Tag: Repo Rate | Page 5

1 April, 2015

Why banks still haven’t cut interest rates

Vivek Kaul

Today is the first day of the new financial year. And banks still haven’t cut interest rates. This despite the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) of cutting the repo rate twice by 50 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) between January and March 2015. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark to the interest rates that banks pay for their deposits and in turn charge on their loans.
Other than the RBI cutting the repo rate, the finance minister has also been very vocal about the entire issue. On March 22, 2015, he remarked: “We do not put pressure on them (i.e. public sector banks) We only expect and our expectations come true.”
A few days later on March 25 2015, Jaitley said: “I mentioned a few days ago in the presence of the (RBI) Governor (Raghuram Rajan) that we do not pressurise the banks to cut rates. But we do expect the banks after assessing the situation to act in a prudent manner. Our banks have been by and large responsible. And I am quite certain we will see more cuts in future.”
Despite this overt pressure, the banks haven’t gone around cutting the interest rates on their loans. A recent Bloomberg newsreport pointed out that 43 out of the 47 scheduled commercial banks haven’t cut their base rates or the minimum interest rate a bank charges its customers.
Unless, banks cut their base rate there is no point in the RBI cutting the repo rate simply because the borrowers as well as the prospective borrowers do not benefit from lower interest rates. Having said that, just because the RBI has cut the repo rate or the fact that the finance minister thinks interest rates should be lower, doesn’t mean that banks should lower interest rates. One thing that they need to look at is their deposit growth vis a vis their loan growth. Latest data from the RBI suggests that deposit growth over the last one year was at 11.6%. In comparison, the loan growth of banks was at 10.2%. Also, the deposit growth was on a higher base. Hence, it is safe to say that deposits of banks have grown much faster than their loans.
This conclusion can also be made by calculating the incremental credit deposit ratio. The incremental credit deposit ratio over the last one year stands at 67.3%. This means that for every Rs 100 raised as deposit, banks have given out loans worth Rs 67.3. Ideally, banks should be lending around Rs 74.5 for every Rs 100 they raise as a deposit. This, after adjusting for the Rs 25.5 of Rs 100 that they need to maintain as cash reserve ratio and statutory liquidity ratio.
Around this time last year, the incremental credit deposit ratio had stood at 73.7%. Hence, what this clearly tells us is that lending by banks is growing at a significantly slower pace in comparison to the increase in deposits. Given this, banks should be in a position to cut their base rate, but they still haven’t.
Why? While banks are quick to raise interest rates when the RBI raises the repo rate, they are slow to cut interest rates when the RBI cuts the repo rate. Also, if banks lower their base rate, the interest they earn on the money that they have lent comes down immediately. But the interest that they pay on their deposits does not change. While loans rate are floating, deposit rates are not. Hence, banks continue to hold on to interest rates on their loans.
As a March 11 report by the International Monetary Fund on India points out: “Pass-through to deposit and lending rates is relatively slow and the deposit rate adjusts more quickly to monetary policy changes than does the lending rate.” What this means is that after the RBI cuts the repo rate, banks tend to cut their deposit rates more quickly in comparison to their lending rates. Further, it takes around 9.5 months for deposit rates to change and 18.8 months for the lending rates to change,after the RBI has cut the repo rate, the IMF stated. Given this, it will be a while by the time banks start to cut their lending rates. And this assuming that the RBI does not change its direction on repo rate cuts.
What has not helped is the fact that banks continue to accumulate bad loans. As the IMF report on India points out: “Evidence of corporate India’s worsening financial performance is found in the rising share of stressed loans in banks’ portfolios—both non-performing assets (NPAs) and restructured loans have continued to increase, and are at their highest levels since 2003…Corporates in the manufacturing and construction sectors, plus the infrastructure sector, contributed notably to banks’ non performing assets. Between 2002/03 and 2013/14 corporate debt increased by 428 percent for a sample of 762 firms.”
With such high levels of borrowing the pressure on the balance sheets of banks (in particular public sector banks) is likely to continue in the days to come. As the IMF reports points out: “Some corporates are likely already credit constrained due to high leverage, which in turn continues to put pressure on the health of the financial system, in particular on the balance sheets of public sector banks (PSBs). This will further affect bank risk taking as well as the ability of the banking system to finance economic recovery.”
The bad loans will also limit the ability of banks to cut their lending rates. As Crisil Research pointed out in a recent report: “High non performing assets curb the pace at which benefits of lower policy rate are passed on to borrowers. Data shows periods of high NPAs – such as between 2002 and 2004 (when NPAs were at 8.8% of gross advances) – are accompanied by weaker transmission of policy rate cuts. This time around, NPA levels are not as high as witnessed back then, but still remain in the zone of discomfort.”
Given this, the finance minister Jaitley may keep asking banks to cut their lending rates, but the banks are not likely to oblige him any time soon.

The column was originally published on The Daily Reckoning on April 1, 2015

4 February, 2015

Why banks are not cutting interest rates

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) presented its last monetary policy statement for this financial year, yesterday. It decided not to cut the repo rate which continues to be at 7.75%. The repo rate is the interest rate at which the RBI lends to banks and is expected to act as a sort of a benchmark to the interest rates at which banks carry out their business.
The RBI deciding not to cut the repo rate was largely around expected lines. I had said so clearly in my column dated January 16, 2015. The RBI had cut the repo rate by 25 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) a day earlier, on January 15, 2015.
There was a straightforward reason for this—the RBI had said in the statement released on January 15, that: “Key to further easing are data that confirm continuing disinflationary pressures.” Between January 15 and February 3 no new inflation data has come out. Hence, there was no way that the RBI could figure out whether the fall in inflation (or what it calls disinflation) has continued. Given this, there was no way it could cut the repo rate, unless it chose to go against its own guidance.
The more important issue here is that despite the RBI cutting the repo rate on January 15, 2015, very few banks have acted on it and passed on the rate cut to their consumers. Reuters reports that only three out of India’s 45 commecial banks have cut their base lending rates since the RBI cut the repo rate last month. The base rate is the minimum interest rate a bank is allowed to charge to its customers.
This has happened in an environment where growth in bank loans has slowed down substantially. Every week the RBI puts out data regarding the total amount of loans given out by banks. As on January 9, 2015 (the latest such data available), the total lending by scheduled commercial banks had grown by 10.7% over a one year period. For the one year period ending January 10, 2014, the total lending by banks had grown by 14.8%. This clearly shows that the bank lending has slowed down considerably over the last one year.
In this scenario theoretically it would make sense for banks to cut their interest rate so that more people borrow. As Rajan put it while addressing a press conference yesterday: “To get that lending they will have to be more competitive, which means they will have to cut base rate. I am hopeful it is a matter of time before banks judge that they should pass it on.”
But as I have often explained in the past cutting interest rates does not always lead to more people borrowing because the fall in EMIs is almost negligible in most cases.
As John Kenneth Galbraith writes in The Affluent Society: “Consumer credit is ordinarily repaid in instalments, and one of the mathematical tricks of this type of repayment is that a very large increase in interest brings a very small increase in monthly payment.” And vice versa—a large cut in interest rate decreases the monthly payment by a very small amount. So interest rate cuts do not always lead to people borrowing more.
Hence, the banks run the risk of cutting the base rate and charging their existing customers a lower rate of interest and at the same time not gaining new customers. This will be a loss-making proposition for banks and given that only 3 out of the 45 scheduled commercial banks have cut their base rates since January 15, 2015.
Banks increase their lending rates very fast when the RBI raises the repo rate. But they take time to cut their lending rates particularly in a situation where the RBI has reversed its monetary policy stance and cut the repo rate after a long time.
As Crisil Research points out in a research note released yesterday: “Lending rates show upward flexibility during monetary tightening but downward rigidity during easing. Between 2002 and 2004, while the policy rate declined by 200 basis points, lending rates dropped by just 90-100 basis points. Conversely, in 2011-12, when the policy rate rose by 170 basis points, lending rates surged 150 basis points.”
So when the RBI is increasing the repo rate, banks typically tend to match that increase, but the vice versa is not true. “Lending and deposit rates also move in tandem in times of policy rate hikes, while the gap between them widens when rates fall. Base rates of banks have been steady around 10-10.25% over the last 18 months, while deposit rates started coming down in October 2014 by about 20- 25 basis points because of ample liquidity.,” points out Crisil Research.
This is something that Rajan also talked about yesterday, when he said: “Many [banks] have been relatively quick to cut their deposit rates, but not so quick to cut their lending rates, I presume some are hoping they can get the spread for a little more time to repair banks’ balance sheets.”
When a bank cuts the interest rate it pays on its fixed deposits and at the same time does not cut its lending rate, it earns what bankers call a greater spread. This essentially means more profit for the bank.
Rajan in his statement also talks about banks repairing their balance sheets. This is particularly in r reference to the bad loans of public sector banks. As the latest financial stability report released by the RBI in December 2014 points out: “PSBs[public sector banks] continued to record the highest level of stressed advances at 12.9 per cent of their total advances in September 2014 followed by private sector banks at 4.4 per cent.” The situation hasn’t really changed since then, if the latest quarterly results of public sector banks for the period October to December 2014 are anything to go by.
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. 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.
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 10.7 is in shaky territory. For public sector banks this number is even higher at Rs 12.9.
The public sector banks are hoping to recover some of these losses by cutting their deposit rates but staying put on their lending rates. And this leads to a situation where even though the RBI has cut the repo rate once, it hasn’t had much impact on the lending rates of banks. “High non performing assets curb the pace at which benefits of lower policy rate are passed on to borrowers. Data shows periods of high NPAs – such as between 2002 and 2004 (when NPAs were at 8.8% of gross advances) – are accompanied by weaker transmission of policy rate cuts. This time around, NPA levels are not as high as witnessed back then, but still remain in the zone of discomfort,” Crisil Research points out.
In this situation, banks will cut lending rates at a much slower pace than the pace at which the RBI cuts the repo rate.

(The column originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning, on Feb 4, 2015)

4 February, 2015

Raghuram Rajan is not an item number; there can’t be something new every 15 days

If you are the kind who watches Hindi film trailers regularly, you would know that item numbers hit television screens regularly; once in about every two weeks is my guess. Such songs, normally do not have any link with the overall story of the movie and are typically included just to get the audience to the theatres, once the movie releases.
Given this, they have a very small shelf life. Of course there are songs like choli ke peeche kya hai which fall into this category and have survived the test of time. But they are exceptions that prove the rule.
The mainstream media also needs its shares of item numbers to keep the audience interested. And given the state of our country, there is no dearth of such events. It could mean non-stop coverage of a child who has fallen into a bore-well or a sting operation that merely states the obvious.
One part of the media which does not get enough item numbers is the business media. And typically they look forward to the days on which the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) presents the monetary policy. Today was one such day and business media was waiting for it with bated breath.
But the item number turned out to be a bhajan when the RBI governor Raghuram Rajan decided not cut the repo rate in the Sixth Bi-Monthly Monetary Policy Statement, for 2014-2015. Repo rate is the rate at which the RBI lends to banks and is currently at 7.75%.
Rajan had cut the repo rate on January 15, 2015, by 25 basis points. This was an inter-meeting cut with no monetary policy announcement being scheduled on that day. This cut had left the media gasping for more cuts.
Rajan in a press conference after the policy was announced today rubbed salt into media’s wounds(i.e. their disappointment at the repo rate not being cut) by saying that “monetary policy is a long term process. Don’t hold me for something new every 15 days.”
A rate cut would made the day easier for the business media. The stock market would have rallied. The experts would have explained why the stock market has rallied. Still other experts would have told us which are the stocks to buy now. The economists could be got in to explain, why the RBI cut the repo rate. They could also speculate about whether the RBI would cut the repo rate by 25 basis points or 50 basis points on April 7, 2015, the day, the next monetary policy statement is scheduled to be announced. And the television anchors could have brought out their million dollar smiles. All in all everyone would have had a good time.
But in the words of Sahir Ludhianvi made famous by Amitabh Bachchan “magar ye hona saka”.
Nevertheless, if people had chosen to read the last monetary policy statement carefully enough, they would have known that the chances of the RBI cutting the repo rate again on February 3, were next to nothing.
The statement had clearly said: “Key to further easing are data that confirm continuing disinflationary pressures.” This means that if inflation keeps falling or remains stable, the RBI will cut the repo rate more in the days to come. The trouble was that between January 15 and today no new inflation data was released. That will happen only next week.
In the same statement the RBI had further said that “also critical would be sustained high quality fiscal consolidation.” This financial year is more or less over. The only way the RBI can figure out how the government is planning to manage its fiscal deficit for the next financial year is by studying the annual budget once it is out on February 28, later this month. The fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
Given this, any further rate cuts would mean waiting for new inflation data to come out as well as waiting for the government to present its budget.
As the RBI said in the monetary policy statement released today: “The Reserve Bank also indicated that “key to further easing are data that confirm continuing disinflationary pressures. Also critical would be sustained high quality fiscal consolidation…”. Given that there have been no substantial new developments on the disinflationary process or on the fiscal outlook since January 15, it is appropriate for the Reserve Bank to await them and maintain the current interest rate stance.”
Over and above this the RBI also needs to take a look at a few other data points that are scheduled to be released. Sometime late last week, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released a new method of calculating the GDP. This changed the base year for calculating the 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.
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.
On February 9, later this month the government will release the expected GDP growth for 2014-2015, using the new method unveiled late last week. The RBI will have to take this into account while deciding what to do with the repo rate in the days to come.
Along with the new GDP, the RBI also will have to monitor the revision in the way the consumer price index is calculated. As the central bank said in its statement: “As regards the path of inflation in 2015-16, the Reserve Bank will keenly monitor the revision in the CPI, which will rebase the index to 2012 and incorporate a more representative consumption basket along with methodological improvements.”
Given these reasons, the next action from the RBI on the repo rate front, will happen only after the government has presented its annual budget irrespective of the business media continuing to make a song and dance about it.

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

This column originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on February 3, 2015

8 December, 2014

RBI must ensure that interest rates remain greater than inflation

Vivek Kaul

The Raghuram Rajan led Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has now more or less made it clear that it is likely to start cutting the repo rate from early next year. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark for the interest rates that banks pay on their fixed deposits and hence, charge on their loans.
The question to ask now is by how much will the RBI cut the repo rate by, as and when it does start to do so. The answer to the question is not very straightforward. As ex Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech December 2004, when he was a governor of the Fed, “If making monetary policy is like driving a car, then the car is one that has an unreliable speedometer, a foggy windshield, and a tendency to respond unpredictably and with a delay to the accelerator or the brake.”
Keeping this analogy in mind, let’s look at the accompanying table. Take a look at the green line and the red line.

The green line is the inflation as measured by consumer price index. The red line is the average interest rate which the government has been paying on the money it borrows. In 2007-2008, the green line went above the red line and that’s how things stayed till 2013-2014.
What does this mean? This means that the government managed to borrow money at a rate of interest that was lower than the rate of inflation. Or as an economist would have put it, the government managed to borrow money at a negative real rate of interest.
As can be seen from the table, the difference between the rate of inflation and the average interest at which the government managed to raise debt was significant. Since the government was offering a lower rate of interest, it set the benchmark low. Even though banks had to borrow at a rate of interest higher than that of the government, it was still lower than the prevailing rate of inflation between 2007-2008 and 2013-2014.
This is how things have stood over the last few years. The situation has been reversed only over the last few months as inflation as measured through the consumer price index has fallen dramatically. And for the first time in many years, the rate of interest offered by banks on their fixed deposits is actually higher than the rate of inflation. The country has had to pay a huge cost for this scenario. The household financial savings have fallen dramatically over the last few years. The household financial savings rate was at 7.2% of the gross domestic product in 2013-2014, against 7.1% of GDP in 2012-2013 and 7% in 2011-2012. It had stood at 12% in 2009-2010. Financial savings did not exactly collapse because people ultimately need to save some money, but they came down nonetheless. Household financial savings is essentially the money invested by individuals in fixed deposits, small savings scheme, mutual funds, shares, insurance etc.
When individuals figured out that the interest rates offered on fixed deposits were lower than the rate of inflation, they started to looked at other avenues of investments where they could earn a higher return. One such avenue was gold. As the 2012-2013 Economic Survey had pointed out “The last three years have seen a substantial rise in gold imports (the value of gold imports increased nine times between January 2008 and October 2012)…Gold imports are positively correlated with inflation.”
Money invested in gold is essentially locked up. It is not available in the financial system to be loaned out. Further, the rise of Ponzi schemes was also linked to the era of high inflation. People moved their money into Ponzi schemes which promised a slightly higher rate of return than fixed deposits did. Money moved into real estate as well.
Given these reasons, it makes sense for the RBI to make sure that interest rates continue to be higher than the rate of inflation. This is one way of ensuring that household financial savings which have fallen dramatically over the last few years, start building up again. Also, this is one way of ensuring that money does not get locked up in the blackholes of gold and real estate, or is invested into Ponzi schemes.
So, this brings us back to the question, what should the repo rate cut be like? It actually depends on where the rate of inflation is in early 2015. RBI’s prediction is of consumer price inflation being at 6% in March 2015.
As Chetan Ahya and Upasana Chachra of Morgan Stanley write in a research note titled RBI Policy – Fight Against Inflation Over, Rate Cuts to Come: “We expect the central bank to follow a framework of keeping positive real rates to the tune of ~150-200 basis points[one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage]. As such, the key determinant of the magnitude of nominal rate cuts will be where inflation settles on a sustainable basis. In our base case, we expect inflation to reach the 6% level on a sustained basis by Mar-15 (same as the RBI). We thus assume 50bps policy rate cuts in 2015 in our base case.”
If the inflation falls to below than 6% then the rate could be higher.
To conclude, wherever the inflation lands up, the RBI must make sure that interest rates are higher than that.

The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Dec 5, 2014

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

8 December, 2014

What India Inc needs to understand about interest rates

Vivek Kaul

Big business has been after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut the repo rate or the rate at which the central bank lends money to the banks.
There seems to be a certain formula to the whole thing. Before any monetary policy the business lobbies make a series of statements asking the RBI to cut interest rates. And when the RBI does not cut the repo rate, they make another series of statements explaining why the RBI should have cut the repo rate.
The belief is that a cut in the repo rate will lead to banks cutting the interest rates at which they lend. The statements made by the business lobbies normally try to explain how a cut in interest rates will lead to people borrowing and consuming more and companies borrowing and investing more. The RBI hasn’t entertained them till now.
In the monetary policy statement released on December 2, 2014, the RBI said that it might start cutting the repo rate sometime early next year.
The business lobbies immediately issued statements expressing their disappointment on the RBI not cutting the repo rate. Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), one of the three big business lobbies, said in a statement: “At this juncture, even a symbolic cut in policy rates would have sent a strong signal down the line that both the government and the RBI are acting in concert to harness demand and take the economy to the higher orbit of growth.”
The phrase to mark here is harness demand (which I have italicized). As explained earlier the logic is that when the RBI cuts the repo rate, banks will cut their lending rates as well and people will borrow and spend more. This will mean businesses will earn more and will lead to economic growth.
Only if it was as simple as that: .
As John Kenneth Galbraith writes in The Affluent Society: “Consumer credit is ordinarily repaid in instalments, and one of the mathematical tricks of this type of repayment is that a very large increase in interest brings a very small increase in monthly payment.” And vice versa—a large cut in interest rate decreases the monthly payment by a very small amount.
Let’s understand this through an example. An individual decides to take a car loan of Rs 4.5 lakh at 10.5%, repayable over a period of five years. The monthly payment or the EMI on this loan amounts to Rs 9,672. Now let’s say the RBI decides to cut the repo rate by 50 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage).
The bank works in perfect coordination with RBI (which is not always the case) and decides to cut the interest loan on the car loan by 50 basis points to 10%. The new EMI now stands at Rs 9,561 or around Rs 111 lower.
If the interest rate is cut by 100 basis points to 9.5%, the EMI falls by around Rs 221.5. Hence, a nearly one tenth cut in interest rate (from 10.5% to 9.5%) leads to the EMI falling by around 2.3% (Rs 221.5 expressed as a percentage of Rs 9,672, the original EMI).
Now will people go and buy cars just because the EMI is Rs 111 or Rs 221.5 lower? Obviously not. People spend money when they feel confident about their economic future. And that is not just about lowering interest rates.
For loans of smaller ticket sizes (consumer durables, two wheeler loans etc.) the difference between EMIs when interest rates are cut, is even more smaller. Hence, the logic that a cut in interest rates increases borrowing, isn’t really correct. As Galbraith puts it: “During periods of active monetary policy, increased finance charges have regularly been followed by large increases in consumer loans.”
What about the corporates? The business lobby CII felt that if the RBI had cut interest rates it would have “improved the poor credit offtake by industry”. In simple English this means that corporates would have borrowed and invested more, only if, the RBI had cut the repo rate.
But is that really the case? As John Kenneth Galbraith points out in The Economics of Innocent Fraud: “If in recession the interest rate is lowered by the central bank, the member banks are counted on to pass the lower rate along to their customers, thus encouraging them to borrow. Producers will thus produce goods and services, buy the plant and machinery they can afford now and from which they can make money, and consumption paid for by cheaper loans will expand.”
But that doesn’t really happen. “The difficulty is that this highly plausible, wholly agreeable process exists only in well-established economic belief and not in real life. The belief depends on the seemingly persuasive theory and on neither reality nor practical experience. Business firms borrow when they can make money and not because interest rates are low [the emphasis is mine],” Galbraith points out.
The last sentence in the above paragraph summarizes the whole situation. And it is difficult to believe that corporates do not understand something as basic as this.
This was also pointed out in a recent research report titled Will a rate cut spur investments?Not really, brought out by Crisil Research. (I had referred to this report in detail on an earlier occasion).
In this report it was pointed out that investment growth in fiscals 2013 and 2014 fell to 0.3%, despite negative real interest rates (repo rate minus retail inflation). The real interest rate during the period was at minus 2.1%, whereas the real lending rate was only at 2.8%.
In contrast for the period between 2004 and 2008, had a real interest rate of 7.4%, and the average investment growth stood at 16.4% per year, during the period. Why was that the case? “The rate of return on investments – as proxied by return on assets (RoA) of around 10,000 non-financial companies as per CMIE Prowess database – have fallen sharply to 2.8% in fiscal 2013 and 2014 from 5.9% in the pre-crisis years,” Crisil Research points out.
This is precisely the point Galbraith makes— Business firms borrow when they can make money and not because interest rates are low.
To conclude, Indian businesses seem to have great faith in monetary policy doing the trick, when there are too many other factors holding back growth (I haven’t gone into these factors partly because they are well known and partly because that’s a separate column in itself).
Indian businessmen are not the only ones who seem to have great faith in monetary policy. This is a trend that is prevalent throughout the world. The central bankers are expected to use monetary policy and come to the rescue of the beleaguered economies all over the world.
Where does this faith stem from? Galbraith explains this beautifully in The Affluent Society: “There is no magic in the monetary policy…[It] is a blunt, unreliable, discriminatory and somewhat dangerous instrument of economic control. It survives in esteem partly because so few understand it…It survives, also because active monetary policy means that, at times, interest rates will be high – a circumstance that is far from disagreeable for those with money to lend.”

The article appeared on www.equitymaster.com as a part of The Daily Reckoning, on Dec 8, 2014