In theory, Rupee at 72 to dollar is the solution to CAD


Gary Dugan 4

Gary Dugan is the CIO – Asia and Middle East, RBS Wealth Division. In this freewheeling interview with Vivek Kaul he talks about the recent currency crash in Asia, where the rupee is headed to in the days to come and why you would be lucky, if you are able to find a three BHK apartment, anywhere in one of the major cities of the world, for less than $100,000.
What are your views on the current currency crash that is on in Asia?
People are trying to characterise it as something like what has happened in the past. I think it is very different. It is different in the sense that we know that emerging markets in general have improved. Their financial systems are more stronger. The government policy has been more prudent and their exposure to overseas investors in general has been well controlled. I don’t think we are going to see a 12 month or a two year problem here. However, countries such as India and Indonesia have been caught out and the money flows have brought their currencies under pressure. So, it’s a problem but not a crisis.
One school of thought coming out seems to suggest that we are going to see some version of the Asian financial crisis that happened in 1998, over the next 18 to 20 months…
I totally disagree with that. The rating agencies have looked at the Indonesian banks and they have said that these banks are well-abled to weather the problems. If you look at India, the banking system is well-abled to weather the problems. It is not as if that there is a whole set of banks about to announce significant write down of assets or lending. The only thing could go wrong is what is happening in Syria. If the oil price goes to $150 per barrel then the whole world has got a problem. The emerging market countries would have an inflation problem and that would only create an exaggeration of what we are seeing at the moment.
Where do you see the rupee going in the days to come?
There is still going to be downward pressure. I said right at the beginning of the year, and I was a little bit tongue in cheek when I said that in theory the rupee could fall to 72. At 72 to a dollar, in theory, clears the current account deficit. I never expected it to get anywhere near that, certainly in a short period of time. But some good comes out of the very substantial adjustments, because pressure on the current account starts to disappear. Already the data is reflecting that. Where the rupee should be in the longer term is a very difficult question to answer.
Lets say by the end of year…
(Laughs) I challenged our foreign exchange market experts on this and asked them what is the fair value for the rupee? I ran some numbers on the hotel prices in Mumbai, relative to other big cities, and not just New York and London, but places like Istanbul as well. India, is the cheapest place among these cities. Like the Economist’s McDonald Index, I did a hotel index, and on that you could argue that the rupee should be 20-30% higher. But, if you look at the price that you have got to pay to sort out your economic problems, it is probably that the currency is going to be closer to 70 than 60 for the balance of this year.
One argument that is often made, at least by the government officials is that because the rupee is falling our exports will start to go up. But that doesn’t seem to have happened…
It takes a while. I was actually talking to a client in Hong Kong last week and he said that warehouses in India have been emptied of flat screen TVs, and they have all been sent to Dubai because they are 20% cheaper now. It is a simple story of how the market reacts to a falling currency.
But it’s not as simple as that…
Of course. A part of the problem that India has is that the economic model has more been based on the service sector rather than manufacturing. The amount of manufactured products that become cheaper immediately and everyone says that I need more Indian products rather than Chinese products or Vietnamese products, is probably insufficient in number to give a sharp rebound immediately. Where you may see a change, even though some of the call centre managers are a little sceptical about it, is that call centres which had lost their competitive edge because of very substantial wage growth in India, will immediately get a good kicker again. It would certainly be helpful, but I would say that it normally takes three to six months to see the maximum benefit of the currency adjustment.
What are the views on the stock market?
I am just a bit sceptical that you are going to see much performance before the elections. I always say it is a relative game rather than absolute one. If all markets are doing well, then India with its adjustment will do fine. Within the BRIC countries, India falls at the bottom of the pack, in terms of relative attractiveness, just because there is a more dynamic story for some of the other countries at the moment.
One of the major negatives for the stock market in India is the fact that the private companies in India have a huge amount of dollar debt…
It is definitely a reason to worry. It’s not something I have looked at in detail. But as you were asking the question, I was just thinking that people are dragging all sorts of bad stories out. When there were bad stories before, people were just finding their way through it. And India has a wonderful way of working its way through its problems and has been doing that for many many years. Remember that these problems come to the head only if the banks call them to account. I think there will be a re-negotiation. It is not as if a very substantial part of Indian history is about to go under because someone is going to pull the plug on them.
Most of the countries that have gone from being developing countries to becoming developed countries have gone through a manufacturing revolution, which is something that is something that has been missing in India…
It is. You look at the stories from the past five years, and the waning strength of the service sector in India, in th international markets, comes out. A good example is that of call centres that have gone back to the middle of the United States from India. A part of that came through currency adjustment. You can say that maybe the rupee was overvalued at the time when this crisis hit. But it is true, in a sense, that India has got to back-fill a stronger manufacturing industry and it has got to reinforce its competitive edge in the service sector.
What is holding back the Indian service sector?
A number of structural things. I talked to some service sector companies at the beginning of the year. And one of things I was told was that I have got all my workers sitting here in this call centre, but now they cannot afford to live within two hours of commuting distance. Why did that happen? That is not about service sector. It is about the broad infrastructure and putting people at home, close to where they work. There are lot of problems to be solved.
There has been talk about the Federal Reserve going slow on money printing(or tapering as it is called) in the days to come. How do you see that going?
Everyone has got to understand that the principle of quantitative easing is to generate growth. So, if there is enough growth around they will keep tapering, even if they get it wrong by starting to taper too early. They will stop tapering if growth is slow. Secondly, number of Federal Reserve governors are worried about imprudent actions of consumers and industrialists, in terms of taking cheap money and spending it on things that they typically do not need to spend on. A good example is speculation in the housing market, something which created the problem in the first place. So they want to choke such bad behaviours. They will probably start tapering in September in a small way. The only thing that may stop it from happening is if the middle Eastern situation blows up. The US didn’t think it was going to get involved a few weeks ago. Now it is.
Isn’t this kind of ironical, that the solution to the problem of propping up the property market again, is something that caused the problem in the first place…
That’s been very typical of the United States for the last 100 years. Evertime there is a problem you ask people to use their credit cards. Or use some form of credit. And when there is an economic slowdown because of the problems of non performing loans, then you get the credit card out again. So, yeah unfortunately that is the way it is.
Why is there this tendency to go back to the same thing that causes the problem, over and over again?
It is the quickest fix. And you hope that you are going to bring about structural changes during the course of a better economic cycle. So people don’t bring the heavyweight policies in place until they have got the economy going again and sadly the only way you can get the economy going again is to just to make credit cheap and encourage people to borrow.
Inflation targeting by central banks has come in for criticism lately. The point is that because a central bank works with a certain inflation target in mind, it ends up encouraging bubbles by keeping interest rates too low for too long. What is your view on that?
These concepts were brought in when central banks thought they could control inflation. If you look at one country that dominates the world at the moment in terms of product prices and in terms of the inflation rate, it is China. Your monetary policy isn’t going to change the behaviours of China. And some of the flairs up in inflation have been as a consequence of China and therefore monetary policies have no impact. Secondly, the idea of controlling inflation, the concept worked for the 20 years of the bull market. Then we got inflation which was too low. So we have changed it all around to actually try to create inflation rather than to dampen inflation. I don’t think they know what tools they should be using. The central banks are using the same tools they used to dampen inflation, in a reverse way, in order to create it.
And that’s where the problem lies…
For nearly two to three hundred years, the world had no inflation, yet the world was kind of an alright place. We had an industrial revolution and we still had negative price increases, but that did not stop people from getting wealthy.
Many people have been shouting from the rooftops that because of all the money that has been printed and is being printed, the world is going to see a huge amount of inflation, so please go and buy gold. But that scenario hasn’t played out…
Chapter one of the economic text book is that if you create a lot of money, you have got a problem. Chapter two is that there is actually another dimension to this and that is the velocity of money. If you have lots of money and if it happens to go around the world very very slowly it doesn’t have any impact. And that has been the point. The amount of money has gone up considerably but the velocity of money has come down. To date, again in the western world, there is little sign of the velocity improving. We are seeing this in the lending numbers. Even if banks have the appetite for lending money, nobody wants to borrow. Someone’s aged 55, and the job prospects are no wage growth, and the pension is tiny, I am not sure that even if you have gave him ten credit cards, he’ll go and use any of one of them. And that is the kind of thing that is happening in Europe and to some extent in the United States.
Yes that’s true…
The only money going into housing at the moment is the money coming from the institutional market, as they speculate. If you look at students coming out of college in the United States, they have come out way down with debt. There is again no way that they are going to go and take more loans from the bank because they have already done that in order to fund their education. So I do not seeturnover of money in the Western world.
There may be no inflation in everyday life but if you look at asset inflation, it has been huge.. That’s right. People just find stores of value. Gold went up as much as it did, in its last wave. If you look at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, in the art market, they are doing extremely well. The same is true about the property market. Places which are in the middle of a jungle in Africa, there prices have gone up to $100,000 an acre. Why? There is no communication. No power lines. It is just because people have money and are seeking out assets to save that money. Also, there has been cash.If you go to Dubai, 80% of the house purchases there, are in cash. So you don’t need the banks.
Can you tell us a little more on the Africa point you just made?
I did laugh when Rwanda came to Singapore to raise money for its first ever bond issue and people were just discovering these new bond markets to invest purely because they did not know what to do with their money. So someone said that I am building, you know in a Rwanda or a Nigeria, and people just ran with their cash, buying properties and buying up land wherever the policies of the government allowed. Sri Lanka again just closed the door on foreign investors because you start to get social problems as the local community cannot afford properties to live in. It was amazing how commercial many of these property markets became, even though in the past they were totally undiscovered. And as we have seen with many of them, you take considerable risk with the legal system. The world has got repriced. I always say that if you can find a three bedroom house below a $100,000-$150,000 in a major city, you are doing well anywhere in the world today.
In Mumbai you won’t find it even for that price..
Yes, though five years ago it was true. It is impossible now.

(The interview appeared in the Forbes India magazine edition dated Oct 4, 2013) 

With gold imports almost zero, trade deficit unlikely to fall further

goldVivek Kaul 
The trouble with being a one trick pony is that the trick stops yielding dividends after sometime. Something similar seems to have happened to the efforts of the government of India to control the huge trade deficit. Trade deficit is the difference between imports and exports.”
Trade deficit for August 2013 was at $10.9 billion. This is a major improvement in comparison to the trade deficit of $14.17 billion in August 2012. The deficit was $12.27 billion in July, 2013.
This fall in trade deficit has come through the efforts of the government to bring down gold imports by increasing the import duty on it. India imported just 2.5 tonnes of gold in August and this cost $650 million. Now compare this to 47.5 tonnes imported in July, 31.5 tonnes in June, 162 tonnes in May and 142.5 tonnes in April of this year.
In April 2013, the 142.5 tonne of imported gold had cost $7.5 billion and the trade deficit was at $17.8 billion. If there had been no gold imports, then the trade deficit for April would have stood at $10.3billion($17.8 billion – $7.5 billion). If the gold imports had been at $650 million (or $0.65 billion) as has been the case in August 2013, then the trade deficit would have stood at $10.95 billion ($17.8 billion – $7.5 billion + $0.65 billion). This number is very close to the trade deficit of $10.9 billion that the country saw in August 2013.
So the point is that the government has been able to control the trade deficit by ensuring that the gold imports are down to almost zero. 
As the Indian Express reports “Gold imports stopped after July 22 due to confusion over a rule issued by the Reserve Bank of India, which required importers to re-export at least 20% of all the purchases from overseas.”
The confusion has now been cleared. Also, with Diwali in early November and the marriage season starting from October, gold imports are likely to pick up in September and October. Even if it doesn’t, the imports are already close to zero. So, any more gains on the trade deficit front by limiting gold imports, is no longer possible. 
The Indian Express report cited earlier quotes a senior executive of the Bombay Bullion Association as saying “Imports may again rise to around 30 tonne in September, as jewellers usually start building inventory to cater to the requirement during the festival and marriage season.”
At the same time, the government hasn’t been able to do much about oil, which is India’s biggest import. In August 2013, oil imports stood at $15.1 billion, up by 17.9% in comparison to the same period last year. Oil imports formed nearly 40.8% of the total imports of $37.05 billion. There isn’t much the government can do on this front, other than raising prices majorly to cut under-recoveries of oil marketing companies and limit demand for oil products at the same time.
But that may not be a politically prudent thing to do. The commerce minister, 
Anand Sharma, warned that with the international prices of crude oil rising over the past 10 days, the oil import bill may go up in the months to come. And this may lead to a higher trade deficit.
As Sonal Varma of Nomura Securities wrote in a report dated September 10, 2013, “Looking ahead, a seasonal rise in imports during the festive season and higher oil prices should result in a slightly higher trade deficit in Q4 2013(the period between Oct and Dec 2013), relative to Q3 (the period between July and Sep 2013).”
But imports form just one part of the trade deficit equation. Exports are the other part. Exports for August 2013, went up by nearly 13% to $26.4 billion, in comparison to August 2012. In July, exports were at $25.83 billion.
While exports may have gone up by in August due to a significantly weaker rupee, whether they will continue to go up in the months to come is a big question. As Ruchir Sharma, Head of Global Macro and Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley, and the author of 
Breakout Nations, told me in a recent interview I did for Forbes India “Exports are dependent on multiple factors, exchange rate being only one of them. Global demand which is another major factor influencing exports, has been weak. If just changing the nominal exchange rate was the game, then it would be such an easy recipe for every country to follow. You could just devalue your way to prosperity. But in the real world you need other supporting factors to come through. You need a manufacturing sector which can respond to a cheap currency. Our manufacturing sector, as has been well documented, has been throttled by all sorts of local problems which exist.”
This something that another international fund manager reiterated when I met him recently. As he said “A part of the problem that India has is that the economic model has been based more on the service sector rather than manufacturing. The amount of manufactured products that become cheaper immediately and everyone says that I need more Indian products rather than Chinese products or Vietnamese products, is probably insufficient in number to give a sharp rebound immediately.”
The other big problem with Indian exports is that they are heavily dependent on imports. As commerce minister Anand Sharma admitted to “45% of exports have imported contents. I don’t think weak rupee has any impact on positive export results.”
In fact 
The Economic Times had quoted Anup Pujari, director general of foreign trade(DGFT) on this subject a few months back. As he said “It is a myth that the depreciation of the rupee necessarily results in massive gains for Indian exporters. India’s top five exports — petroleum products, gems and jewellery, organic chemicals, vehicles and machinery — are so much import-dependent that the currency fluctuation in favour of exporters gets neutralised. In other words, exporters spend more in importing raw materials, which in turn erodes their profitability.”
Also, the moment the rupee falls against the dollar, the foreign buyers try to renegotiate earlier deals, Pujari had said. “As most exporters give in to the pressure and split the benefits, the advantages of a weak rupee disappear.”
What all these points tell us is the simple fact that the trade deficit will be higher in the months to come. And given, this the market, like is the case usually, is probably overreacting.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 11, 2013 

 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 
 

The Great Indian FDI conundrum

ghemawat 2

Our politicians think our problems come from being connected with the world, but the reality is we are too little connected to the world, says Pankaj Ghemawat.

Vivek Kaul

The United Progressive Alliance government is fond of telling us that India’s weakening macroeconomic indicators – a falling rupee, a declining stock market, rising bond yields – are the result of being tied to a weak global economy and factors external to India. But if you were to ask Pankaj Ghemawat, Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, India is not exactly as globally connected as we think it is.
Ghemawat has constructed a broad index of international integration, the DHL Global Connectedness Index, which was first released in November 2011. The 2012 version of this index was released last year and it shows India closer to the bottom. “This index extends beyond trade to incorporate capital, information and people flows as well, and covers 140 countries that account for 95% of the world’s population and 99% of its GDP,” says Ghemawat.
India ranks 119 out of 140 countries on the depth of its global connectedness. “When it comes to trade intensity, India still ranks in the bottom 25% in the sample. As far as capital connectedness is concerned, it is closer to the median,” says Ghemawat.
Capital connectedness is calculated from measures of foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio equity investment into the stock market of the concerned country. India’s decent performance on capital connectedness is primarily on account of the huge money that has come into the Indian stock market from abroad in the last decade and big outward FDI flows in the form of overseas acquisitions by Indian corporates.
If one looks at just inward FDI, the performance is dismal. As Ghemawat puts it, “In terms of inward FDI stock (i.e. foreign companies having built or bought businesses in India) expressed as a percentage of GDP, India comes in the bottom 10%.”
FDI flows into India have also fallen in three out of the last four years. For 2012-13, FDI fell by 21% to $36.9 billion, government data show. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in a recent release, said that FDI inflows to India declined by 29% to $26 billion in 2012.
The government has, faced with an unsustainable current account deficit (CAD), has been trying to encourage FDI into the country to firm up the rupee against the dollar. Last year in September, the government opened up FDI in multi-brand retailing with the rider that each state can decide whether it wants companies like Wal-Mart to set up shop within its borders.
But since then not a single dollar has come into the sector. “One reason for foreign money not coming in is that investors are not sure whether the policy will continue as and when a new government comes in. Also, letting states set their own rules on such an international economic policy matter is basically unheard of elsewhere,” said Ghemawat. Towards the middle of July 2013, the government relaxed FDI norms in 12 sectors, including telecom, insurance, asset reconstruction, petroleum refining, stock exchanges and so on. 
Ghemawat feels that there is a lot that India can learn from China on this front. China started opening up its retail sector to FDI in 1992, initially with various restrictions, but ultimately allowing 100% FDI in 2004. This benefited them with foreign players bringing in new management practices along with supporting technology and investment capital. And we shouldn’t forget the complementarity for foreign retailers between sourcing from China (contributing to China’s export boom) and selling there.
Ghemawat argues that much of the fear about FDI in retail is exaggerated, because even with full liberalisation, foreign retailers would hardly come to dominate the Indian market. “Retail is a very local business, where an intimate understanding of customers, real estate markets, and so on, is essential to success.” He cites a recent estimate that 40 foreign players account for only about 20% of organised retail in China, to suggest that foreign and domestic retail could thrive side-by-side in India.
“Foreign retailers don’t always win out against domestic rivals,” he adds. “Electronics retailers Best Buy from the US and Media Markt from Germany both shut down their stores in China in the last few years. They just couldn’t compete with local rivals Gome and Suning, which had greater domestic scale and business models more attuned to the Chinese market. Home Depot also exited China in 2012. But Chinese consumers gained anyway – competition against foreign retailers spurred locals to improve customer service, one of their weak points.”
Coming back to data from the Indian market, Ghemawat notes an interesting factoid from the 2013 Economist Corporate Network Asia. The nominal GDP of India grew by 12.6% in 2012. In comparison, the sales of MNCs (mainly Western) in India grew by only 6.3%, only half as fast as the GDP. “While this could be viewed as positive regarding Indian firms, a difference of such a big magnitude is probably reflective of a lack of openness,” said Ghemawat.
There are multiple reasons for India’s poor showing on these indicators India regularly figures in the bottom tier of countries in terms of the extent to which its policies promote trade. In the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Enabling Trade Index, India figures in the bottom tier. On the market access parameters, in particular, it figures third from last in a list of 132 countries. Ghemawat also cites the OECD’s FDI restrictiveness index which he has inverted into the FDI Friendliness Index. “India again figures in the bottom 10% of 50 countries in terms of the extent to which it encourages FDI.” No amount of ministerial cajoling of potential foreign investors is likely to outweigh the impact of such protectionist policies.
These indicators, of course, translate into low productivity and lack of infrastructure required to carry out a profitable business. “The Global Competitiveness Report tells us all we need to know about India’s poor infrastructure and low productivity,” says Ghemawat. “India currently ranks 59th on the list (out of 144 countries). It has fallen 10 places since peaking at the 49th spot in 2009. Once ahead of Brazil and South Korea it is now 10 places behind them. China is 30 places ahead of India,” he adds.
When it comes to the supply of transport, energy and ICT (information, communications technology) infrastructure, India is 84th on the list. This lack of infrastructure is the single biggest hindrance to doing business in India, feels Ghemawat. And this has kept foreign investors away from the country. Also given India’s weak health and basic education infrastructure (where it is 101st on the list), India remains low on productivity, which is an important factor for any foreign investor looking to make an investment. And as if all this was not enough it is worth remembering that it is not easy to start any business in India. Every year the World Bank puts out a ranking which measures the Ease of Doing Business across countries. In the 2013 ranking, India came in at rank 132 on the list – the same as in 2012. When it comes to starting a new business In
dia is 173rd on the list. Hence, foreign investors have an option of starting their business in a much easier way in many other countries. Given this, why should they be hurrying to India?
The spate of recent scams also has not helped the way India is viewed abroad. There is significant evidence to show that corruption hampers trade. Says Ghemawat: “According to one study, an increase in corruption levels from that of Singapore to that of Mexico has the same negative effect on inward foreign investment as raising the tax rate by over 50 percentage points.” India stood at 94th position in Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Perception Index. “Given this, tackling corruption has to be a priority,” adds Ghemawat.
The moral of the story is that although India is much more open than it used to be 20 years ago, there is a lot that still needs to be done. And this is important because there is a clear connect between the global connectedness of a country and measures of prosperity. As Ghemawat puts it, “There is a strong positive correlation across countries between the depth of a country’s global connectedness and measures of its prosperity, such as its GDP per capita and its ranking on the UN’s Human Development Index. To be sure, correlation is not the same as causation, but statistical analysis indicates that after controlling for initial income levels, countries with deeper global connectedness have tended to grow faster than less-connected countries.”
The point is further buttressed by one look at the list of countries that are on the top of 2012 DHL Global Connectedness Index created by Ghemawat. These countries are the Netherlands, Singapore, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. In the recent past some of these countries have been caught up in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but it’s important not to let recent growth rates overshadow measures of current prosperity, on which all of these countries far surpass India.
Ghemawat gives the example of the Indian information technology sector. “Ask this simple question to yourself: Would Indian IT companies have been as globally competitive if we had protected them from international competition?” The answer of course is no. But that is the case with the business services sector. There is a huge protective moat around it. This, despite the fact that the sector has a huge potential to create jobs.”
And he backs his argument with numbers. “Although some services (like haircuts) will always be delivered locally, liberalizing trade in services alone could boost global GDP by at least 1.5%.” In India’s case, opening up business services is even more important given that we don’t trade much with our neighbours due to various reasons. “For example, Indian trade with Pakistan, according to one study, is only 2 to 4% of what it might be under friendlier circumstances. The rest of India’s neighbours are relatively small and poor, presenting limited opportunities compared with, for example, the benefits China realised by tying into Japanese and Korean production networks. It is neither exaggerated nor xenophobic to say that one of India’s key structural problems is that it is located in a difficult neighbourhood,” says Ghemawat.
Countries tend to trade the most with their neighbours.  Ghemawat explains, “all else being equal, if you cut the distance between a pair of countries in half, their trade volume will go up almost 200%.  Add a common border, and trade rises another 60%.  That’s why more trade happens within world regions than across them, and the US’s top export destinations are Canada and Mexico.”
In India’s case, at least over the short-to-medium term, trading primarily with neighbours won’t be workable (though Ghemawat does urge India to take the lead on regional integration in South Asia). Hence, he feels that some business services can be outsourced over greater distances than many categories of merchandise are traded, since physical shipment of products is not required. 
One exception he notes is how, recently, China became India’s biggest trading partner, overtaking the United States. But Ghemawat feels that caution is in order. “India runs a huge trade deficit with China and exports mainly primary products there: Cotton, copper and iron ore account for nearly one-half of the total. Given the limited progress the US has made in rebalancing its trade with China, it’s hard to see what India might accomplish within any reasonable timeframe,” he says. Trade deficit is the difference between imports and exports.
Ghemawat also feels that India has a lot to gain by encouraging trade within states. “I have been trying unsuccessfully for years to get hold of data on trade between Indian states,” he says. “India has a lot to gain by encouraging and increasing trade between states. As the former Chairman of Suzuki once put it to me, what India needs is not external trade liberalisation but internal trade liberalisation. And I heard Ratan Tata say something similar about the need for more integration and fewer barriers within India. For a large country, the potential gains from internal trade are typically much larger than those from international trade,” Ghemawat concludes. 

The interview originally appeared in the Forbes India magazine in the edition dated Sep 20, 2013