Vivek Kaul
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) led by Raghuram Rajan presented the third monetary policy statement for the current year, yesterday. In the monetary policy it decided to maintain the repo rate at 7.25%. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark for the interest rates that banks pay for their deposits and in turn charge on their loans.
The decision of the RBI not to raise interest rates was widely along expected lines and needs no further discussion. Nevertheless, something that RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said during the course of the press conference that followed the monetary policy statement yesterday, is something that needs to be discussed.
Rajan talked about the merits of having a monetary policy committee (MPC) to decide on the monetary policy. The governor currently makes the monetary policy decisions. He is advised by the technical advisory committee which was set up during the time YV Reddy was the governor of the RBI between 2003 and 2008. At the end of the day the technical advisory committee just advises and the final decision lies with the RBI governor.
In the budget speech made in February earlier, this year the finance minister Arun Jaitley had said that: “We will move to amend the RBI Act this year, to provide for a Monetary Policy Committee.”
In the press conference that followed the monetary policy statement Rajan laid out the advantages of having a monetary policy committee decide on the interest rates, instead of just the governor. Rajan basically pointed out three advantages. As he said: “First, a committee can represent different viewpoints and studies show that its decisions are typically better than individuals.”
What does Rajan mean here? As James Surowiecki writes in The Wisdom of Crowds—Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few: “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with.”
So what does the group do? “Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms—like…intelligent voting systems—to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent not what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense, what they all think. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible,” writes Surowiecki.
And this is precisely what Rajan must be expecting from a monetary policy committee making monetary policy decisions rather than just the RBI governor. Rajan further pointed out that: “spreading the responsibility for decision making can reduce the internal and external pressure that falls on an individual.”
This is an interesting point. A RBI governor comes under tremendous pressure from the government as well as businessmen to cut interest rates, when he personally may not believe in doing so. The current finance minister (and even the previous one) has regularly spoken to the media and asked the RBI to cut interest rates.
Businessmen and lobbies representing them do the same thing as well. As Rajan said in a speech in February 2014: “what about industrialists who tell us to cut rates? I have yet to meet an industrialist who does not want lower rates, whatever the level of rates.” With a monetary policy committee all the pressure which is currently on the RBI governor can be distributed across the members of the committee.
Also, a monetary policy committee “will ensure broad monetary policy continuity when any single member, including the governor, changes.”
By making these three points, Rajan explained why a monetary policy committee is the way forward for RBI. A section of the media essentially projected this as Rajan falling in line with the government thinking on the issue. And that is totally incorrect. Allow me to explain.
Rajan took over as the RBI governor in September 2013. One of the first reports to be released after he took over was titled Report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework (better known as the Urjit Patel committee). It was released by the RBI in January 2014.
As this report pointed out: “Drawing on international experience, the evolving organizational structure in the context of the specifics of the Indian situation and the views of earlier committees, the Committee is of the view that monetary policy decision-making should be vested in a monetary policy committee.”
Hence, there is no way Rajan could have been against a monetary policy committee. If that were to be the case this paragraph would have never made it to the Urjit Patel committee report. So what made people say that Rajan had fallen in line?
The Urijit Patel committee had recommended that the monetary policy committee should have five members. As the report pointed out: “The Governor of the RBI will be the Chairman of the monetary policy committee, the Deputy Governor in charge of monetary policy will be the Vice Chairman and the Executive Director in charge of monetary policy will be a member. Two other members will be external, to be decided by the Chairman and Vice Chairman on the basis of demonstrated expertise and experience in monetary economics, macroeconomics, central banking, financial markets, public finance and related areas.”
The recently released Indian Financial Code did not agree with this. . Article 256 of the code points out: “The Monetary Policy Committee will comprise – (a) the Reserve Bank Chairperson as its chairperson; (b) one executive member of the Reserve Bank Board nominated by the Re- 20 serve Bank Board; (c) one employee of the Reserve Bank nominated by the Reserve Bank Chairperson; and (d) four persons appointed by the Central Government.”
The Indian Financial Code gave the government a majority in the monetary policy committee, with 4 out of seven members being appointed by the government. This was unworkable given that the government has entered into an agreement with the RBI. As per this agreement, the RBI will aim to bring down inflation below 6% by January 2016. From 2016-2017 onwards, the rate of inflation will have to be between 2% and 6%.
This clearly was not possible with government nominees dominating the monetary policy committee. The government always wants lower interest rates. And given that it would have been very difficult for the RBI to control inflation.
There were a lot of negative comments on this attempt by the government to indirectly take over the functioning of the RBI. Not surprisingly the government has now washed its hands of this recommendation.
During the course of the press conference Rajan hinted at the kind of structure he would prefer the monetary policy committee to take. He talked about the former finance minister P Chidambaram’s column in The Indian Express on August 2, 2015.
In this column Chidambaram talked about a six member committee, with three members from the RBI and three members appointed by the government. “In the case of a tie, let the governor have a casting vote. The minutes must be made public. Assuming the three internal members vote alike, the governor needs to persuade at least one external member to agree with him, and on most occasions he will. In situations where all three external members disagree with the three internal members, it will be a brave governor who will vote, every time, in his own favour to break the tie,” wrote Chidambaram.
I am no fan of Chidambaram, but I think for once he makes some sense.
The column was originally published on The Daily Reckoning on August 5, 2015
