RBI Financial Stability Report

Indian Banks Will Have Rs 17-18 Lakh Crore Bad Loans By September

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) publishes the Financial Stability Report (FSR) twice a year, in June and in December. This year the report wasn’t published in December but only yesterday (January 11, 2021).

Media reports suggest that the report was delayed because the government wanted to consult the RBI on the stance of the report. For a government so obsessed with controlling the narrative this doesn’t sound surprising at all.

Let’s take a look at the important points that the FSR makes on the bad loans of banks and what does that really mean. Bad loans are largely loans which haven’t been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

1) The bad loans of banks are expected to touch 13.5% of the total advances in a baseline scenario. Under a severe stress scenario they are expected to touch 14.8%. These are big numbers given that the total bad loans as of September 2020 stood at 7.5% of the total advances. Hence, the RBI is talking of a scenario where bad loans are expected to more or less double from where they are currently.

2) Under the severe stress scenario, the bad loans of public sector banks and private banks are expected to touch 17.6% and 8.8%, respectively. This means that public sector banks are in major trouble again.

3) In the past, the RBI has done a very bad job of predicting the bad loans rate under the baseline scenario, when the bad loans of the banking system were going up.

Source: Financial Stability Reports of the RBI.
*The actual forecast of the baseline scenario was between 4-4.1%

If we look at the above chart, between March 2014 and March 2018, the actual bad loans rate turned out to be much higher than the one predicted by the RBI under the baseline scenario. This was an era when the bad loans of the banking system were going up year on year and the RBI constantly underestimated them.

4) How has the actual bad loans rate turned out in comparison to the bad loans under severe stress scenario predicted by the RBI?

Source: Financial Stability Reports of the RBI.
*The actual forecast of the baseline scenario was between 4-4.1%

In four out of the five cases between March 31, 2014 and March 31, 2018, the actual bad loans rate turned out higher than the one predicted by the RBI under a severe stress scenario. As Arvind Subramanian, the former chief economic advisor to the ministry of finance, writes in Of Counsel:

“In March 2015, the RBI was forecasting that even under a “severe stress” scenario— where to put it colourfully, all hell breaks loose, with growth collapsing and interest rates shooting up—NPAs [bad loans] would at most reach about Rs 4.5 lakh crore.”

By March 2018, the total NPAs of banks had stood at Rs 10.36 lakh crore.

One possible reason can be offered in the RBI’s defence. Let’s assume that the central bank in March 2015 had some inkling of the bad loans of banks ending up at around Rs 10 lakh crore. Would it have made sense for it, as the country’s banking regulator, to put out such a huge number? Putting out numbers like that could have spooked the banking system in the country. It could even have possibly led to bank runs, something that the RBI wouldn’t want.

In this scenario, it perhaps made sense for the regulator to gradually up the bad loans rate prediction as the situation worsened, than predict it in just one go. Of course, I have no insider information on this and am offering this logic just to give the country’s banking regulator the benefit of doubt.

5) So, if the past is anything to go by, the actual bad loans of banks when they are going up, turn out to be much more than that forecast by the RBI even under a severe stress scenario. Hence, it is safe to say that by September 2021, the bad loans of banks will be close to 15% of advances, a little more than actually estimated under a severe stress scenario.

This will be double from 7.5% as of September 2020. Let’s try and quantify this number for the simple reason that a 15% figure doesn’t tell us about the gravity of the problem. The total advances of Indian banks as of March 2020 had stood at around Rs 109.2 lakh crore.

If this grows by 10% over a period of 18 months up to September 2021, the total advances of Indian banks will stand at around Rs 120 lakh crore. If bad loans amount to 15% of this we are looking at bad loans of Rs 18 lakh crore. The total bad loans as of March 2020 stood at around Rs 9 lakh crore, so, the chances are that bad loans will double even in absolute terms. If the total advances grow by 5% to around Rs 114.7 lakh crore, then we are looking at bad loans of around Rs 17.2 lakh crore.

6) The question is if this is the level of pain that lies up ahead for the banking system, why hasn’t it started to show as yet in the balance sheet of banks. As of March 2021, the RBI expects the bad loans of banks to touch 12.5% under a baseline scenario and 14.2% under a severe stress scenario. But this stress is yet to show up in the banking system.

This is primarily because the bad loans of banks are currently frozen as of August 31, 2020. The Supreme Court, in an interim order dated September 3, 2020, had directed the banks that loan accounts which hadn’t been declared as a bad loan as of August 31, shall not be declared as one, until further orders.

As the FSR points out:

“In view of the regulatory forbearances such as the moratorium, the standstill on asset classification and restructuring allowed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the data on fresh loan impairments reported by banks may not be reflective of the true underlying state of banks’ portfolios.”

The Supreme Court clearly needs to hurry up on this and not keep this hanging.

7) Delayed recognition of bad loans is a problem that the country has been dealing with over the last decade. The bad loans which banks accumulated due to the frenzied lending between 2004 and 2011, were not recognised as bad loans quickly enough and the recognition started only in mid 2015, when the RBI launched an asset quality review.

This led to a slowdown in lending in particular by public sector banks and negatively impacted the economy. Hence, it is important that the problem be handled quickly this time around to limit the negative impact on the economy.

8) Public sector banks are again at the heart of the problem. Under the severe stress scenario their bad loans are expected to touch 17.6% of their advances. The sooner these bad loans are recognised as bad loans, accompanied with an adequate recapitalisation of these banks and adequate loan recovery efforts, the better it will be for an Indian economy.

9) At an individual level, it makes sense to have accounts in three to four banks to diversify savings, so that even if there is trouble at one bank, a bulk of the savings remain accessible. Of course, at the risk of repetition, please stay away from banks with a bad loans rate of 10% or more.

To conclude, from the looks of it, the process of kicking the bad loans can down the road seems to have started. There is already a lot of talk about the definition of bad loans being changed and loans which have been in default for 120 days or more, being categorised as bad loans, against the current 90 days.

And nothing works better in the Indian system like a bad idea whose time has come. This is bad idea whose time has come.

 

Did RBI just hint that Indian corporates have reached Ponzi stage of finance?

ARTS RAJAN
The Reserve Bank of India(RBI) releases the Financial Stability Report twice a year. The second report for this year was released yesterday (i.e. December 23, 2015). Buried in this report is a very interesting box titled In Search of Some Old Wisdom. In this box, the RBI has resurrected the economist Hyman Minsky. Minsky has been rediscovered by the financial world in the years that have followed the financial crisis which started with the investment bank Lehman Brothers going bust in September 2008.

So what does the RBI say in this box? “When current wisdom does not offer solutions to extant problems, old wisdom can sometimes be helpful. For instance, the global financial crisis compelled us to take a look at the Minsky’s financial stability hypothesis which posited the debt accumulation by non-government sector as the key to economic crisis.”

And what is Minsky’s financial stability hypothesis? Actually Minsky put forward the financial instability hypothesis and not the financial stability hypothesis as the RBI points out. I know I am nit-picking here but one expects the country’s central bank to get the name of an economic theory right. I guess given that the name of the report is the Financial Stability Report, someone mixed the words “stability” and “instability”.

The basic premise of this hypothesis is that when times are good, there is a greater appe­tite for risk and banks are willing to extend riskier loans than usual. Businessmen and entrepreneurs want to expand their businesses, which leads to increased investment and corporate profits.

Initially, banks only lend to businesses that are expected to gen­erate enough cash to repay their loans. But as time progresses, the competition between lenders increases and caution is thrown to winds. Money is doled out left, right, and centre and normally it doesn’t end well.

This is the basic premise of the financial instability hypothesis. In this column I will explain that the Indian corporates have reached what Minsky called the Ponzi stage of finance.  Minsky essentially theorised that there are three stages of borrowings. The RBI’s box in the Financial Stability Report explains these three stages. Nevertheless, a better explanation can be found in L Randall Wray’s new book, Why Minsky Matters—An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist.

As Wray writes: “Minsky developed a famous classification for fragility of financing positions. The safest is called “hedge” finance (note that this term is not related to so-called hedge funds). In a hedge position, expected income is sufficient to make all payments as they come due, including both interest and principal.” Hence, in the hedge position the company taking on loans is making enough money to pay interest on the debt as well as repay it.

What is the second stage? As Wray writes: “A “speculative” position is one in which expected income is sufficient to make interest payments, but principal must be rolled over. It is “speculative” in the sense that income must increase, continued access to refinancing must be expected, or an asset must be sold to cover principal payments.”

Hence, in a speculative position, a company is making enough money to keep paying interest on the loan that it has taken on, but it has no money to repay the principal amount of the loan. In order to repay the principal, the income of the company has to go up. Or banks need to agree to refinance the loan i.e. give a fresh loan so that the current loan can be repaid. The third option is for the company to start selling its assets in order to repay the principal amount of the loan.

And what is the third stage? As Wray writes: “Finally, a “Ponzi” position (named after a famous fraudster, Charles Ponzi, who ran a pyramid scheme—much like Bernie Madoff’s more recent fraud”) is one in which even interest payments cannot be met, so that the debtor must borrow to pay interest (the outstanding loan balance grows by the interest due).”

Hence, in the Ponzi position, the company is not making enough money to be able to pay the interest that is due on its loans. In order to pay the interest, it has to take on more loans. This is why Minsky called it a Ponzi position.

Charles Ponzi was a fraudster who ran a financial scheme in Boston, United States, in 1919. He promised to double the investors’ money in 90 days. This was later shortened to 45 days. There was no business model in place to generate returns. All Ponzi did was to take money from new investors and handed it over to old investors whose investments had to be redeemed. His game got over once the money leaving the scheme became higher than the money being invested in it.

Along similar lines once companies are not in a position to pay interest on their loans they need to borrow more. This new money coming in helps them repay the loans as well as pay interest on it. And until they can keep borrowing more they can keep paying interest and repaying their loans. Hence, the entire situation is akin to a Ponzi scheme.

By now, dear reader, you must be wondering, why have I been rambling on about a single box in the RBI’s Financial Stability Report and an economist called Hyman Minsky.

In RBI’s Financial Stability Report the box stands on its own. But is the RBI dropping hints here? Of course, you don’t expect the central bank of a country to directly say that a large section of its corporates have reached the Ponzi stage of finance. And there are many others operating in the speculative stage of finance. Even without the RBI saying it directly, there is enough evidence to establish the same.

In the report RBI points out that as on September 30, 2015, the bad loans (gross non-performing advances) of banks were at 5.1% of total advances of scheduled commercial banks operating in India. The number was at 4.6% as on March 31, 2015. This is a huge jump of 50 basis points in a period of just six months.

The restructured loans of banks fell to 6.2% of total advances from 6.4% in March 2015.  A restructured loan is a loan on which the interest rate charged by the bank to the borrower has been lowered. Or the borrower has been given more time to repay the loan i.e. the tenure of the loan has been increased. In both cases the bank has to bear a loss.

The stressed loans of banks, obtained by adding the bad loans and the restructured loans, came in at 11.3% of total advances. They were at 11.1% in March 2015.
The numbers for the government owned public sector banks were much worse. The stressed loans of public sector banks stood at 14.1%. In March 2015, this number was at 13.2%. This is a significant jump in a period of just six months. The stressed loans of private sector banks stood at a very low 4.6% of total advances.

Let’s look at the stressed loans of public sector banks over a period of time. In March 2011, the number was at 6.6% of total advances. By March 2012, it had jumped to 8.8% of total advances. Now it is at 14.1%.

What is happening here? Banks are clearly kicking the can down the road by restructuring more loans, because many corporates are clearly not in a position to repay their bank loans. Why do I say that? As the Mid-Year Economic Review published by the Ministry of Finance last week points out: “Corporate balance sheets remain highly stressed. According to analysis done by Credit Suisse, for non – financial corporate sector (based on ~ 11000 companies in the CMIE database as of FY2014 and projections done for FY2015 based on a sample of 3700 companies), the number of companies whose interest cover is less than 1 has not declined significantly (this number was 1003 in September 2014 and is 994 in September 2015 quarter).”

Interest coverage ratio is essentially obtained by dividing the earnings before interest and taxes(operating profit) of a company during a given period, by the interest that it needs to pay on the loans that it has taken on.

In the Indian case, a significant section of the corporates have an interest coverage ratio of less than 1. This means that they are not earning enough to even pay the interest on their outstanding loans.

Further, the weighted average interest coverage ratio of all companies in the sample as on September 2015 was at 2.3. It was at 2.5 in September 2014. As the Mid-Year Economic Review points out: “Research indicates that an interest cover of below 2.5 for larger companies and below 4 for smaller companies is considered below investment grade.”

What this means that many corporates now are not in a position to even pay interest on their loans. They need newer loans to repay interest on their loans. They have reached the Ponzi stage of finance, as Minsky had decreed. Still others are in the speculative stage.

The RBI Financial Stability Report again hints at this without stating it directly. As the report points out: “Bank credit to the industrial sector accounts for a major share of their overall credit portfolio as well as stressed loans. This aspect of asset quality is related to the issue of increasing leverage of Indian corporates. While capital expenditure (capex) in the private sector is a desirable proposition for a fast growing economy like India, it is observed that the capex which had gone up sharply has been coming down despite rising debt. During this period, profitability and as a consequence, the debt-servicing capacity of companies has, seen a decline. These trends may be indicative of halted projects, rising debt levels per unit of capex, overall rise in debt burden with poor recoveries on resources employed.”

What the central bank does not say is that rising debt without a rising capital expenditure may also be indicative of the fact that newer loans are being taken on in order to pay off older loans as well as pay interest on the outstanding loans. The public sector banks are issuing newer loans because if they don’t corporates will start defaulting and the total amount of bad loans will go up even further.

In such a scenario, the public sector banks have also been helping corporates by restructuring more and more loans. By doing this they are essentially postponing the problem. A restructured loan is not a bad loan. Further, around 40% of restructured loans between 2011 and 2014 have turned into bad loans.

All this hints towards a large section of Indian corporates operating in what Minsky referred to as a Ponzi stage of finance. Many corporates are also in the speculative stage. And given that, it’s not going to end well.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on SwarajyaMag on December 24, 2015

Fasten your seatbelts: Not only United Bank, a major part of banking is in trouble

 indian rupeesVivek Kaul 
In an editorial today (i.e. February 26, 2014), on the troubled United Bank of India, The Financial Express asks “Wasn’t anybody watching?”. “It is amazing that things could have been allowed to come to such a pass without action being taken to stop it,” the pink-paper points out.
In fact, The Financial Express should have been asking this question about the Indian banking sector as a whole, and not just the United Bank in particular. As of September 30, 2013, the stressed asset ratio of the Indian banking system as a whole stood at 10.2% of its total assets.
This is the highest since the financial year 2003-2004 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2003 and March 31, 2004) point out Tushar Poddar and Vishal Vaibhaw of Goldman Sachs in a recent report titled India: No ‘banking’ on growth.
Interestingly, the public sector banks are in a worse situation that their private sector counterparts. As the latest RBI Financial Stability Report points out “Among the bank-groups, the public sector banks continue to have distinctly higher stressed advances at 12.3 per cent of total advances, of which restructured standard advances were around 7.4 per cent.”
The stressed asset ratio is the sum of gross non performing assets plus restructured loans divided by the total assets held by the Indian banking system. What this means in simple English is that for every Rs 100 given by Indian banks as a loan(a loan is an asset for a bank) nearly Rs 10.2 is in shaky territory. 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) by increasing the tenure of the loan or lowering the interest rate.
The restructuring of a loan happens through the Corporate Debt Restructuring(CDR) cell. The Goldman Sachs analysts point out in their report that 85% of restructured loans were restructured during the last two years (i.e. financial year 2011-2012 and 2012-2013).
What makes the situation even more precarious is the fact that the stressed loans could keep increasing. Goldman Sachs projects that among the banks its research team covers stressed loans could go up by as much as 25% in 2013-2014 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014). Also, some of the troubled loans have still not been restructured or classified as bad loans by banks. Hence, the situation is worse than what the numbers tell us.
As Akash Prakash of Amansa Capital wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard “Most investors believe that many of the problem assets are yet to be recognised by the system. These banks continue to increase their exposure to the problem areas of power and infrastructure.”
Five sectors, namely, Infrastructure, Iron & Steel, Textiles, Aviation and Mining, have the highest level of stressed advances. “At system level, these five sectors together contribute around 24 percent of total advances of SCBs [scheduled commercial banks], and account for around 51 per cent of their total stressed advances…The share of above mentioned five sectors in the loans portfolio of Public Sector Banks,” the RBI Financial Stability Report points out. Hence, the public sector banks are in greater trouble than their private counterparts.
Of the five sectors the infrastructure sector has contributed around 30% of the total stressed assets even though its share of total loans is only about 15%.
The banks have also not been provisioning enough money against stressed loans. “Moreover, provisions for stressed assets are still low, and the lowest in the region. For public-sector banks under its coverage, our Financials Research team assesses the provision coverage ratio for stressed loans at only 24%,” write Poddar and Vaibhav.
What this means is that the banks are not setting aside enough money to deal with prospect of a greater amount of their stressed loans being defaulted on by borrowers and turning into bad loans. And to that extent, banks have been over-declaring profits. That wouldn’t have been the case if they had not been under-provisioning.
Despite the under-provisioning the capital adequacy ratio of banks has fallen dramatically in the recent past. “The Capital to Risk Weighted Assets Ratio (CRAR) at system level declined to 12.7 per cent as at end September 2013 from 13.8 per cent in as at end March 2013…At bank-group level, PSBs recorded the lowest CRAR at 11.2 per cent,” the RBI Financial Stability Report points out. In fact, since September 30, the capital adequacy ratio of the entire banking system would have fallen even more, given that bad loans have gone up. The capital adequacy ratio of a bank is the total capital of the bank divided by its risk weighted assets.
In the days to come, the banks, particularly public sector banks (given their falling capital adequacy ratio), will have to raise more capital to have a greater buffer against the mounting bad loans. The RBI estimated in late 2012 that banks need to raise around $26-28 billion (or around Rs 1,61,200 crore – Rs 1,73, 600 crore, if one dollar equals Rs 62) by 2018.
This is a huge amount. “The capital raising requirement could increase to US$43bn [Rs 2,66,600 crore] under a stress scenario where gross NPLs[non performing loans] and restructured assets rise to 15% of loans, the previous historical high,” estimates Goldman Sachs.
So where is this money going to come from? For the financial year 2014-2015 (i.e. the period between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015). the finance minister P Chidambaram has set aside only Rs 11,200 crore for capital infusion into public sector banks. This is simply not enough.
So should government pump in more money into the banks? It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do so. As Akash Prakash writes “There is no way the government can fund this; there is simply no fiscal capacity. Nor do investors want to stand in front of this freight train, since the capital needs for most banks are greater than their current market capitalisation.”
Let’s take the case of the United Bank of India. The current market capitalisation of the bank is around Rs 1442 crore(assuming a share price of Rs 26). The government has decided to pump in Rs 800 crore into the bank. Given that, the market capitalisation of the bank is around Rs 1442 crore, which private investor would have been ready to pump in Rs 800 crore? Also, when the State Bank of India tried to sell shares worth Rs 9,600 crore to institutional investors recently, it failed to raise the targeted amount and had to be rescued with the Life Insurance Corporation pitching in and picking up its shares.
If the biggest public sector bank in the country, which accounts for nearly 20% of Indian banking, is unable to sell its shares completely, what is the chance for other public sector banks being able to do so?
Given these reasons, Indian banking is in for a tough time ahead. Fasten your seatbelts. 
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on February 26, 2014. 
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Crony capitalism: The truth about Indian banking is finally coming out

indian rupeesVivek Kaul  
One of the well kept secrets about the fragile state of the Indian economy is gradually coming out in the open. The Indian banks are not in great shape. The Financial Express reports that the chances of a lot of restructured loans never being repaid has gone up. It quotes R K Bansal, chairman of the corporate debt restructuring (CDR) cell, as saying that the rate of slippages could go up to 15% from the current levels of 10%. “The slower-than-expected economic recovery and delayed clearances for projects will result in a higher share of failed restructuring cases,” Bansal told the newspaper.
When a big borrower (usually a company) fails to repay a bank loan, the loan is not immediately declared to be a bad loan. The CDR cell is a facility available for banks to try and rescue the loan. Loans are usually restructured by extending the repayment period of the loan. This is done under the assumption that even though the borrower may not be in a position to repay the loan currently due to cash flow issues, chances are that in the future he may be in a better position to repay the loan. Or as John Maynard Keynes once famously said “If you owe your banka hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.” 
As of December 2013, the CDR cell had restructured loans of around Rs 2.9 lakh crore. Of this nearly 10% of the loans have turned into bad loans with promoters not paying up. Bansal expects this number to go up to 15%. Interestingly, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) working group estimates that nearly 25-30% of the restructured loans may ultimately turn out to be bad loans.
And that is clearly a worrying sign. There is more data that backs this up. In the financial stability report released in December 2013, the RBI estimated that the average stressed asset ratio of the Indian banking system stood at 10.2% of the total assets of Indian banks as of September 2013. It stood at 9.2% of total assets at the end of March 2013.
The average stressed asset ratio is essentially the sum of gross non performing assets plus restructured loans divided by the total assets held by the Indian banking system. What this means in simple English is that for every Rs 100 given by Indian banks as a loan(a loan is an asset for a bank) nearly Rs 10.2 is in shaky territory. 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 RBI financial stability report points out that this has happened because of bad credit appraisal by the banks during the boom period. “It is possible that boom period[2005-2008] credit disbursal was associated with less stringent credit appraisal, amongst various other factors that affected credit quality,” the report points out. Hence, borrowers who shouldn’t have got loans in the first place, also got loans, simply because the economy was booming, and bankers giving out loans felt that their loans would be repaid. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case.
Interestingly, Uday Kotak, Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Bank recently told CNBC TV 18 that the current stressed, restructured or non performing loans amounted to nearly 25% of the Indian banking assets. He put the total number at Rs 10 lakh crore of the total loans of Rs 40 lakh crore given by the Indian banking system. This is a huge number.
Kotak further said 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.
Interestingly, a few business sectors amount for a major portion of these troubled loans. As the RBI report on financial stability points out “There are five sectors, namely, Infrastructure, Iron & Steel, Textiles, Aviation and Mining which have high level of stressed advances. At system level, these five sectors together contribute around 24 percent of total advances of SCBs (scheduled commercial banks), and account for around 51 per cent of their total stressed advances.”
So, five sectors amount to nearly half of the troubled loans. If one looks at these sectors carefully, it doesn’t take much time to realize these are all sectors in which crony capitalism is rampant (the only exception probably being textiles).
Take the case of L Rajagopal of the Congress party (who recently used the pepper spray in the Parliament). He is the chairman and the founder of the Lanco group, which is into infrastructure and power sectors. As Shekhar Gupta pointed out in a recent article in The Indian Express, Rajagopal’s “company got a Rs 9,000 crore reprieve in a CDR (corporate debt restructuring) process just the other day. His bankrupt companies were given further loans of Rs 3,500 crore against an equity of just Rs 239 crore. Twenty-seven banks were involved in that bailout.”
Here is a company which hasn’t repaid loans of Rs 9,000 crore. It benefits from the restructuring of those loans and is then given further loans worth Rs 3,500 crore. So, if the Indian banking sector is in a mess, it is not surprising at all.
As bad loans mount, banks will go slow on giving out newer loans. They are also likely to charge higher rates of interest from those borrowers who are repaying the loans. This is not an ideal scenario for an economy which needs to grow at a very fast rate in order to pull out more and more of its people from poverty. If India has to go back to 8-9% rate of economic growth, its banks need to be in a situation where they should be able to continue to lend against good collateral.
So is there a way out of this mess? A suggestion on this front has come from Saurabh Mukherjea from Ambit. He suggests that the bad assets be taken off from the balance sheets of banks and these assets be moved to create a “bad bank”. This would allow the good banks to operate properly, without worrying about the bad loans on its books. As he writes “This would, in effect, nationalise the bad assets of the Indian banks and the taxpayer would have to bear the burden of these sub-standard loans.”
The government had followed this strategy to rescue Unit Trust of India (UTI). All the bad assets were moved to SUUTI (Specified Undertaking of the Unit Trust of India). The good assets were moved to the UTI Mutual Fund, which has flourished over the years. The government also has gained in the process.
The trouble here is that even if the government does this, there is no guarantee that it might be successful in reining in the crony capitalists. Over the last 10 years crony capitalists like Rajagopal, who are close to the Congress party, have benefited out of the Indian banking system. Given this, it is but natural to assume that after May 2014, the crony capitalists close to the next government (which in all likeliness will be led by Narendra Modi) will takeover. And that is the real problem of the Indian banking sector, for which there can be no solution other than a political will to clean up the system.
The article originally appeared on www.firstbiz.com on February 25, 2014
 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)