMIs.
But the greater impact has been because of the government deciding to allow the price of petrol and diesel to go up. With the government holding back the price of petrol and diesel for a very long time, prospective car buyers kept buying cars because they were not feeling the pinch of the high cost of fuel. Now any prospective car buyer also needs to take the high cost of fuel into account while making a decision. Since people were not paying the right price for diesel and petrol, this had artificially held up the demand for cars. Now that demand is coming down crashing. The point is that any artificial demand cannot hold up beyond a point.
What this also tells us is that if the government had allowed the market to operate when it came to fuel prices, auto demand would have not come crashing down as it has, but would have adjusted gradually to a change in higher fuel prices. And you don’t need to be an expert to understand that a gradual adjustment is better than a dramatic fall.
Now this is just one part of the story which explains why car sales have slowed down dramatically. But there is another part to the story. Slowing car sales also slow down other sectors of the economy as well, and this slows down the overall economy further. As T N Ninan wrote in a brilliant column in Business Standard in January 2013 “The car industry is a key economic marker, because of its unmatched backward linkages – to component manufacturers, tyre companies, steel producers, battery makers, glass manufacturers, paint companies, and so on – and forward linkages to energy demand, sales and servicing outlets, et al.”
In that context the fall of car sales by more than 25% in the month of February 2013 should be a clear sign of worry. Slowing car sales are also a reflection of the fact that people expect the bad times to either continue or to get even worse in the months to come. And this makes them hold onto the money they would have used to buy a car otherwise. It also means that they do not want to commit to an EMI right now.
Floyd Norris writing in The New York Times explains it best: “New-car sales can be a particularly sensitive economic indicator because few people really need to buy a new car, and thus tend not to do so when they feel uncertain about their economic prospects. Even if a car purchase can no longer be delayed, a used car is an alternative.”
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on March 12, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)