Central bank governors rarely indulge in any plain speak. You have to always read between the lines to understand what they are really saying. They never say what they mean. And they never mean what they say.
But D Subbrarao, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, indulged in some plain speaking on Wednesday and questioned the logic of the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal setting up a Rs 500 crore relief fund to compensate the losses of those people who had invested in deposits raised by the Saradha Group in West Bengal.
A part of this relief fund will be funded by a 10% tax on cigarettes and the rest of the money will be raised through other sources. “If you go back to the West Bengal Saradha scheme, the Chief Minister said ‘I will levy additional taxes on cigarettes and some other things to compensate the people who have lost money’ … Is it fair?” Subbarao asked.
Why should people who smoke fund those whose money has gone up in smoke, is a reasonable question to ask. It is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Subbarao also dwelled into why Ponzi schemes like Saradha have become fairly popular. “The reason it (the Ponzi schemes) is happening because ordinary people… the low income people are not sufficiently aware of where they can put their money. They don’t have enough avenues to put their money. They can’t get into the banks like we all do. They face both formal and informal barriers…So they fall prey to these fraudulent schemes,” Subbarao explained.
This is an explanation similar to the one his deputy K C Chakrabarty had come up with a few days back when he said: “The need of the hour is to ensure that our unbanked population gains access to formal sources of finance, their reliance on informal channels and on the shadow banking system subsides and, in the process, consumer exploitation is curbed.”
This is a very one-dimensional explanation of why Ponzi schemes have become so popular in India in the last few years. Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scheme where the money being brought in by newer investors is used to pay off older investors. The scheme offers high returns and it keeps running till the money being brought in by the newer investors is greater than the money needed to pay off the older investors whose investment is up for redemption. The moment this breaks, the scheme collapses.
This writer has explained in the past that lack of a bank in their neighbourhood is not a reason good enough to explain why people invest money in Ponzi schemes. Many of the Ponzi schemes over the last few years have been very popular in urban as well as semi-urban areas, where there are enough number of banks going around. At the same time some of the Ponzi schemes have even needed bank accounts to ensure participate. So saying that people invest in Ponzi schemes because there are not enough banks going around, is not good enough. There are other bigger factors at work.
Ponzi schemes have become a big menace in India over the last few years. There numbers have gone up many times over. While there is no hard data to support the claim, but there is enough anecdotal evidence going around. Be it Speak Asia or Stock Guru or MMM India or Emu Ponzi schemes etc, there has been endless list of Ponzi schemes hitting the market.
This has also been a period of high inflation where interest offered on fixed deposits and postal savings deposits, has been very low or even negative once it is adjusted for inflation. There are other reasons as well why people find fixed deposits and postal savings deposits unattractive.
As Ila Patnaik wrote in a recent column in The Indian Express “Even those who have access often find it unattractive. Interest rates paid to depositors have been pushed down through years of policies of administered interest rates and lack of competition in banking. Regulatory requirements for priority sector lending and holding of government bonds have further resulted in lower returns. The result is low or negative real interest rates for depositors.”
It has been an era where bank fixed deposits have offered around 9% interest before tax when the inflation has been at 10% or more. The returns from post office savings deposits have been even lower than bank fixed deposits. Hence, in the strictest sense of the term, money deposited in banks or post office, has essentially been a losing proposition, given the high inflationary scenario that has prevailed.
And not surprisingly in this situation people have been looking at other investment avenues where there is a prospect of making higher returns. Gold has been one such investment avenue. As the Economic Survey released by the government in late February this year pointed out “Gold imports are positively correlated with inflation. High inflation reduces the return on other financial instruments… This observation, in line with global trends, is easily explained by the declining real returns on the gamut of financial instruments available to the investor and soaring ones on gold (23.7 per cent annual average return between April 2007 – March 2012 versus 7.3 per cent return on Nifty and 8.2 per cent on savings deposits).”
So money came into gold because there was a prospect of earning a high real return instead of bank and post office deposits where the individual would have actually lost money after adjusting for high inflation.
A similar explanation can be offered for people investing their hard earned money in Ponzi schemes like Saradha. They were looking for a higher return which helped them at least beat the rate of inflation. And this is where Ponzi schemes like Saradha came in. These schemes offered deposits which promised higher returns than bank or post office deposits.
As an article in the Business Standard pointed out “Sen(in reference to Sudipta Sen who ran Saradha) offered fixed deposits, recurring deposits and monthly income schemes. The returns promised were handsome. In fixed deposits, for instance, Sen promised to multiply the principal 1.5 times in two-and-a-half years, 2.5 times in 5 years and 4 times in 7 years. High-value depositors were told they would get a free trip to “Singapur”.”
In case of Saradha, the credibility it had built through its media empire as well as being seen closely aligned to the ruling Trinamool Congress, also helped. The deposits being raised may have even been seen as very safe, by those investing.
The other thing that has happened over the last few years is that household savings have come down. In 2009-2010 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2009 and March 31, 2010), savings stood at 25.2% of the gross domestic product (GDP). In 2011-2012 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2011 and March 31, 2012) the savings had fallen by nearly three percentage points to 22.3% of the GDP.
This has primarily happened because of high inflation which has pushed up expenditure as a proportion of total income. But incomes haven’t gone up at the same pace. And this has led to a fall in savings.
Given that savings of people have come down, there might be a temptation to invest them in avenues where they thought a higher return could be earned so as to ensure that investment goals continue to be on track, even with a lesser amount of savings being invested. This might have increased people’s appetite for taking on investment risk.
Hence, high inflation may have had a big role to play in people investing their money in Ponzi schemes. And we all know who is to be blamed for that.
Inflation has had Subbarao worried for a while now. “There is an important constituency in the country that is hurt by inflation. Their voice also needs to be heard. It is the responsibility of public policy institutions like the Reserve Bank to go out of our way and listen to silent voices,” the RBI governor said on Wednesday.
To conclude, it is very easy to argue that more Ponzi schemes spread because people people lack access to basic banking. But the reality is a little more complicated than that. As they say, truth is often stranger than fiction.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 9,2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
Dr K C Chakrabarty
Dear KC Chakrabarty, here’s the real reason why people invest in Ponzi shemes
Vivek Kaul
A standard explanation that seems to be emerging about why Ponzi schemes keep occurring in different parts of the country is that India does not have enough banks. And this lack of banks leads people to invest in fraudulent Ponzi schemes.
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scheme in which the illusion of high returns is created by taking money being brought in by new investors and passing it on to old investors whose investments are falling due and need to be redeemed.
K C Chakrabarty, the deputy governor, is the latest individual who has jumped onto the more banks equals fewer Ponzi schemes, bandwagon. “The fact that people have to rely on such entities for their saving needs indicates a failure on the part of the formal financial system to reach out to such groups and earn their trust and confidence through a transparent and responsive customer service regime,” Chakrabarty said yesterday.
“The need of the hour is to ensure that our unbanked population gains access to formal sources of finance, their reliance on informal channels and on the shadow banking system subsides and, in the process, consumer exploitation is curbed,” he added.
So what Chakrabarty is effectively saying is that only if people had a bank in their neighbourhood they would have stayed away from a Ponzi scheme like Saradha. While it simple to come to this conclusion which sounds quite logical, the truth is not as simple as it is being made out to be.
Lets consider a few Ponzi schemes that have done the rounds lately. MMM India which promises to double the investment every month, needs prospective investors to have bank accounts. So here is a Ponzi scheme which is using what Chakrabarty calls the ‘formal financial system’ to flourish.
Before that there was the Speak Asia Ponzi scheme. In this scheme investors needed to fill online surveys. Anyone who has access to internet in India is most likely to have access to a bank account as well. So people who invested in Speak Asia, did so because they wanted to not because they had no banks in their locality.
Then there are Ponzi schemes which involve investments in gold coins. People who can buy gold coins won’t have access to a bank account?
Or lets take the case of Emu Ponzi schemes which had become fairly popular in parts of Tamil Nadu. The pioneer among these schemes was Susi Emu Farms. It promised a return of at least Rs 1.44 lakh within two years, after an initial investment of Rs 1.5 lakh had been made. This was the model followed by nearly 100 odd emu Ponzi schemes that popped up after the success of Susi.
Again anyone who has Rs 1.5 lakh to invest in a Ponzi scheme will not have access to a bank? That is rather difficult to believe. As Dhirendra Kumar of Value Research puts it in a recent column“Could it be that all those people who put money into Saradha wouldn’t have done so if they had a bank in their neighbourhood? Very unlikely. A lot of the deposits seem to have come from towns where there would have been banks. Moreover, almost every ponzi scheme that has come to light in the last few years has actually flourished in towns and cities. The investors who fell for StockGuru or the Emu farms or other schemes all had access to legitimate alternatives.”
So what is it that gets people to put their hard earned money into Ponzi schemes rather than deposit it into banks? The simple answer is ‘greed’. We all want high returns from the investments we make. And Ponzi schemes typically offer significantly higher rates of return than other investment options that are available at any point of time.
Having said that ‘higher returns’ are not the only reason that lures people into Ponzi schemes. There are other factors at work, which along with the lure of higher returns, ends up making a deadly cocktail.
Typically people do not like handing over money to someone they do not know. In small towns, people end up investing money into a Ponzi scheme through an agent they happen to know. So even though they have no clue about the company they are investing in, they feel they are doing the right thing because they know the agent.
In the case of Saradha, agents of Peerless General Finance and Investment were used to collect money. Peerless had a good reputation among the people of West Bengal, having been in the business of collecting small savings since 1932. This helped Saradha establish the trust that it needed to, during its initial days of operation.
As a report in The Indian Express points out “The selection of agents, a crucial link in the chain, was done very carefully by Saradha. Those picked were generally ones who wielded influence in their locality and in whom people had confidence.”
What also helps is the fact that agents are paid reasonably high commissions, leading to a higher level of motivation and thus better service. The agents typically come to homes of prospective investors to get them to invest money. So clearly there is better service on offer unlike a bank. There is very little need for documentation ( PAN No, Address proof etc not required) as well, unlike is the case with a bank.
Let us briefly go back to the more banks fewer Ponzi schemes argument. As the Indian Express report cited earlier states “One important reason for chit funds mushrooming(they are really not chit funds, but Ponzi schemes) in West Bengal is the absence of easy access to banks and other financial institutions. According to an estimate of the state Finance Department, of the 37,000 villages in the state, nearly 27,767 have no bank branch.”
While villages may not have access to a bank, they do have access to post offices. And India Post runs many small savings schemes, in which people can deposit money. But in West Bengal people seemed to have stayed away from these schemes. A report published in December 2012, in The Hindu Business Line quotes Gautam Deb, a former housing minister as saying “small savings and post office collections in West Bengal during the April-October 2012 period were merely Rs 194 crore, against the targeted amount of Rs 8,370 crore.”
So why did people stay away from the post office schemes and get into Ponzi schemes? For one the returns offered on Ponzi schemes were significantly higher. The second reason obviously is the significantly better level of service that Ponzi schemes offer with agents getting higher commissions.
In fact, there are no commissions on offer for selling post office savings schemes. As Kumar points out in his column “The post office offers excellent schemes with a huge reach in rural and semi-urban areas but can it compete on sales and marketing? In fact, when the government eliminated commissions on PPF and other deposits in post offices in 2011, it effectively eliminated whatever little sales muscle there was.”
The formal financial system thus finds it very difficult to compete with unscrupulous operators like Saradha. It is not easy for it to offer higher commissions as and when it wants to simply because it has got rules and regulations to follow. As Kumar puts it “They (i.e. the Ponzi schemes) spend much more on sales commissions, on offices, keeping politicians happy and getting media coverage because they can just dip into the deposited money for all these expenses. Therefore, even if legitimate financial services are available passively, they won’t be able to compete.”
Another reason why the people of West Bengal fell for Saradha was the fact that the Ponzi scheme came to be very closely associated with Trinamool Congress, the party that rules the state. The ‘formal financial system’ cannot afford to do anything like that.
When we take all these reasons into account it is safe to say that the more banks fewer Ponzi schemes argument doesn’t really work. Even if more banks are established, the banks will not be able to compete with the level of service and commissions that Ponzi schemes can offer. Hence, it is very important that unscrupulous operators who are caught running Ponzi schemes are punished and justice is delivered as soon as possible. This will ensure that anyone who wants to start a Ponzi scheme will think twice before he acts. And that is the best way to protect people from Ponzi schemes.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 3, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)