John Maynard Keynes

What do the new GDP numbers mean for the govt?

keynes_395
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – Attributed to John Maynard Keynes.

The Controller General of Accounts releases fiscal deficit numbers towards the end of every month. The latest set of numbers released late last week show that the fiscal deficit for the first nine months of the financial year between April to December 2014 was at 100.2% of its annual target.
The fiscal deficit target for the current financial year is Rs 5,31,177 crore. The government ran a fiscal deficit of Rs 5,32,381 crore or 100.2% of the targeted fiscal deficit during the first nine months of the financial year. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
In my columns so far I have remained sceptical on the ability of the government to meet its fiscal deficit target, given that the growth in its tax collections has been way off the mark than what it had assumed when it had presented the budget. But this might change in the days to come.
The reason for this is very simple—the fiscal deficit target that needs to be achieved is always expressed as a certain proportion of the gross domestic product(GDP) of the country. The GDP is a measure of all the goods and services produced in a country. It essentially tells how big the economy of a country is.
The GDP can be measured in multiple ways. As Diane Coyle writes in GDP—A Brief But Affectionate History: “You can add up all the output of the economy, all the expenditure in the economy, or all the incomes.” Theoretically these numbers should match. But they never do given the discrepancies that creep in at the time of collection of data. In this column we will discuss things from the point of view of output of the various sectors in the economy.
The finance minister Arun Jaitley had set an absolute fiscal deficit target of Rs 5,31,177 crore when he presented the budget in July 2014. This was essentially 4.1% of the projected GDP of Rs 12,876,653 crore in 2014-2015.
If the projected GDP goes up, the fiscal deficit as a proportion of the GDP automatically starts to come down. Essentially this is what will happen.
Last week, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released a new methodology to measure GDP. It changed the base year for measuring GDP from 2004-2005 to 2011-2012. The structure of the economy keeps changing. Hence, the GDP calculations also need to keep pace with this change. Over and above that the data that the government has access to keeps improving over the years, and this also needs to be incorporated in the way the GDP is calculated.
As Crisil Research points out in a research note released on February 2, 2015: “This base revision incorporates the changing structure of the economy, especially rural India. The revised series for GDP…in addition to change in some estimation methods, now also incorporate information from new datasets, in particular, Census 2011, annual account of companies as filed with Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), NSS Unincorporated Enterprise Survey (2010-11), NSS Employment-Unemployment Survey (2011-12), Agriculture Census (2010-11) and Livestock Census (2012), NSS All India Debt and Investment Survey (2013) and NSS Consumer Expenditure Survey (2011-12).”
This new GDP data essentially suggests that the Indian economy grew by 4.9% during 2012-13, and 6.6% during 2013-14. The earlier calculations had suggested that the Indian economy grew by 4.5% in 2012-2013 and 4.7% in 2013-2014.
While, there is not much difference in GDP growth in 2012-2013, between the new method and the old method, the difference in GDP growth in 2013-2014 is significant. One possible explanation for this lies in the fact that as per the new method of measuring GDP, the manufacturing sector grew by 5.3% in 2013-2014, whereas it had contracted by 0.7% as per the earlier method. A similar sort of dynamic seems to have played out with mining and quarrying sector as well. As per the old method the sector contracted by 1.4% in 2013-2014, whereas as per the new method the sector actually grew by 5.4%.
Also, trade, hotels, transport and communication grew by 3% as per the old method of measuring GDP. In the new method trade, repair, hotels and restaurants grew by 13.3%. Further, transport, storage, communication & services related to broadcasting grew by 7.3%.
The comparison does give us a drift of why the GDP growth was higher in 2013-2014 as per the new method. Nevertheless there are doubts being raised about this jump in growth from 4.7% to 6.6% in 2013-2014. The Chief Economic Adviser to the ministry of finance Arvind Subramanian told Business Standard in an interview that: “India is perhaps unique in that GDP revisions result in lower numbers rather than the typically high upward revisions…The key 2011-12 estimate of GDP is actually two per cent lower than previously estimated.” Given that, the 2011-2012 GDP is down by 2%, the growth in the latter years has been faster.
Further, it needs to be remebered that 2013-2014 was a crisis year for the Indian economy where external capital flowed out of India and interest rates had to be jacked up. Imports also fell. As Subramanian put it: “Import of goods apparently declined 10 per cent; this, even after accounting for the squeeze on gold imports, is high. Typically, growth booms are accompanied by surges in import, not declines.” At the same time inflation was very high slowding down consumption. So, the other data goes against this upward revision in the GDP number for 2013-2014.
Further, what does this change mean for the current financial year’s fiscal deficit? The GDP numbers for 2014-2015 calculated as per the new method will be released on February 9, 2015. Subramanian feels that there won’t be much of a difference if the projected GDP growth as per the new method remains the same as is being currently expected. While we will have to wait for the actual numbers to come out, nevertheless if the GDP growth turns out to be faster than the 5.5% growth that had been calculated as per the old method, the denominator in the fiscal deficit to GDP ratio will actually go up and thus push down the ratio.
This will be good news for the government which is struggling to meet its fiscal deficit target. In fact, this change in methodology may also give the government a little more leaway to arrive at the fiscal deficit number for the next financial year, allowing it to spend more. The question though is whether the financial market will start believing in India’s new GDP numbers? That remains to be seen.
(The column originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning on February 3, 2015) 

A 200 year old economic theory tells us what is wrong with the developed world today

Jean-baptiste_SayVivek Kaul

I like to quote a lot of John Maynard Keynes in what I write. The reason for that is fairly simple—Keynes is the Mirza Ghalib of economics. He has written something appropriate for almost every occasion.
Nevertheless, I’d like to admit that even though I have tried to read his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money a few times, over the years, I have never been able to go beyond the first few chapters.
The economist whose books I find very lucid is the Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith unlike other economists of his era was a prolific writer and was one of the most widely read economists in the United States and other parts of the world between the 1950s and 1970s. He was even the US Ambassador to India in the early 1960s.
His most popular book perhaps was The Great Crash 1929, a fantastic book on the Great Depression, which he wrote in the mid 1950s. His other famous work was The Affluent Society published in 1958.
But the book I am going to talk about today is A History of Economics—the past as the present. In this book Galbraith looks at the history of economics and writes it in a way that even non-economists like me can understand it.
One of the laws that Galbraith talks about is the Say’s Law. This law was put forward by Jean-Baptise Say, a French businessman, who lived between 1767 and 1832. “Say’s law held that out of the production of goods came an effective aggregate of demand sufficient to purchase the total supply of goods. Put in somewhat more modern terms, from the price of every product sold comes a return in wages, interest, profit or rent sufficient to buy that product. Somebody, somewhere, gets it all. And once it is gotten, there is spending up to the value of what is produced,” wrote Galbraith explaining Say’s Law.
The Say’s Law essentially states that the production of goods ensures that the workers and suppliers of these goods are paid enough for them to be able to buy all the other goods that are being produced. A pithier version of this law is, “Supply creates its own demand.”
And this law explains to us all that is wrong with the developed world today. As Bill Bonner writes in his latest book Hormegeddon—How Too Much of a Good Thing Leads to Disaster “French businessman and economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, discovered that “products are paid for with products,” not merely with money. He meant that you needed to produce things to buy things; you could not just produce money…has anyone ever mentioned this to the Federal Reserve?”
The central banks in the developed world have printed close to $7-8 trillion in the aftermath of the financial crisis which broke out in mid September 2008, with the investment bank Lehman Brothers going bust. The Federal Reserve of the United States has printed around $3.6 trillion dollars in the aftermath of the crisis to get the American economy up and running again.
The standard theory that has emerged in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that consumer demand has collapsed in the Western world and this has led to a slowdown in economic growth. In order to set this right, people need to be encouraged to borrow and spend. As John Maynard Keynes put it: “Consumption—to repeat the obvious—is the sole end and object of economic activity.” (There I have quoted him again!)
To get borrowing and consumption going again central banks have printed a lot of money to ensure that the financial system remains flush with money and interest rates continue to remain low. At low interest rates the chances of people borrowing and spending would be more. And this would lead to economic growth was the belief.
Now only if economic theory worked so well in practice. Also, it was “excessive” borrowing and spending that led to the crisis in the first place.
Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales explain this very well in a new afterword to Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, “For decades before the financial crisis in 2008, advanced economies were losing their ability to grow by making useful things. But they needed to somehow replace the jobs that had been lost to technology and foreign competition… So in an effort to pump up growth, governments spent more than they could afford and promoted easy credit to get households to do the same. The growth that these countries engineered, with its dependence on borrowing, proved unsustainable.”
It is worth pointing out here that the share of United States in the global production of goods has fallen over the last few decades. Thomas Piketty makes this point in his magnum opus Capital in the Twenty First Century. Between 1900 and 1980, 70–80 percent of the global production of goods happened in the United States and Europe. By 2010, this share had declined to around 50 percent, around the same level it was at in 1860. Also, faced with increased global competition, Western workers were unable to demand the pay increases they used to in the past.
Piketty further points out that the minimum wage in the United States, when measured in terms of purchasing power, reached its maximum level in 1969 and has been falling since then. At that point of time, the wage stood at $1.60 an hour or $10.10 an hour in 2013 dollars, taking into account the inflation between 1968 and 2013. At the beginning of 2013, the minimum wage was at $7.25 an hour, more than 28 percent lower than that in 1969.
This slow wage growth has led to Western governments following an easy money policy by making it easy for people to borrow. As Michael Lewis writes in The Big Short—A True Story: “How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.”
In case of the United States, trade with China had an impact as well. As the historian Niall Ferguson writes in The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: “Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labor costs kept down US wage costs. As a result, it was remarkably cheap to borrow money.”
Ironically, what worked earlier is not working now. What has happened instead is that financial institutions have borrowed money at low interest rates and invested it in financial markets all over the world, in search of a higher return. Despite the central banks printing a lot of money, Japan recently entered a recession, with two successive quarters of economic contraction.
Europe is staring at a deflationary scenario. And the economic recovery in the United States continues to remain fragile.
Further, over the coming decades, a billion more people are expected to join the work force in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This will apply a downward pressure on costs and prices in the years to come and hence, wages in developed countries aren’t going to go up in a hurry.
Moral of the story: Western nations need to go back to making things, if they want a sustainable economic recovery. But as the American baseball coach Yogi Berra once famously said “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

The article originally appeared on equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning, on Nov 28, 2014

Game theory in the stock market: On the Island of the Green-Eyed Tribe, blue eyes are taboo

green eyed cat
In response to yesterday’s piece a friend pointed out that John Maynard Keynes’ “stock market as a beauty contest” parable is an example of common knowledge game in modern game theory. Game theory is essentially a study of strategic decision making.
Hearing his comment I almost fell from my chair. “Ab game theory bhi padhna padega?” I wondered. But as good friends usually do, my friend mailed across some excellent reference material. (You can read the two pieces by Ben Hunt who writes the Epsilon Theory newsletter here and here).
In this piece I have summarized the two pieces written by Ben Hunt and tried to explain how the stock market is currently working from a game theory point of view and what are the learnings that we can draw from it.
First we need to understand what a common knowledge game is. In order to understand that we will go through the example of the island of the green eyed tribe. On this island people have eyes that are green in colour. Anyone having blue eyes, is supposed to leave the island in a canoe at dawn, the morning after he has found out.
However there are two problems. There are no mirrors on the island. So no one knows what is the colour of their eyes. Further, residents are not allowed to tell each other what is the colour of their eyes. So, if Ajay knows that the colour of Vijay’s eye is blue, he is not allowed to tell Vijay about it.
To summarise, the island of the green eyed tribe is a small island. Given this, every resident knows the eye colour of everyone else who lives on the island, but himself.
In a normal scenario, if the island has residents with blue eyes, they could continue to live on the island. This happens because they themselves do not know they have blue eyes and no one else can tell them about it.
Now let’s say a missionary lands up on the island and declares that at least one resident of the island has blue eyes. Further, let’s say only one resident on the island has blue eyes. So what will happen in this case? This individual, let’s call him Ajay, knows that everyone else has green eyes, so he comes to the conclusion that he must be the one with blue eyes. Hence, next morning he gets into a canoe and leaves the island.
Simple!
Now let’s complicate the situation a little more. Let’s say two residents, Ajay and Vijay, have blue eyes. What do you think will happen here? Ajay and Vijay have seen each other and each thinks that the other has blue eyes. They themselves do not know that they have blue eyes. Hence, Ajay thinks that Vijay will leave the island on a canoe the next morning and vice versa.
Next morning, neither Ajay nor Vijay has left the island. This leaves both Ajay and Vijay confused. But they soon figure out the situation. Ajay thinks that Vijay hasn’t left the island because he has seen someone else with blue eyes. At the same time Ajay knows that everyone else other than Vijay has green eyes. Hence, that leaves only him with blue eyes.
Vijay also realises the same thing. The next morning both Ajay and Vijay leave the island. As Ben Hunt writes in an excellent newsletter titled A Game of Sentiment and dated November 3, 2013, “The generalized answer to the question of “what happens?” is that for any n tribe members with blue eyes, they all leave simultaneously on the nth morning after the Missionary’s statement.”
But that is something for economists who carry out game theory experiments to ponder on. What is the learning here for stock market investors? Before the missionary lands up on the island every resident of the island knows the colour of the eyes of every other resident on the island. But this is private information which is locked up in the minds of the residents.
The missionary comes and changes this situation. He does not turn the information locked up in the minds of residents into public information, meaning he doesn’t tell them loud and clear that Ajay and Vijay are the ones with blue eyes.
Nevertheless, he turns what is private information until then into common knowledge. And common knowledge is different from public information.
As Hunt writes in a newsletter titled When Does the Story Break and dated May 25, 2014, “Common knowledge is simply information, public or private, that everyone believes is shared by everyone else. It’s the crowd of tribesmen looking around and seeing that the entire crowd heard the Missionary that unlocks the private information in their heads and turns it into common knowledge. This is the power of the crowd watching the crowd, and for my money it’s the most potent behavioral force in human society.”
Further, it takes time for the residents of the island to realize what they know. It doesn’t happen immediately. As Hunt writes “The truth is that an enormous amount of mental calculations and changes are taking place within each and every tribesman’s head as soon as the common knowledge is created. The more tribesmen with blue eyes, the longer the game simmers. And the longer the game simmers the more everyone – blue-eyed or not – questions whether or not he has blue eyes.”
In the example of Ajay and Vijay, it took them a day to realize that both of them have blue eyes. And once they did, they left the island the next morning, i.e two days after the missionary made the statement.
If there had been three people with blue eyes, it would have taken them three days and so on. That is how the dynamic works. So Ajay is watching Vijay and thinking that Vijay has blue eyes and hence, needs to leave the island. A similar dynamic is playing up in Vijay’s mind as well about Ajay.
The next day Vijay hasn’t left the island and Ajay realizes that Vijay is thinking the same thing about him, as he is thinking about Vijay. And once they have figured out they leave the island. So, nothing happens for two days and then they leave the island. In case of three people with blue eyes, nothing happens for three days and then they leave the island.
The point being it takes time for common knowledge to seep through and then there is immediate action.
If all that has left you wondering what all this has got to do with the stock market, allow me to explain. “If you haven’t observed exactly this sort of dynamic taking place in markets over the past five years, with nothing, nothing, nothing despite what seems like lots of relevant news, and then – boom! – a big move up or down as if out of nowhere – I just don’t know what to say. And I don’t know a single market participant, no matter how successful, who’s not bone-tired from all the mental anguish involved with trying to navigate these unfamiliar waters,” writes Hunt.
In the Indian context, the Sensex was yo-yoying over the last few years but has made a definitive move in 2014, with gains of nearly 33%. “And then boom,” is the best way to describe this move. That’s the power of the “crowd watching the crowd” for a while and then suddenly deciding to invest because the “common knowledge” of they thinking that everyone else is investing, seeps through.
That’s one part. The other part here is that of the “missionary” and the message he is sending out. The message will be believed depending on how credible the missionary is viewed to be and how loud is his voice. In the media this loudness and credibility is established by being seen at the right place. And that’s how the message is amplified.
As Hunt writes in A Game of Sentiment “How do we “see” a crowd in financial markets? Through the financial media outlets that are ubiquitous throughout every professional investment operation in the world – the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNBC, and Bloomberg. That’s it. These are the only four signal transmission and mediation channels that matter from a financial market CK (common knowledge) game perspective because “everyone knows” that we all subscribe to these four channels. If a signal appears prominently in any one of these media outlets (and if it appears prominently in one, it becomes “news” and will appear in all), then every professional investor in the world automatically assumes that every other professional investor in the world heard the signal.”
And this has an impact on the financial markets. In an Indian context one could add The Economic Times to the list as well. Fund managers want to be featured in these publications because it increases their ability to influence the financial markets. The stories they want to tell people about explaining the various reasons behind what is an “easy money” driven bull market are more likely to be believed.
The big missionaries in the current scenario are the central banks. What they say is closely watched.  As Gary Dorsch, Editor, Global Money Trends newsletter, wrote in a recent column “Bad economic news is treated as bullish news for the stock market, because it lead to expectation of more “quantitative easing.” And the easy money flows that are injected by central banks go right past goods and services (ie; the real economy) and are whisked into the financial markets, where it pushes up the prices of stocks and bonds. In simple terms, what matters most to the stock markets are the easy money injections from the central banks, and to a lesser extent, the profits of the companies whose stocks they are buying and selling.”
But that is something that fund managers are not very comfortable talking about.

This piece originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 26, 2014

Sensex @28,500 : Stock Market as a beauty contest

bullfightingVivek Kaul

We never know what we are talking about – Karl Popper

The Sensex closed at 28,499.54 points yesterday (i.e. November 24, 2014). The fund managers are confident that this bull run will last for a while. Or so they said in a round table organised by The Economic Times.
Prashant Jain of HDFC Mutual Fund explained that during the last three bull markets that India had seen, the market had never peaked before reaching a price to earnings ratio of 25 times. The price to earnings ratio currently is 16 times, and hence, we are still at a “reasonable distance” from the peak.
This seems like a fair point. But how many people invest in the stock market on the basis of where the price to earnings ratio is at any point of time? If that were the case most people would have invested in 2008-2009, when the price to earnings ratio of the Sensex through the year stood at 12.68.
By buying stocks at a lower price to earnings ratio, they would have made more money once the stock market started to recover. But stock markets and rationality don’t always go together. Every investor is does not look at fundamentals before investing. “In investing, fundamentals are the underlying realities of business, in terms of sales, costs and profits,” explains John Lanchester in How to Speak Money.
A big bunch of stock market investors like to move with the herd. Let’s call such investors non fundamentals investors.
So when do these investors actually invest in the stock market? In order to understand this we will have to go back to John Maynard Keynes. Keynes equated the stock market to a “beauty contest” which was fairly common during his day.
As Lanchester writes “Keynes gave a famous description of what this kind of non-fundamentals investor does: he is looking at a photo of six girls and trying to pick, not which girl he thinks is the prettiest, and not which he thinks most people will think is the prettiest, but which most people will think most people will think is the prettiest…In other words the non-fundamentals investor isn’t trying to work out what companies he should invest in, or what company most investors will think they should invest in, but which company most investors will think most investors will want to invest in.”
Or as Keynes put it in his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”
Hence, a large bunch of investors invest on the basis of whether others round them have been investing. That is the beauty contest of today.
Nilesh Shah, MD and CEO of Axis Capital pointed out in The Economic Times round table that nearly Rs 25,000-Rs 30,000 crore of money will come into the stock market through systematic investment plans (SIPs).
Anyone who understands the basics of how SIPs work knows that they are designed to exploit the volatility of the stock market—buy more mutual fund units when the stock market is falling and buy fewer units while it is going up. This helps in averaging the cost of purchase over a period of time, and ensures reasonable returns.
Investors who are getting into SIPs now are not best placed to exploit the SIP design. Nevertheless, they are still investing simply because others around them have been investing. This also explains why the net inflow into equity mutual funds for the first seven months of the this financial year (between April and October 2014) has been at Rs 39,217 crore. This is when the stock market is regularly touching new highs.
And if things go on as they currently are, the year might see the highest inflow into equity mutual funds ever. The year 2007-2008 had seen Rs 40,782 crore being invested into equity mutual funds. This was the year when the stock market was on fire. In early January 2008, the Sensex almost touched 21,000 points. It had started the financial year at around 12,500 points.
So, now its all about the flow or what Keynes said “what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” And till people see others around them investing in the stock market they will continue to do so. This will happen till the stock market continues to rise. And stock market will continue to rise till foreign investors keep bringing money into India.
No self respecting fund manager can admit to the fact that these are the reasons behind the stock market rallying continuously all through this year. This is simply because all fund managers charge a certain percentage of the money they manage as a management fee.
And how will they justify that management fee, if the stock market is going up simply because it is going up. Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller calls such a situation a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme.
As he writes in the first edition of Irrational Exuberance: “Ponzi schemes do arise from time to time without the contrivance of a fraudulent manager. Even if there is no manipulator fabricating false stories and deliberately deceiving investors in the aggregate stock market, tales about the market are everywhere. When prices go up a number of times, investors are rewarded sequentially by price movements in these markets just as they are in Ponzi schemes. There are still many people (indeed, the stock brokerage and mutual fund industries as a whole) who benefit from telling stories that suggest that the markets will go up further. There is no reason for these stories to be fraudulent; they need to only emphasize the positive news and give less emphasis to the negative.”
And that is precisely what fund managers will do in the time to come. In fact, they have already started to do that.
They will tell us stories. One favourite story that they like to offer is that India’s economy is much better placed than a lot of other emerging markets. This is true, but then what does that really tell us? (For a real picture of the Indian economy check out this piece by Swaminathan Aiyar).
Another favourite line you will hear over and over again is that “markets are never wrong”. This phrase can justify anything.
The trick here is to say things with confidence. And that is something some of these fund managers excel at. Nevertheless it is worth remembering what Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in The Black Swan: “Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be smooth as possible in personal manners…It is not what you are telling people, it how you are saying it.”
And this is something worth thinking about.

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 25, 2014

The great Indian debt time bomb

time bombVivek Kaul

On November 17, 2014, Adani Enterprises put out a statement saying: “Adani Mining, the Australian subsidiary of Adani Enterprises, and the State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, have today signed an MOU in the aftermath of the successful Brisbane G20 Summit…The MOU provides for a credit facility of up to $1 billion USD subject to the detailed assessment of the company’s mine project at Carmichael, near Clermont in Western Queensland.”
This MOU was questioned in the media. The basic question asked was: Should Adani Enterprises, a company already having a lot of debt, be allowed to raise more debt? Further, the environmental concerns around the mine were highlighted as well.
As on September 30, 2014, the total debt of the company stood at Rs 72,632.37 crore.  It had shot up by Rs 7653.33 crore from where it was on March 31, 2014.
The total operating profit of the company over the last four quarters was at Rs 8,999.92 crore. The interest that it paid on its debt was Rs 5,733.77 crore. This means an interest coverage ratio of around 1.57.
Interest coverage ratio is essentially the earnings before interest, taxes and exceptional items (or operating profit) of a company divided by its interest expense. It tells us whether the company is making enough money to pay the interest on its outstanding debt.
If we look quarterly data, the situation becomes more interesting. The interest coverage ratio of the company was 2.67, for the period of three months ending March 31, 2014. It fell to 1.58 as on June 30, 2014. And for the period of three months ending September 30, 2014,it stood at 1.12.
An interest coverage ratio of close to one basically tells us that the company is making just about enough money to keep paying interest on the debt that it has. Clearly, a worrying situation. Ideally, the interest coverage ratio of a company should be over 1.5.
What this tells us is that Adani Enterprises isn’t in the best financial shape. After some criticism in the media, Arundhati Bhattacharya, the chairman of SBI, said that the loan will go through “proper due diligence both on the credit side as well as on the viability side.” She also said that the board of SBI had yet to take a call on the loan. “The board will take a call and then only the loan will be sanctioned,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya further clarified that a new loan to Adani Enterprises will be given only after the company had repaid portions of the earlier loan given to them by SBI. After that had happened, the fresh lending to the company would work out to only $200-400 million.
As far as environmental concerns went, Bhattacharya said that she had been assured by the Queensland government (where the Carmichael mine is located) that there were no environmental issues around the project.
News-reports appearing in the media clearly suggest otherwise. There seem to be environmental concerns around the mine, as the project is adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. A recent news-report in the British newspaper The Guardian said that the Rainforest Action Network, a US environment group, had written commitments from US banking giants Citigroup,Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, to not back the project.
Before this several British banks had also ruled out funding the project. The news-report pointed out that “several avenues of finance have already been shut off to the $16.5bn project. Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Barclays all ruled out funding the development, before the US banks’ refusal.”
Another recent report in The Guardian points out “construction of Australia’s largest ever mine[i.e. the Carmichael mine] will be well underway before its impact upon the environment is known, with a requirement to replace critically endangered habitat razed by the project pushed back by two full years.”
So, clearly there are environment concerns around the mine, irrespective of what Bhattacharya has been told by the Queensland government. Nevertheless, it was nice to see Bhattacharya come out in the open and clarify that SBI would go through proper due diligence before deciding to give Adani another loan.
If other public sector banks had done that in the past, they would not be in a mess that they currently are in. In August 2014, the finance minister Arun Jaitley had told the Parliament that bad loans in the banking system had risen to 4.03% of the advances in 2013-14. The number had stood at 3.42% in 2012-13 and 2.94% in 2011-12.
In fact, the situation is much worse for public sector banks. As on March 31, 2013, the gross non performing assets (NPAs) of public sector banks had stood at 3.63% of the gross advances. By September 30, 2014, this had jumped up to 4.80% of the gross advances. During the same period the gross NPAs of private sector banks has been more or less stable at 1.8% of gross advances.
This is something that the Reserve Bank of India points out in the Financial Stability Report released towards the end of June 2014, as well. The stressed advances of the Indian banking system stood at 9.8% of the total advances. For public sector banks the number stood at 11.7%. What this means in simple English is that for every Rs 100 given by Indian banks as a loan nearly Rs 9.8 is in shaky territory (for public sector banks the number is at Rs 11.7) 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 (which also entails some loss for the bank).
The report further points out that “There are five sub-sectors: infrastructure (which includes power generation, telecommunications, roads, ports, airports, railways [other than Indian Railways] and other infrastructure), iron and steel, textiles, mining (including coal) and aviation services which contribute significantly to the level of stressed advances.”
These sectors (especially the infrastructure sector) are dominated by crony capitalists, who were able to get loans from public sector banks, and are now unable to repay them.
An excellent example here is that of Lanco Infratech. As on March 31, 2014, the company had total loans amounting to Rs 34,877 crore. Against this the company had a shareholders’ equity of Rs 1,457 crore. This means the company had a debt to equity ratio of around 24. Not surprisingly for the period of three months ending September 30, 2014, the company had an operating profit of Rs 317.23 crore and finance costs of Rs 773.02 crore.
What this clearly tells us is that the banks giving loans to this company did not do any due diligence or were simply under pressure to hand out loans. This is not surprising given that its founding Chairman L Rajagopal was a member of parliament from Vijaywada on a Congress Party ticket, in the last Lok Sabha.
There are many other companies run by crony capitalists which are in a similar situation and are unable to repay the loans they had taken on. This has led to trouble for banks, particularly the public sector banks.
Uday Kotak, Executive Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Bank, in a television interview earlier this year had estimated that the Indian banking system may have to write off loans worth Rs 3.5-4 lakh crore over the next few years. When one takes into account the fact that the total networth of the Indian banking system is around Rs 8 lakh crore, one realizes that the situation is really precarious.
To conclude, it is worth recounting here what the economist John Maynard Keynes once said “If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe your bank a million pounds, it has.”
The modern day version of this quote was put forward by the Economist magazine when it said “If you owe your bank a billion pounds everybody has a problem.”
The point being that any bank has to be very careful when giving out a large loan. Indian public sector banks seem to have forgotten that over the last few years. And now we have a problem.

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 24, 2014