Money printing

Winter and Money Printing are Coming to India, In a Few Months

The Controller General of Accounts publishes the state of government finance at the end of every month. This data is published with a gap of one month. Hence, on 31st August, the data as of 31st July, was published.

This data, not surprisingly, doesn’t make for a good reading. The fiscal deficit, the difference between what a government earns and what it spends, for the period April to July 2020 stood at Rs 8.21 lakh crore. The fiscal deficit that the government had plans to achieve during the course of the current financial year (2020-21) stands at Rs 7.96 lakh crore. Hence, at the end of July, the actual fiscal deficit of the government was 103.1% of the budgeted one.

But given the state we are in this is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, there are several reasons to worry. Let’s take a look at it pointwise.

1) Tax collections have collapsed. Between April and July 2020, the gross tax revenue, which brings in a bulk of the money for the central government and which it shares with the state governments, is down 29.5% to Rs 3.8 lakh crore, in comparison to the same period in 2019.

Let’s look at the different taxes collected by the government between April and June this year and the last year.

They all fall down


Source: Controller General of Accounts.

 

As can be seen from the above chart, the collections of all major taxes are down big time.

Take the case of central goods and services tax. (GST) or the part of GST that ends up with the central government. During April to July 2019, the total collections of the central GST had stood at around Rs 1.41 lakh crore. During the same period this year the collections have fallen by 34% to Rs 92,949 crore. Other taxes have fallen along similar lines.

The fall in GST collections is a reflection of a massive slowdown in consumption. A slowdown in consumption ultimately reflects in a slowdown in income of individuals as well as incomes of companies. Ultimately, one man’s spending is another man’s income.

But there is something that the above chart does not show, the excise duty collections of the central government. They are up year on year by 23.8% to Rs 67,895 crore. This despite the fact that the consumption of petroleum products between April and July is down 22.5% in comparison to 2019.

So, how have excise duty collections gone up? The central government has increased the excise duty on petrol from Rs 22.98 per litre to Rs 32.98 per litre. The excise duty on diesel has been raised from Rs 18.83 per litre to Rs 31.83 per litre. Also, a substantial part of this duty is a cess, leading to a situation where the central government does not have to share the revenue earned through the cess with the state governments.

In the process, the central government has captured a bulk of the fall in oil prices.

2) As mentioned earlier, the central government needs to share a part of the money it earns with state governments. Between April and July it shared Rs 1.76 lakh crore with states, against Rs 2 lakh crore, during the same period last year. This is 12% lower, during a time when the states are at the forefront of fighting the covid-epidemic.

The ability of the state governments to raise taxes, after having become a part of the goods and services tax system, is rather limited. Take the case of petrol and diesel. The central government has raised excise duty by such a huge extent that the state governments aren’t really in a position to raise the value added tax or the sales tax on petrol and diesel, which they are allowed to charge, without having to face political repercussions for it.

3) The central government has more ways of raising money than the states. One such way is disinvestment of its stakes in public sector enterprises. This year the government plans to earn a whopping Rs 2.1 lakh crore through this route. The original plan included the plan to sell Air India. Whether that happens in an environment where the airlines business has been negatively rerated in the aftermath of covid, remains to be seen.

The other big disinvestment plan was that of the government selling its stake in the Life Insurance Corporation of India through an initial public offering. There are one too many regulatory hurdles that need to be removed, before a stake in India’s largest insurance company can be sold to investors. Long story short, it looks highly unlikely that the government will get anywhere near earning Rs 2.1 lakh crore this year, through the disinvestment front.

Having said that, the government can always resort to some accounting shenanigans, like getting one public sector enterprise to buy another, and pocketing that money. This is likely to happen in the second half of the year.

Over and above this, the government earns a lot of money from the dividends that it earns from public sector enterprises as well as banks and financial institutions. The target for this year is around Rs 1.55 lakh crore. Public sector banks will continue to remain on a weak wicket through this year, hence, their ability to pay dividends is rather limited.

The only way the government can make good this target is by raiding the balance sheet of the RBI for money. Also, the government is likely to raid the cash balances of public sector enterprises which have them, by asking them to pay special dividends.

4) The money that gets invested into various small savings schemes, which includes schemes like Post Office Savings Account, National Savings Time Deposits ( 1,2,3 & 5 years), National Savings Recurring Deposits, National Savings Monthly Income Scheme Account, Senior Citizens Savings Scheme, National Savings Certificate ( VIII-Issue), Public Provident Fund, KisanVikas Patra and Sukanya Samriddhi Account, net of the redemptions, is a revenue entry into the government budget.

This time it has been assumed that the government will get Rs 2.4 lakh crore through this route. Between April and July, Rs 38,413 crore or just 16% of the targeted money has come in. Last year, during the same period, 38% of a much lower target of Rs 1.3 lakh crore had been achieved. Clearly, this target is also going to be missed.

5)  Of course, the government understands this and which is why in early May it increased its borrowing target from Rs 7.8 lakh crore to Rs 12 lakh crore, by more than 50%. The government borrows money to finance its fiscal deficit.

What this means is that the government wants to at least keep the fiscal deficit to around Rs 12 lakh crore. The question is will that happen? Gross tax revenues are already down 30%. Of course, as the economy keeps opening up, this number will look better. Having said that, even if tax revenues are down by 15% as of the end of the year, we are looking at a shortfall of Rs 2.5 lakh crore for the central government. The other big entries of disinvestment and the net-revenue from small savings schemes, are also looking extremely optimistic in the current situation.

Even if the government achieves a fiscal deficit of Rs 12 lakh crore and the economy shrinks by around 10% this year, we will be looking at a central government fiscal deficit of 7% against the targeted 3.5%.

In this scenario, it is now more than likely that the RBI will resort to direct financing of government expenditure by printing money and buying government bonds. The government sells bond to finance its fiscal deficit.

This isn’t to say that the RBI hasn’t printed money this year. It has. But it has chosen to operate through the primary dealers. But the mask might come off in in the time to come and the RBI might decide to buy bonds directly from the government.

Winter and money printing are coming to India, in a few months.

 

Money Printing: Rajan Launches QE Lite to Bring Down Interest Rates

ARTS RAJAN

In the first monetary policy statement for this financial year, Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) cut the repo rate by 25 basis points to 6.5%.

One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage. 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.

In the column dated March 30, 2016, I had said that it is best if the RBI cuts the repo rate 25 basis points at a time and not more.

My logic for writing this was fairly straightforward. From January 2015 onwards, the RBI had cut the repo rate by 125 basis points. In comparison, the banks had cut their lending rates by only around 60 basis points. Meanwhile, they have cut the interest rates on their fixed deposits by more than 100 basis points.

This means that the banks have cut their lending rates at a very slow pace. Hence, there was no point in the RBI cutting the repo rate by more than 25 basis points, given that the banks have not passed on that cut to their prospective and current borrowers, in the form of lower lending rates.

In this scenario the best strategy for the RBI is to cut the repo rate 25 basis points at a time and then take a check if the cut has been passed on to the borrowers by banks.

And this is precisely what Rajan did yesterday by cutting the repo rate by 25 basis points. Honestly, the cut in the repo rate was not the most important part of yesterday’s monetary policy statement.

In the most important paragraph of the monetary policy, the RBI said that it will “continue to provide liquidity as required but progressively lower the average ex ante liquidity deficit in the system from one per cent of NDTL [net demand and time liabilities] to a position closer to neutrality.”

What does this mean in simple English? There is a certain demand for money that the banking system has. But there is only a certain supply of it going around which is not enough to fulfil demand. The difference is referred to as liquidity deficit.

Hence, banks cannot borrow as much as they want to from the banking system. In this scenario they have to pay a higher rate of interest to borrow.

The monetary policy statement of the RBI puts the liquidity deficit at 1% of demand and time liabilities. This means that the liquidity deficit in the banking system is at 1% of the total current account deposits, savings account deposits and fixed deposits, of banks.

As on March 18, 2016, the total demand and time deposits of banks stood at Rs 93,786,60 crore. The liquidity deficit is 1% of this and hence works out to around Rs 93,786 crore. This is where theoretically the deficit in the banking system should have been.

But the actual deficit is more than this. Rajan in his interaction with the media after presenting the monetary policy conceded that the actual liquidity deficit was around Rs 50,000-60,000 crore more than the RBI had estimated. This means that the actual daily liquidity deficit is around Rs 1,50,000 crore.

There are multiple reason for the same. Assembly elections are currently on in several states. Around this time, the cash in hands of the public increases. As Rajan said: “you can guess as to reasons why…we also guess.” This increase is not only in the states that go to elections but also in neighbouring states.

Then there was the issuance of tax-free bonds. Further, before the interest rates on small saving schemes were cut there was an inflow of money into these schemes. All these factors have essentially ensured that the liquidity deficit in the banking system is around Rs 1,50,000 crore.

The RBI now plans to bring down this deficit to a position closer to neutrality. The RBI plans to steadily reduce this deficit. The question is how will the RBI do this? The central bank will have to buy assets from banks.

One way of going about it is to carry out open market operations and buy bonds from banks. In fact, the RBI announced an open market operation of Rs 15,000 crore, yesterday.

The question is where will the RBI get this money from? The RBI, like any other central bank, has the ability to create money out of thin air by printing it, or rather by creating it digitally these days.

And this is precisely what the RBI will do—it will print money to buy bonds. When it buys bonds, it will pay for it through this freshly created money. When this freshly created money enters the banking system, the supply of money will go up and the liquidity deficit will come down. This will push down interest rates and in the process banks will pass on lower interest rates to the end consumers.

Of course this is not going to happen overnight and will happen over the course of this financial year and perhaps even the next.

In fact, what the RBI is trying to do is similar to what happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis that started in September 2008. The Federal Reserve of the United States decided to print money and buy bonds, in order to drive down interest rates, so that people would borrow and spend more. This is referred to as quantitative easing or QE.

The RBI is also doing a smaller version of QE. We can perhaps call it QE lite.

There were other moves also to help banks lower lending interest rates. Up until the RBI had maintained a difference of 100 basis points between the reverse repo rate and the repo rate.

While repo rate is the rate at which the RBI lends to banks, the reverse repo rate is the rate at which the RBI borrows from banks. Before today, the repo rate was at 6.75% and the reverse repo rate was at 5.75%. The difference, as mentioned earlier, was 100 basis points.

The RBI cut the repo rate by 25 basis points to 6.5%. At the same time, it increased the reverse repo by 25 basis points to 6%, thus narrowing the difference to 50 basis points. Hence, banks will now pay a lower interest when they borrow from the RBI and get a higher interest when they have excess funds, which they can park at the RBI. This basically will help banks to earn more and make it more likely for them to cut their lending rates.

Further, banks need to maintain 4% of their demand and time deposits with the RBI as a cash reserve ratio(CRR). Currently, the banks need to maintain 95% of the required CRR with banks on a daily basis. This has been lowered to 90%. This will help ease the pressure on banks and they will have more free cash. This should again help them cut their lending rates.

Up until now, the RBI repo rate cuts led to interest rate on deposits being cut more rapidly than lending rates. This time around, the lending rates are also likely to be cut.

Watch this space!

The column was originally published on Vivek Kaul’s Diary on April 6, 2016

Of Japanese deflation, global money printing and quest for economic growth

3D chrome Dollar symbolThe human obsession with economic growth has perhaps been best captured by E.B. White in an essay called A Report in January published in January, 1958. The essay is a part of a book titled Essays by E.B. White.

In this essay White writes: “The theory is that if you shoot forty thousand deer one year you aren’t getting ahead unless you shoot fifty thousand the next, but I suspect there comes a point where you have shot just exactly the right number of deer. Our whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are, and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957, more deer killed, more automatic dishwasher installed…more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill, more automobiles sold, you are headed for trouble, living in danger and maybe in squalor.”

This obsession with economic growth has been at play in the aftermath of the financial crisis which broke out in September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust. The central banks and governments all around the Western world unleashed an era of easy money, by printing money and maintaining low interest rates.

This was done in the hope of people borrowing and spending more. So, with interest rates remaining low, people were likely to buy more homes, more cars, more consumer goods and so on. And in the process there would be more economic growth.

Most central bankers did not want the Western world to turn into another Japan. Right through the eighties, the Japanese stock market and the real estate market had huge bubbles. These bubbles burst towards the end of the eighties. And it is widely believed by economists that the Japanese economy never recovered from this. It entered into an era of deflation (the opposite of inflation, when prices fall).

When the economy is in a deflationary scenario, people tend to postpone their purchases in the hope of getting a better deal. Once this starts to happen, the business earnings start to fall. This leads to businesses cutting costs by firing people among other things. All this impacts economic growth. Businesses cut prices further, in the hope of persuading more people to buy things. And so a deflationary cycle sustains itself.

This is something that Western central bankers wanted to avoid. And this led to the unleashing of an era of easy money, which continues. In fact, as Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, recently said in a speech: “The canonical example here is Japan, where many are persuaded that the key mistake it made was to slip into deflation, which has persisted and held back growth.”

There is a great fear that what has been happening in Japan will happen in large parts of the Western world as well, if central banks don’t act and flood their financial systems with money.

In fact, Andrew Hallande, the Chief Economist of the Bank of England recently suggested the elimination of paper money. This would allow central banks to impose negative interest rates (which some central banks have already tried in Europe). When there is a negative interest rate on deposits, the bank will charge people for depositing their money in a bank account. This will lead to people spending their money instead of keeping it in a bank account, where its value will fall because of a negative interest rate. The spending that follows because of negative interest rates will lead to economic growth.

This is only possible if there is ‘only’ digital money and no paper money. If banks apply negative interest rates as of now, people can simply withdraw that money in the form of paper money and keep it under their mattresses or wherever they want to. Hence, Hallande’s suggestion of only digital money to revive economic growth.

Such suggestions come from the fear of deflation. But the question is are things in Japan as bad as they are made out to be? James Rickards in his book The Death of Money, talks about a speech where he heard a former deputy finance minister of Japan, Eisuke Sakakibara, speak.
“He [i.e. Sakakibara] made the often-overlooked point that because of Japan’s declining population, real GDP per capita will grow faster than real aggregate GDP.”

What this basically means is that because of declining population in Japan, even if the overall Japanese economy does not grow or grows at a very slow pace, there will still be more economic growth per person in Japan.

As Rickards writes: “Far from a disaster story, a Japan that has deflation, depopulation, and declining nominal GDP can nevertheless produce robust real per capita GDP growth for its citizens. Combined with the accumulated wealth of the Japanese people the condition can result in well-to-do society even in the face of nominal growth that would cause most central bankers to flood the economy with money.”

In fact, Rajan made a similar point in his recent speech. As he said: “A closer look at the Japanese experience suggests that it is by no means clear that its growth has been slower than warranted let alone that deflation caused slow growth. It is true that after its devastating crisis in the early 1990s, Japan may have prolonged the slowdown by not taking early action to clean up its banking system or restructure over-indebted corporations. But once it took decisive action in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japanese growth per capita or per worker looks comparable with other industrial countries.”

This becomes clear from the accompanying table:

In fact, one of the fears of deflation, as explained earlier, is that it leads to unemployment. Nevertheless that doesn’t seem to be the case in Japan. As Rajan said: “Japanese unemployment has averaged 4.5% between 2000-2014, compared to 6.4% in the US and 9.4% in the Euro area during the same period. In part, the Japanese have obtained wage flexibility by moving away from the old lifetime unemployment contracts for new hires to short term contracts. While not without social costs, such flexibility allows an economy to cope with sustained deflation”

So, it’s time that central bankers take a re-look at the entire Japanese experience and revise their views on the idea of deflation.

Meanwhile, Japan seems to be getting ready for more money printing. As they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The column originally appeared on October 9, 2015 on The Daily Reckoning 

With QE 4 around the corner, the stock market will rally

3D chrome Dollar symbolVivek Kaul

The post financial crisis world is a weird one—the world’s biggest economy doesn’t do well and the stock market rallies in another part of the world.
The gross domestic product(GDP) of United States grew by 0.2% for the period January to March 2015. This was an advance estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The second estimate is scheduled to be released on May 29, later this month.
The BSE Sensex rose by 479.28 points or 1.77% to close at 27,490.59 points yesterday (May 4, 2015). A possible explanation lies in the fact that the bad economic growth number might force the Federal Reserve of United States, the American central bank, to go in for another round of money printing or quantitative easing (QE), as the economists like to call it.
As Albert Edwards of Societe Generale writes in his latest research note: “The US economy is struggling and the Fed will ultimately re-engage the QE spigot.” The Federal Reserve has already carried out three rounds of money printing, with the last round better known as QE III ending in October 2014.  Until October 2014, the Federal Reserve had been printing money and pumping money into the financial system by buying government bonds and mortgaged backed securities.
The idea was to flood the financial system with money by buying bonds and drive down interest rates. At lower interest rates, people were more likely to borrow and spend money. This would help businesses and in turn, the overall economy. While this happened to some extent, what also happened was that institutional investors borrowed money at low interest rates and invested them in financial markets all over the world. This led to stock market rallies all over the world.
With the US GDP growing by just 0.2%, it is more than likely that the Federal Reserve will go back to its tried and tested strategy of printing money in the days to come. This round of money printing will be referred to as QE IV. What makes the situation more than likely is the fact that even a 0.2% economic growth is overstated. This is primarily because it includes a huge inventory build up. Inventory essentially refers to goods which are being produced but not being sold.
Inventories during the period January and March 2015 went up by $110.3 billion. They had risen by $80 billion during the period October to December 2014. An increase in inventory adds to the GDP. Nevertheless what it also means is that there will be production cuts in the months to come, which in turn will pull the GDP down.
Edwards of Societe Generale estimates that without this unprecedented rise in inventories, “GDP would rather have declined by some 2½%!” Economists at Bloomberg estimate that: “inventory rise added 74 basis points to growth, which means that final sales (GDP ex-inventories) actually contracted (-0.5 percent).” One of the reasons for this rise in inventory is the strong dollar, which has led to imports flooding the United States.
Another reason put forward by American economists for the build up of inventory is the more than usual ‘snowy’ winter in large parts of the United States. Nevertheless as Edwards argues: “Sales are declining on a year on year basis, but we are assured this is due to the cold weather. But if it is not, and sales do not surge in coming months, then the economy is heading into recession as the inventory sales ratio has now reached levels that will necessitate savage cutbacks in production.”
What also does not help is a slowdown in consumer spending. During the period January and March 2015, consumer spending rose by 1.9%. It had grown by 4.4% in the period October to December 2014.
The next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve is scheduled on June 16-17, 2015. It had been suggested earlier that the FOMC will start raising the federal funds rate in June. The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which one bank lends funds maintained at the Federal Reserve to another bank, on an overnight basis and acts as a sort of benchmark for short and medium term loans. Federal funds rate is currently in the range of 0-0.25% and is likely to continue staying in that range.
With the US economic growth collapsing during the first three months of the year, there is no way the FOMC will start raising the federal funds rate in June. What this also means is that money will continue to be available at low interest rates for institutional investors to borrow and invest in financial markets all over the world. The Sensex rising by around 480 points yesterday was an indication of the same.
Also, one of the things that I have learnt in the post financial crisis world is that central banks seem to have come around to the belief that the only economic weapon they have to get economic growth going again is to print money. Given this, QE IV might well be on the cards in the days to come. And this means foreign institutional investors will continue to invest money in Indian stocks.
All I can say as of now is stay tuned and watch this space. 

The column appeared on The Daily Reckoning on May 5, 2015.