YV Reddy

The Undependable GDP

On February 28, 2017, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation published the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) growth figure for the three-month period between October and December 2016.

During the period the Indian economy grew by 7 per cent. This took most economists by surprise because they were expecting demonetisation to pull down economic growth. On November 8, 2016, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that come midnight the notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination, would no longer be money. Hence, the GDP growth for the period October to December 2016 was expected to be lower.

In one go 86.4 per cent of the currency in circulation was rendered useless. As Alain de Botton writes in The News—A User’s Manual: “Like blood to a human, money is to the state the constantly circulating, life-giving medium.”

When money is taken out of an economy, it stops functioning given that economic transactions come to a standstill. In the Indian case, cash/currency is the major form of money given that a bulk of transactions happen in cash. As per a PwC report 98 per cent of consumer payments by volume happens in cash. The Economic Survey of 2016-2017 points out: “The Watal Committee has recently estimated that cash accounts for about 78 percent of all consumer payments.”

In this scenario where bulk of consumer transactions happen in cash, the Indian economy for the period October to December 2016, should have come to a standstill. But the government data suggests that it grew by 7 per cent.

This seems unbelievable. The private consumption expenditure has grown by 10.1 per cent, the second fastest since June 2011. This when the retail loan growth of banks during October to December 2016, grew by just 0.5 per cent. The manufacturing sector grew by 8.3 per cent when bank credit to industry contracted by 2.8 per cent. Hence, there is something that is clearly not right about India’s GDP data.

Some analysts and experts have suggested that data is being fudged to show the government in good light. I really don’t buy that given that there is no evidence of the same. Having said that, one reason why the impact of demonetisation hasn’t been seen in the GDP growth figure is because the GDP calculations do not capture the informal sector well enough.

This is primarily because small manufacturers and those in the retail trade do not maintain accounts. Hence, estimates of the informal sector need to be made using the formal sector indicators. As the Economic Survey points out: “It is clear that recorded GDP growth in the second half of financial year 2017 will understate the overall impact because the most affected parts of the economy—informal and cash based—are either not captured in the national income accounts or to the extent they are, their measurement is based on formal sector indicators.”

In simple English, this basically means that the size of the informal sector while calculating the GDP is assumed to be a certain size of the formal sector. The formal sector has not been affected much due demonetisation. Hence, to that extent the size of the informal sector has been overstated in the GDP. It is expected that more information coming in by next year will set this right. This basically means that the GDP growth is likely to be revised downwards as more data comes in.

But this lack of dependable GDP data and other economic data creates its own set of problems for policymakers in particular.

This is a point that former RBI governor D Subbarao makes in his book Who Moved my Interest Rate?. As he writes: “Our data on employment and wages, crucial to judging the health and dynamism of the economy, do not inspire confidence. Data on the index of industrial production(IIP) which gives an indication of the momentum of the industrial sector, are so volatile that no meaningful or reliable inference can be drawn. Data on the services sector activity, which has a share as high as 60 per cent in the GDP, are scanty.”

Further, this poor quality of data is frequently and significantly revised, making things even more difficult for policymakers. And this possibly led YV Reddy, Subbarao’s predecessor at the RBI, to quip: “Everywhere around the world, the future is uncertain; in India, even the past is uncertain.”

Long story short—sometime around this time next year, the GDP for October to December 2016, is likely to see a significant revision.

The column originally appeared in Daily News and Analysis (DNA) on March 9, 2017

The Undependable GDP

On February 28, 2017, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation published the Gross Domestic Product(GDP) growth figure for the three-month period between October and December 2016.

During the period the Indian economy grew by 7 per cent. This took most economists by surprise because they were expecting demonetisation to pull down economic growth. On November 8, 2016, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that come midnight the notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination, would no longer be money. Hence, the GDP growth for the period October to December 2016 was expected to be lower.

In one go 86.4 per cent of the currency in circulation was rendered useless. As Alain de Botton writes in The News—A User’s Manual: “Like blood to a human, money is to the state the constantly circulating, life-giving medium.”

When money is taken out of an economy, it stops functioning given that economic transactions come to a standstill. In the Indian case, cash/currency is the major form of money given that a bulk of transactions happen in cash. As per a PwC report 98 per cent of consumer payments by volume happens in cash. The Economic Survey of 2016-2017 points out: “The Watal Committee has recently estimated that cash accounts for about 78 percent of all consumer payments.”

In this scenario where bulk of consumer transactions happen in cash, the Indian economy for the period October to December 2016, should have come to a standstill. But the government data suggests that it grew by 7 per cent.

This seems unbelievable. The private consumption expenditure has grown by 10.1 per cent, the second fastest since June 2011. This when the retail loan growth of banks during October to December 2016, grew by just 0.5 per cent. The manufacturing sector grew by 8.3 per cent when bank credit to industry contracted by 2.8 per cent. Hence, there is something that is clearly not right about India’s GDP data.

Some analysts and experts have suggested that data is being fudged to show the government in good light. I really don’t buy that given that there is no evidence of the same. Having said that, one reason why the impact of demonetisation hasn’t been seen in the GDP growth figure is because the GDP calculations do not capture the informal sector well enough.

This is primarily because small manufacturers and those in the retail trade do not maintain accounts. Hence, estimates of the informal sector need to be made using the formal sector indicators. As the Economic Survey points out: “It is clear that recorded GDP growth in the second half of financial year 2017 will understate the overall impact because the most affected parts of the economy—informal and cash based—are either not captured in the national income accounts or to the extent they are, their measurement is based on formal sector indicators.”

In simple English, this basically means that the size of the informal sector while calculating the GDP is assumed to be a certain size of the formal sector. The formal sector has not been affected much due demonetisation. Hence, to that extent the size of the informal sector has been overstated in the GDP. It is expected that more information coming in by next year will set this right. This basically means that the GDP growth is likely to be revised downwards as more data comes in.

But this lack of dependable GDP data and other economic data creates its own set of problems for policymakers in particular.

This is a point that former RBI governor D Subbarao makes in his book Who Moved my Interest Rate?. As he writes: “Our data on employment and wages, crucial to judging the health and dynamism of the economy, do not inspire confidence. Data on the index of industrial production(IIP) which gives an indication of the momentum of the industrial sector, are so volatile that no meaningful or reliable inference can be drawn. Data on the services sector activity, which has a share as high as 60 per cent in the GDP, are scanty.”

Further, this poor quality of data is frequently and significantly revised, making things even more difficult for policymakers. And this possibly led YV Reddy, Subbarao’s predecessor at the RBI, to quip: “Everywhere around the world, the future is uncertain; in India, even the past is uncertain.”

Long story short—sometime around this time next year, the GDP for October to December 2016, is likely to see a significant revision.

The column originally appeared in Daily News and Analysis (DNA) on March 9, 2017

Of Football Goalkeepers, RBI Governor Subbarao and the Art of Doing Nothing

 

subbarao-rbi-governor

Sometime in August last year I got an email, late in the evening. Before I clicked to open it, I thought it was one of the many spam emails that one gets during the course of any day.

Thankfully, I did click on it and the contents of the email told me that it wasn’t spam. The sender of the email was writing a book and he wanted my permission to refer to an article I had written for the Daily News and Analysis(DNA) in August 2013.

This book, which refers to my DNA article, titled Who Moved My Interest Rate? has recently published. It has been authored by D Subbarao, who was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2008 and 2013, before Raghuram Rajan took over.

On page 140 of the book, governor Subbarao refers to my August 2013 DNA article. The article was titled RBI is behaving like a football goalkeeper. The article was written during the taper tantrum.

On May 22, 2013, Ben Bernanke, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank, told the Joint Economic Committee of the American Congress that “if we see continued improvement and we have confidence that that is going to be sustained, then we could in the next few meetings … take a step down in our pace of purchases.”

The Federal Reserve of the United States had been printing dollars every month. It had been pumping those dollars into the financial system by buying financial securities. The idea was to ensure that there was enough money going around in the financial system, so that interest rates remained low.

At lower interest rates, it was hoped that the American consumer would borrow and spend again, and in the process revive the economy. What also happened was that low interest rates allowed financial institutions to borrow dollars and invest them in financial markets all over the world. This became the dollar carry trade.

This led to financial markets rallying all over the world. Bernanke, spoilt the party in May 2013. What he was basically saying was that money printing by the Federal Reserve would come to an end. Of course, this wouldn’t be done all at once and would be done gradually (i.e. tapered) over a period of time. This meant that the dollar carry trade would no longer be viable with an era of easy money coming to an end and the interest rates starting to go up. And as a reaction institutional investors who had borrowed in dollars to invest, started to get money out of financial markets all over the world.

This included India. Foreign investors sold both stocks and bonds. When they did that, they got rupees in exchange. These rupees had to be exchanged for dollars, if the money was to be repatriated back to the United States. This pushed up the demand for the dollar, and the rupee started to lose value against the dollar.

In fact, on May 22, 2013, when Bernanke made his comment one dollar was worth Rs 55.41. By August 7, 2013, when my article appeared in DNA, one dollar was worth Rs 60.78. Of course, the RBI was trying to intervene in the foreign exchange market in order to ensure that rupee doesn’t fall too much.

One of the major reasons for doing the same lay in the fact that those were days of high oil prices. India imports four-fifth of the oil that it consumes. Hence, the oil companies would have to pay more in rupees to buy the dollars that they would have needed to buy oil.

Further, back then the oil companies weren’t allowed to pass on this increase in price of oil to the end consumer by increasing the price of diesel, kerosene and cooking gas (since then diesel has gone out of the list). The government picked up a major part of this tab and in the process the fiscal deficit of the government went up as well. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.

Getting back to the point. In my DNA article I suggested that the RBI was behaving like a football goal keeper. This analogy came from a research note written by Societe Generale’s Albert Edwards. In this note, Edwards said: “When there are problems, our instinct is not just to stand there but to do something… When a goalkeeper tries to save a penalty, he almost invariably dives either to the right or the left. He will stay in the centre only 6.3% of the time. However, the penalty taker is just as likely (28.7% of the time) to blast the ball straight in front of him as to hit it to the right or left. Thus goalkeepers, to play the percentages, should stay where they are about a third of the time. They would make more saves.”

But they rarely do that. “Because it is more embarrassing to stand there and watch the ball hit the back of the net than to do something (such as dive to the right) and watch the ball hit the back of the net,” wrote Edwards.

The point being that in a moment of crisis it is important to be seen to be doing something. Using this analogy, I had said that the RBI would have been better off just letting the rupee fall and finding its right level. The efforts of the RBI between May and August hadn’t helped much, and the rupee had continued to fall. As I wrote back then: “The RBI is like a football goalkeeper. It knows ‘do nothing’ is the best course, but it can’t just stand pat.”

This is something that Subbarao also suggests in his book. As he writes: “Let me conclude my experiences of steering the rupee in turbulent waters by reiterating a standard dilemma. Given my position that a sharp correction of the exchange rate was programmed and forex intervention by the Reserve Bank would only postpone the inevitable, wouldn’t it have been rational to just stay put till the adjustment had been complete…Sensible maybe, but virtually impossible in the shrill democracies of today.”

To conclude, this is a point that another ex-RBI governor (not Subbarao) made to me once, when he said that in “moment of crisis the central bank can’t be seen to be doing nothing,” even if “do nothing” might be the best strategy to follow.

The column was originally published in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 18, 2016

YV Reddy is right: The govt borrowing on its own won’t work

yv reddy
In the budget speech he made on February 28, 2015, the finance minister Arun Jaitley had said: “I intend to begin this process this year by setting up a Public Debt Management Agency (PDMA) which will bring both India’s external borrowings and domestic debt under one roof.”
The government of India, like most governments spends more than it earns. The difference it makes up through borrowing. This borrowing is currently managed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Jaitley now wants to take away this responsibility from the RBI and set up an independent public debt management agency.
On the face of it this sounds like a simple move-one institution was taking care of the government borrowings needs, now the government wants to takeover the responsibility. But it is not as simple as that.
Before I explain why, it is important to understand something known as the statutory liquidity ratio (SLR), which currently stands at 21.5%. What this means is that for every Rs 100 that banks raise as a deposit, Rs 21.5 needs to be invested in government bonds.
This number was at higher levels earlier and has constantly been brought down by the RBI over the years. This provision helps the government raise money at lower interest rates than it would otherwise be able to.
This is something that the Report of the Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework (better known as the Urjit Patel committee) released in January 2014 pointed out: “Large government market borrowing has been supported by regulatory prescriptions under which most financial institutions in India, including banks, are statutorily required to invest a certain portion of their specified liabilities in government securities and/or maintain a statutory liquidity ratio (SLR).”
This statutory requirement essentially ensures that there is a constant demand for government bonds. This helps the government get away by offering a lower rate of interest on its bonds.
“The SLR prescription provides a captive market for government securities and helps to artificially suppress the cost of borrowing for the Government, dampening the transmission of interest rate changes across the term structure,” the Expert Committee report points out.
Take a look at the following chart. Between 2007-2008 and 2013-2014, the government was able to borrow money at a much lower rate of interest than the prevailing inflation. The red line which represent the estimated average cost of public debt (i.e. Interest paid on government borrowings) has been below the green line which represents the consumer price inflation, since around 2007-2008. 


The major reason for the same is the fact that there is an inbuilt demand for government securities. The Economic Survey of 2014-2015 has some interesting data which buttresses the point that I am trying to make. The total internal liabilities of the government of India have gone up by 1.9 times between 2009-10 and 2014-2015. Nevertheless, the average cost of borrowing has gone up only from 7.5% to 8.41%.

average cost of borrowing
This financial repression of forcing banks, insurance companies as well as provident funds to buy government bonds, allows the government to raise money at low interest rates, than they would be able to do if they allowed the market to operate.
Now the government wants to take away the debt management function from the RBI and raise money independently. In this scenario the question is can the SLR continue? Dr YV Reddy, former governor of the RBI, made this point in an interview to the The Economic Times. As he said: “If the government is having an independent debt office then how can the statutory liquidity ratio of a high order continue. Once it is an independent debt office, basically, it should independently be able to raise money.”
Fair point, I guess. “So, if the government want to raise money then indirectly the regulator cannot go on supporting through a cell. So the pre-condition will be SLR has to be removed. Because it would be inappropriate to say that you are independent but I will help you do something. So, in all probability the RBI will have no choice except to reduce SLR to zero as a precondition for an independent debt office,” Reddy told The Economic Times. 
The question that crops up here is whether the government is ready to take on this risk given that it is likely to lead to higher interest rates. With banks no longer having to compulsorily buy government bonds, they may not buy government bonds all the time, like is the case currently. This will lead to a situation where the government will have to offer a higher interest rate to get the banks interested. While this sounds good on the face of it, given that if the government offers higher interest rates on its bonds, that higher interest rate will become the benchmark.
Given this, banks will have to offer higher interest rates on their fixed deposits. This means that the chances of savers getting a higher rate of interest (which is greater than the rate of inflation) also goes up.
But if banks offer a higher rate of interest on fixed deposits, they will also have to charge a higher rate of interest on their loans. And this is something that the government won’t like, given that it is currently trying to push down interest rates in the hope of getting the investment cycle and the consumption cycle going all over again. It needs to be pointed out that savers are not the ones either governments or politicians are really bothered about.
Nevertheless, the government might force the RBI to keep the SLR at its current level. But then there would be no independent public debt office. It would be a farce. As Reddy put it: “If the government is pressurising the RBI to not reduce the SLR that is inappropriate. That is not an independent debt office. And it would be inappropriate for RBI even to appear to support the government debt programme. It cannot appear to be.”
Long story short-we haven’t heard the last of this issue. There will be more to come in the time to come. Stay tuned.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Mar 14, 2015