As banks turn immune to monetary policy, QE may save the day for RBI

If the central bank views asset purchases as a way to influence the waning quantity of money, then it should act now. Doing so may well save the day.

With India’s nominal GDP growing at its slowest pace in 17 years, it’s a given that the central bank will cut interest rates again this Thursday.

What’s the point, though? Commercial bank lending rates have turned immune to monetary policy, so much so that a sixth reduction this year in the benchmark price of money will make hardly any difference. The only medicine that can work is quantitative easing, a remedy authorities aren’t even discussing. QE may not cure the patient, but it may well succeed in bringing India’s economy out of a coma.

To see why the quantity of money is a bigger problem than its price, consider M4. The growth rate of India’s broadest measure of money supply has collapsed to single-digit levels for some time now, and is refusing to budge. New loans automatically create new deposits in the banking system. But until there are creditworthy takers for fresh advances, deposits won’t revive.

Time and demand deposits at banks account for 84 per cent of money supply, so it’s hard for the latter to get a boost without an uptick in the former.

Unconventional asset purchases can make a difference, though not the vanilla Japanese variety in which the central bank buys government bonds from banks for cash, which they stuff into their current accounts with the monetary authority.

This kind of QE does have a couple of advantages. One, it lowers the long-term government bond yield. That reduces loan costs for risky borrowers, since government bond yields act as a benchmark. Two, a more liquid banking system with more low-yielding cash than higher-yielding bonds will be impatient to lend — at least in theory. Yet this type of QE relies on loans being made. If the demand side of the economy is struggling, the impact may be limited because of the one thing it doesn’t do: lift money supply in the broader economy. That’s a point Invesco Asset Management chief economist John Greenwood has made in Japan’s case.

For India, it would help much more for the central bank to buy government bonds from nonbanks, following in the footsteps of the US Federal Reserve, which primarily purchased securities from hedge funds, broker-dealers and insurance companies. Since nonbank sellers of bonds don’t have accounts at the Reserve Bank of India, they’ll deposit any cash they receive with commercial lenders. Money supply would accelerate even without new loans being made.

Business Standard

It will need more than a rate cut to salvage India's sputtering economy

It wasn't too long ago that economic aspirations for India echoed China's. Now this young country of 1.4 billion people is looking more like Indonesia, Malaysia or the Philippines.

BS : Shaktikanta Das has one of the easiest jobs in central banking. He just has to keep doing what he's been doing since becoming governor of the Reserve Bank of India last December: cut interest rates. Fortunately, political will is on his side.

That’s an enviable state of affairs for a central banker these days. Just look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who has become a constant target of President Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades. It’s also face-saving for Das that politics and economics are pointing in the same direction. He took up this post under a cloud of question marks about the RBI’s independence. Das’s immediate predecessor, Urjit Patel, quit abruptly almost a year ago, just as the government was ratcheting up pressure for the institution to hand over some of its reserves to free up fiscal spending.

The troubling state of Asia's third-largest economy makes Das's task uncomplicated. The country's pace of economic growth is slowing dramatically; government numbers due late Friday may well show the expansion slipped below 5 per cent last quarter, the weakest pace since gross domestic product figures were reconfigured in 2012. Last year, the nation was churning out GDP numbers with an 8 in front of them. Many big economies have been slowing, but it’s hard to think of another where growth has come down to earth so quickly.

For Das to even contemplate taking his foot off the monetary pedal now would be a mistake. He should look past the recent uptick in inflation last month, largely attributed to vegetables such as onions, a staple of Indian cooking. Those price gains helped push the measure beyond the RBI's 4 per cent medium-term target. More important is the slide in core inflation, which strips out volatile commodity prices. This points to a demand problem in the economy, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Andy Mukherjee wrote here.

Das says policymakers will keep cutting rates until growth revives. The five reductions he’s overseen haven’t given the economy back its groove; so the mission is clear going into next week’s meeting, when the central bank is expected to cut again. His global peers may have done well to adopt the same approach. It's clear from the Fed’s retreat that the hikes in 2018 went too far in the face of anemic inflation. The European Central Bank had barely curtailed quantitative easing before it had to start all over again.

Lest Das be tempted to sail through, there's the iceberg of India’s banking industry to consider, which is saddled with one of the world's most dangerous loads of bad debt. The trouble is, about 60 per cent of the financial system is controlled by state-run banks that report to the government, so Das’s ability to influence them is constrained. At some point he may well have to challenge entrenched political interests.

Despite RBI prod, banks unwilling to cut lending rates as deposits dwindle

Shaktikanta Das, the new RBI governor, has been trying to nudge bankers to lower lending rates, holding meetings with bank chiefs last month to discuss the monetary policy transmission.

Business Standard : Indian lenders haven’t fully passed on the central bank’s latest interest rate cut to borrowers, pressuring the monetary authority to loosen policy even more to support economic growth.

A mismatch between deposits and credit growth, and competition from the government for small-savings mean banks face a high cost of capital, limiting their ability to transmit monetary policy easing. Bankers say the Reserve Bank of India’s 25 basis-point reduction in the repurchase rate to 6.25 percent in February was a start, but was probably too little to have any impact on lending rates just yet.

Latest data from the central bank shows the main overnight lending rate offered by commercial banks has been sticky in a range of 8.15 percent to 8.55 percent since the beginning of the year. Most banks have trimmed lending rates by a ‘token’ 10 basis points, said Ashutosh Khajuria, chief financial officer at Federal Bank Ltd. in Mumbai, adding that the RBI needs to move by a bigger-than-usual 50 basis points to spur lending.

“If it is a 50 basis points cut, it will be an accelerated transmission,” Khajuria said. “If inflation behaves the way it has been,” rates will certainly go down in the first quarter of the next financial year starting April.

Subdued Inflation

Calls for rate cuts have been building, given benign inflation and weak demand. Inflation has been subdued at about 2 percent, much lower than the central bank’s medium-term target of 4 percent.

Shaktikanta Das, the new RBI governor, has been trying to nudge bankers to lower lending rates, holding meetings with bank chiefs last month to discuss the monetary policy transmission. In India, rate adjustments take about six to nine months to work its way through the economy.

Bankers remain cautious though and “are not willing to cut rates as deposits and household financial savings are at historical lows,” said Prachi Mishra, chief India economist at Goldman Sachs India Securities. “Even while policy rates are down, the rates paid by the government on small savings are significantly higher than bank deposit rates.”

Savings programs offered by the government through post offices return between 7 percent and 8 percent annually along with tax benefits, while a one-year time deposit with the State Bank of India, the country’s largest bank, earns an interest of 6.9 percent.