Consumption

Why No One is Worried About Savers

Economists are like sheep. They like to move in a herd.

If one of them says that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and banks need to cut interest rates in order to revive the economy, largely everyone else follows.

This basically stems from the fact that the practitioners of economics like to think of the subject as a science, having built in all that maths into it over the decades.

In science, controlled experiments can be run and results can be arrived at. If these experiments are run again, the same results can be arrived at again.

The economists like to think of economics along similar lines. But then economics is not a science.

Take the case of the idea of a central bank and banks cutting interest rates when the economy of a country is not doing well. Why do economists offer this advise? The idea is that as banks cut interest rates, people will borrow and spend more.

At the same time corporates will borrow and expand, by setting up more factories and offices. This will create jobs. People will earn and spend more. Businesses will benefit. The economy will do better than it did in the past. And everyone will live happily ever after.

Okay, the economists don’t say the last line. I just added it for effect. But they do believe in everything else. Hence, they keep hammering the point of banks having to cut interest rates to get the economy going, over and over again. The corporates who pay these economists also like this point being made.

The trouble is that what the economists believe in doesn’t always turn out to be true. Or to put in a more nuanced way, there is a flip side to what they recommend. And I have seen very few professional economists talk about it till date. In fact, low interest rates hurt a large section of the population especially during an economic recession and contraction.

In India, a section of the population, is dependent on the level of interest rate on bank deposits (especially fixed deposits). Currently, the average interest rate on a fixed deposit is around 5.5% per year.

The inflation as measured by the consumer price index in September stood at 7.34%. Hence, the actual return on a fixed deposit is in negative territory. It has been in negative territory through much of this year. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that interest earned on fixed deposits is taxable at the marginal rate. After taking that into account the real return turns further negative.

This hurts people living off interest income, in particular senior citizens. Senior citizens whose fixed deposits have matured in the recent past have seen their interest income fall from around 8% per year to around 5.5% per year, in an environment where food inflation is higher than 10%.

The only way to keep going for them is to cut monthly expenses or start using their capital (or the money invested in fixed deposits) for regular expenses. It is worth remembering that India has very little social security and health facilities for senior citizens, as is common in developed nations.

Lower interest rates also impacts a large section of the population which saves for the future through bank fixed deposits. It is worth remembering that it is this section of the population which actually drives the private consumption in the country. When returns on their savings fall, the logical thing is to cut consumption and save more. If this is not done, then the future gets compromised on.

Lower interest rates hurt institutions like non-government organisations, charitable trusts etc., which save through the fixed deposit route.

The stock market wallahs love lower interest rates because a section of the population continues to bet on stocks despite the lack of company earnings. The price to earnings ratio of the stocks that constitute the Nifty 50, one of India’s premier stock market indices, is currently at more than 34.

Such high levels have never been seen before. It’s not the chances of future high earnings which have driven up stock prices but the current low interest rates, leading to more and more people trying to make a quick buck on the stock market. The government likes this because it feeds into their all is well narrative.

At the same time, given that the government is cash-starved this year, the stock market needs to continue to be at these levels for it to be able to sell its stakes in various public sector enterprises to raise cash.

Between March 27 and October 9, the deposits of banks (savings, current, fixed, recurring etc.) have increased by a whopping Rs 7.4 lakh crore or 5.4%. In the same time, the total loans of banks have shrunk by Rs 38,552 crore or 0.4%. This basically means people are repaying loans instead of taking on fresh ones, despite lower interest rates.

In this environment, with banks unable to lend out most of their fresh deposits, it is but natural that they will cut interest rates on their fixed deposits. You can’t hold that against them. That is how the system is adjusting to the new reality. But what has not helped is the fact that the RBI has been trying to drive down interest rates further by printing money and pumping it into the financial system.

Between early February and September end, the central bank has pumped more than Rs 11 lakh crore into the financial system.

Not all of it is freshly printed money, but a lot of it is. This has apparently been done to encourage corporates to borrow. The bank lending to industry peaked at 22.43% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012-13. Since then it has been falling and in 2019-20, it stood at 14.28% of the GDP. Clearly, Indian industry hasn’t been in a mood to borrow and expand for a while. Hence, the so-called high interest rates, cannot be the only reason for it.

The real reason for the RBI pumping in money into the financial system and driving down interest rates has been to help the government borrow money at low interest rates. As tax collections have fallen the government needs to borrow significantly more this year than it did last year.

All this has hurt the saver. But clearly unlike the corporates and the government, the savers are not organised. Hence, almost no one is talking about them. In the latest monetary policy committee meeting, there was just one mention of them.

One of the members had this to say: “With retail fixed deposit rates currently ranging between 4.90-5.50 per cent for tenors of 1-year or more and the headline inflation prevailing above that for some months now, there has been a negative carry for savers.”

We already know that no economist talks about this phenomenon or more specifically the fact that low interest rates and high inflation should have led to a cut down in consumption. How big and significant is that cutdown? How is it hurting the Indian economy?

Is this cutdown in consumption more than the loans given by banks because of low interest rates?

These are questions that need answers. But the problem is that to a man with a hammer everything appears like a nail. For economists interest rates are precisely that hammer which they like using everywhere. This situation is no different.

The trouble is their hammer doesn’t necessarily work all the time.

A shorter version of this column appeared in the Deccan Chronicle on October 25, 2020.

Why is the stock market going up when the economy is going down?

The total collections of the goods and services tax (GST) between March and July stood at Rs 2.73 lakh crore. This is 34.5% lower than what the government earned during the same period in 2019.

The stock market index Nifty 50 has rallied by 53% to 11,648 points between March 23 and August 28. It had touched this year’s low of 7,610 points on March 23.

So, what’s the point in comparing the Nifty 50 with GST collections? The GST is basically a tax on consumption. If the GST collections are down by more than a third, what that basically means is that private consumption is down majorly.

When consumption is down, the company earnings are bound to take a beating. Take the case of two-wheelers and cars. When people don’t buy as many of them as they used to, their production takes a beating. When that happens, it has an impact right down the value chain. It means lower production of steel, steering, glass, tyres, etc. A lower production of tyres means a lower demand for rubber.

A lower production on the whole means lower demand for power. Industrial power largely subsidises farm power and home power (where power is stolen). If industrial power consumption goes down, the losses of state electricity boards go up. When this happens, their ability to keep paying power generation companies goes down. When these companies don’t get paid, they are in no position to repay loans they have taken from banks. So, the cycle works.

Many people buy two-wheelers and cars on loans from banks and non-banking finance companies. When the buying falls, the total amount of loans given by banks also comes down. When banks don’t get enough loans, they need to cut the interest rate on their fixed deposits.

When this happens, people who are saving towards a goal, need to save more. This means they need to cut down on their consumption. Further, people who are largely dependent on interest from bank deposits will see their incomes fall. This means they need to cut down on their consumption as well.

This cycle will also lead to a fall company earnings. A Business Standard results tracker for 1,946 companies reveals that the sales of these companies for April to June 2020 were down 23.1% in comparison to the same period in 2019. The net profit for these companies was down 60.8%.

The stock market does not wait for things to happen. It discounted for this possibility and the Nifty fell by 32.1% between end February and March 23. The market was adjusting for an era of falling company earnings. But it didn’t stay at those low levels and has rallied by more than 50% since then.

The trouble now is that the valuations are way off the chart. The price to earnings ratio of the Nifty 50 index, as of August 28, stood at 32.92. This means that investors are ready to pay close to Rs 33 for every rupee of earning for stocks that make up the Nifty 50 index. Such a level has never been seen before. Not during the dotcom bubble era and not even during early 2008 when the stock market rallied to its then highest level.

Why has the stock market jumped as much as it has? Does this mean that the company earnings will jump big time in the near future? Not at all. The covid-induced recession is not going to go anytime quickly. Also, the pandemic is now gradually making its way into rural India.

So, why is the stock market rallying? The Western central banks led by the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank, have printed a lot of money post February, in order to drive down interest rates and get people and businesses to borrow and spend. The Federal Reserve has printed more than $2.8 trillion between February 26 and August 5. Some of this money has made it into India.

During this financial year, the foreign institutional investors have net invested a total of Rs 83,682 crore into Indian stocks, after going easy on investing in India over the last few years. This is clearly an impact of the easy money policies being run in much of the Western world.

Further, the participation of the retail investors in the stock market has increased during the course of this year. Between December 2019 and June 2020, the number of demat accounts has gone up by 39 lakhs or 10% to 4.32 crore accounts. In fact, between March end, after a physical lockdown to tackle covid was introduced, and up to June, the number of demat accounts has gone up by 24 lakhs.

The latest monthly bulletin of Securities and Exchange Board of India, the stock market regulator, points out: “We have seen a huge surge in participation of retail investors in the equity market in the last few months. The fact that there is also a surge in opening up of demat accounts suggests that many of these retail investors are perhaps first time investors in the stock market.”

With after tax return on bank fixed deposits down to 4-5% when inflation is close to 7%, these investors are coming to the stock market, in search of higher returns.

The question is, with the stock market at all time high valuations, will their good times continue? Or once the dust has settled, is another generation of investors ready to equate stock market investing to gambling? On that your guess is as good as mine.

This article originally appeared in the Deccan Herald on August 30, 2020.

Cut Interest Rates by 2 per cent: The New Economics of Nirmala Sitharaman

Nirmala Sitharaman Spokesperson 11, Ashoka Road, New Delhi - 110001.

BA Kiya Hai, MA Kiya,
Lagta Hai Wo Bhi Aiwen Kiya. – Gulzar in Mere Apne

The commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman wants the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) to cut the repo rate by 200 basis points.

Yes, you read that right!

200 basis points!

The repo rate is the rate at which banks borrow from the RBI on an overnight basis. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage. The repo rate currently stands at 6.5 per cent.

“I still hold that the cost of credit in India is high. Undoubtedly, particularly MSMEs which create a lot of jobs contribute to exports… are all hard pressed for money and for them, approaching a bank is no solution because of the prevailing rate of interest. I have no hesitation to say, yes 200 bps, I would strongly recommend,” Sitharam told the press yesterday in New Delhi.

What Sitharaman was basically saying is that India’s micro and small and medium enterprises(MSMEs) are not approaching banks for loans because interest rates are too high. Given this, the RBI should cut the repo rate by 200 basis points and in the process usher in lower interest rates for MSMEs.

This, according to Sitharaman, was important because MSMEs create a lot of jobs and contribute to exports, and hence, should be able to borrow at a lower interest rates, than they currently are. As per the National Manufacturing Policy of 2011, the small and medium enterprises contribute 45 per cent of the manufacturing output and 40 per cent of total exports.

Hence, Sitharaman was batting for the MSMEs. But is it as easy as that?

That politicians don’t understand economics, or at least pretend not to understand it, is a given. But Sitharaman is a post graduate in economics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. (You can check it out here). For her, to make such an illogical remark, is rather surprising.

Not that the RBI is going to oblige her, but for a moment let’s assume that it does, and cuts the repo rate by 200 basis points, in the next monetary policy statement, which is scheduled for October 4, 2016, or over the next few statements.

What is going to happen next? Will banks cut their lending rates by 200 basis points? Only, when the banks cut their lending rates by 200 basis points, is the MSME sector going to benefit.

Banks only borrow a small portion of money from the RBI on an overnight basis and pay the repo rate as interest. A major portion of the money that they lend is borrowed in the form of fixed deposits. Hence, lending rates cannot fall by 200 basis points, unless fixed deposit interest rates fall by at least 200 basis points. (I use the word at least because banks tend to cut deposit rates faster than lending rates).

Wil the banks cut deposit rates by 200 basis points? Let’s assume that they do. If the deposit rates are cut by such a huge amount at one go, people will not save money in fixed deposits. Money will move into post office savings schemes, which offer a significantly higher rate of interest in comparison to fixed deposits (which they do even now, but with a cut the difference will be substantial).

Over a longer period of time, money will also move into real estate and gold, as people start looking for a better rate of return, higher than the prevailing inflation. This will lead to the financial savings of the nation as a whole falling. And banks in order to ensure that deposits keep coming in, will have to reverse the 200 basis points cut and start raising interest rates.

This is precisely how things played out between 2009 and 2013, when household financial savings fell from 12 per cent of the GDP to a little over 7 per cent of the GDP. Meanwhile, the interest rates went up, in order to attract financial savings.

This is Economics 101, which a post graduate in economics from a premier university in the country, should be able to understand.

Another important issue that our politicians seem to forget, over and over again, is the importance of fixed deposits, as a mode of saving, in an average Indian’s life. In 2013-2014, the latest year for which data is available, 69.23 per cent of total household financial savings, were in deposits.

Of this nearly 62.02 per cent was with scheduled commercial banks and 4.19 per cent with cooperative banks and societies. Nearly 2.61 per cent was invested in deposits of non-banking companies.

What does this tell us? It tells us that for the average Indian, the fixed deposit is an important form of saving. For the retirees it is an important form of regular income. Now what happens if fixed deposit interest rates are cut by 200 basis points? The regular income from the fresh money that retirees invest, will come down dramatically. Also, when their old fixed deposits mature, they will have to be invested at a significantly lower rate of interest.

This means that they will have to limit their consumption in order to ensure that they meet their needs from the lower monthly income that their fixed deposits are generating.

What about those who use fixed deposits as a form of saving? (I know that fixed deposits are a terribly inefficient way of saving, but that is really not the point here). Those who are using fixed deposits to save money, for their retirement, for the education and wedding of their children, will now have to save more money, in order to ensure that they are able to create the corpus that they are aiming at. This will also mean lower consumption.

Ultimately lower consumption will impact MSMEs as well, because there won’t be enough buyers for what they produce, as people consume less.

Those individuals who are not in a position to save the extra amount in order to make up for lower interest rates, will end up with a lower corpus in the years to come.

The point being that MSMEs do not operate in isolation. And the level of interest rates impacts the entire economy and not just the MSMEs, as Sitharaman would like us to believe.

Further, even if fixed deposit rates fall by 200 basis points, banks may still not be able to offer low interest rates to MSMEs, simply because they need to charge a credit risk premium i.e. factor in the riskiness of the loan that they are maing.

In case of the State Bank of India, the gross non-performing assets of SMEs stands at 7.82 per cent, as on March 31, 2016. This means that for every Rs 100 that the bank has lent to an SME, close to Rs 8 has been defaulted on. This risk of default needs to incorporated in the interest rate that is being charged.

And finally, the interest rates on fixed deposits of greater than one year are currently in the region of 7 to 7.5 per cent. This is when the rate of inflation has already crossed 6 per cent. In July 2016, the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer price index was at 6.07 per cent.

If fixed deposit rates are cut by 200 basis points, the interest rates will fall to around 5 to 5.5 per cent. This when the rate of inflation is greater than 6 per cent. This would mean that the real rate of interest (the difference between the nominal rate and the rate of inflation) would be in a negative territory. This is precisely how things had played out between 2009 and 2013 and look at the mess it ended up creating for the Indian economy.

Given these reasons, it is best to say that Sitharaman’s prescription would be disastrous for the Indian economy.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on August 25, 2016

Why RBI Should Not Cut Interest Rate by 1%

 

RBI-Logo_8

In an interesting The Honest Truth column which was recently published, Ajit Dayal writes: “I think the RBI may charge ahead with a 100 basis points cut!” One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage. Hence, 100 basis points amount to 1%.

The Reserve Bank of India(RBI)’s next monetary policy statement is scheduled for April 5, 2016.

Dayal offers multiple reasons on why he thinks the RBI may cut the repo rate by 1%. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark for the short and medium term interest rates in the economy. I would highly recommend that you read Dayal’s column before you start reading mine.

The stock market wallahs always want lower interest rates because they believe that lower interest rates take the stock market to higher levels. The logic is that at lower interest rates people will borrow and spend more. They will buy more two-wheelers, cars, consumer durables and homes, and this will benefit companies. With this increase in consumption, earnings of companies are likely to go up, and the stock prices will adjust for it.

Further, it will also benefit companies which have a huge amount of debt. They will have to pay a lower amount of interest to service their existing debt. Third, the banks will benefit from the huge bond portfolios that they have.

As Dayal writes: “A 1% cut in interest rates would boost the value of the bond portfolios of banks by 10% to 15%. So, for every Rs 100,000 crore of bonds held by the banks, there will be a possible Rs 12,000 crore to Rs 15,000 crore surge in the net worth of the bank.”

Interest rates and bond prices are inversely related. As interest rates fall, bond prices go up. This is because investors want to stock up on bonds issued earlier, which pay a higher interest. This drives up the price of these bonds. As prices go up, this benefits banks which already own these bonds and they make higher profits.

While these reasons make sense, they present only a part of the picture. In this column, the point I will make is exactly the opposite of what Dayal is making i.e. RBI should not cut the repo rate by 1%, or at least not all at once.

There are multiple reasons for the same. First and foremost, the RBI cutting the repo rate is just a part of the process of the overall interest rates coming down. When the RBI cuts the repo rate, the banks need to pass on the cut to their borrowers as well. This happens by the banks cutting their deposit rates as well as their lending rates.

But what has happened in the Indian case is that banks have cut their deposit rates without cutting their lending rates at the same pace. As RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had said in December 2015 “Since the rate reduction cycle that commenced in January [2015], less than half of the cumulative policy repo rate reduction of 125 basis points has been transmitted by banks. The median base lending rate has declined only by 60 basis points.”

So a 100 basis points cut by the RBI will lead to banks cutting the interest rates on their deposits without cutting their lending rates at the same rate. Historically this is what banks have always done and there is no reason to believe that this time will be any different.

And this is not a good thing. Hence, it is best that the RBI cut the repo rate in a gradual way, 25 basis points at a time, wait to see whether the banks pass on the cut and then move further.

A new marginal cost based lending rate comes into the picture for banks from April 1, 2016. The RBI needs to wait to see how this pans out and whether banks actually go about cutting interest rates on their loans, as they are expected to.

Also, many economists and analysts look at interest rates just from the point of view of the borrower. But what about the saver? If the interest rates are cut dramatically the saver will have to save more to meet his or her financial goals, in the years to come. How about taking that into account as well?

Deposits with banks, non-banking companies and cooperative banks and societies, form a major part of household financial savings of Indians. In 2011-2012, 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, deposits formed 58%, 56% and 69% of the total household financial savings. Banks deposits made up for 53%, 50% and 62% of the total household financial savings. (The breakup for 2014-2015 is not available).

Hence, interest rates need to be viewed from the point of view of savers as well, given that a major part of savings are in bank deposits. The economist Michael Pettis makes a very interesting point about the relationship between interest rate and consumption in case of China.

As he writes in The Great Rebalancing: “Most Chinese savings, at least until recently, have been in the form of bank deposits…Chinese households, in other words, should feel richer when the deposit rate rises and poorer when it declines, in which case rising rates should be associated with rising, not declining, consumption.”

Given that a large portion of the Indian household financial savings are invested in bank deposits, any fall in interest rates should make people feel poorer and in the process negatively impact consumption, at least from the point of savers.

Also, people who are savings towards a goal will have to save more. Pettis explains this in his book through an example that one of his students told him about. As he writes: “According to my student, her aunt was planning to save a fixed amount of money for when her twelve-year-old son turned eighteen and was slated to go university. She had a certain amount of money already saved, but not enough, so she needed to add to her savings every month to achieve her target.”

A similar logic applies in the Indian case as well and needs to be taken into account whenever we talk about lower interest rates.

Rajan has often said in the past that he wants to maintain a real interest rate level of 1.5-2%. Real interest is essentially the difference between the rate of interest (in this case the repo rate) and the rate of inflation.

The consumer price inflation on which the RBI bases its monetary policy on, in February 2016, stood at 5.2%. If we add 1.5% to this, we get 6.7%, which is more or less similar to the prevailing repo rate. The current repo rate stands at 6.75%.

The last time I used this argument some readers on the social media pointed out that instead of using the repo rate, I should have used the interest rate on fixed deposits to make this argument.

I used the repo rate because that is what the RBI does. As a February 2016 newsreport of the PTI points out: “Deputy Governor Urjit Patel also defended the RBI move to take into account the repo rate, and not the deposit rates, while computing the real rate of interest, saying the rate set by RBI is a universal one which is relevant for the entire country.”

Nevertheless, let’s take the case of the interest rate that the State Bank of India pays on its fixed deposits for a period of 5-10 years. The interest rate is 7%.

The latest consumer price inflation is 5.2%. If we to add 1.5% to this, we get 6.7%. The SBI interest rate is 7%. Hence, there is a scope for 25 basis point repo rate cut from the RBI, if we use the bank fixed deposit interest rate to calculate the real rate of interest.

The interest rate offered by SBI on a fixed deposit of a tenure two years to less than three years, is 7.5%. If were to consider this while calculating the real rate of interest, then there is a scope for a 75 basis points rate cut by the RBI.

It is important that a real rate of interest of 1.5-2% is maintained in order to drive up the rate of household financial savings. In 2007-2008, the household financial savings had stood at 11.2% of the gross domestic product (GDP). By 2011-2012, they had fallen to 7.4% of GDP. Since then they have risen marginally. In 2014-2015, the household financial savings stood at 7.7% of GDP. This needs to go up.

This column originally appeared on the Vivek Kaul Diary on March 30, 2016