Indias structural opportunity in a new age of financial repression ForumIAS Blog

In such situations, it is imperative for governments to adopt an expansive fiscal policy and central banks’ monetary policy must support these fiscal measures. Financial repression is an indirect way for governments to have private industry dollars pay down public debts. A government steals growth from the economy with subtle tools like zero interest rates and inflationary policies to knock down its own debts. Some of the methods may actually be direct, such as outlawing the ownership of gold and limiting how much currency can be converted into foreign currency.

• The effect is upward pressure on wages and the price level — pretty straightforward.
• Financial repression prices Chinese households about 255 billion renminbi (US$36 billion), four.1 percent of China’s GDP, and a fifth of it goes to firms, one-quarter to banks, and the federal government assumes the rest.
• The apparent results had been actual rates of interest – whether on treasury bills (Figure 1), central financial institution low cost rates, deposits or loans – that had been markedly unfavorable during .
• In the process, however, yields and future returns have plunged, presenting not a warm Pacific Ocean of positive real interest rates, but a frigid, Arctic ice-ladened sea when compared to 2-3% inflation now commonplace in developed economies.
• On behalf of governments, central banks stored the nominal rates of interest beneath the inflation price.

Unlike international currency-denominated debt, debt in domestic currency may be decreased through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers producing unfavorable real rates of interest. This would lead to a higher fiscal deficit which means higher debt levels; through financial repression we would see central banks being forced to support the government initiative by intervening in the bond market and preventing long-term yields from rising. Very simply, central banks are liquidity providers, and they can’t influence the lending activities of banks or spending patterns of corporates and consumers.

East Asian Model for India

To handle huge levels of debt, the developed world and China need to inflate away their debts. The developed world has discovered it’s new normal in inflating away debts, but India continues with its existing monetary system. It is the result of companies being supported by the government because they’re considered to be too big to fail.

Investors should seek out select equities with strong balance sheets and international operations. They should also consider high quality sovereign debt with positive real yields, like that of Australia (FAX), Norway, Malaysia, the Philippines, and scarce others. Just as the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) is historically unprecedented (and on a global scale, no less), so are these levels of excess reserves held by banking institutions. This is impossibly risky in a global financial system that is perpetually inches away from the precipice of catastrophic failure, and the solvency of these big, slow moving capital pools is integral to the stability of the real economy. Economic growth comes about largely as the result of falling rates of time preference, which bring about an increase in the proportion of saving and investment to consumption, as well as a falling rate of interest. The Great Financial Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis pushed Germany’s total non-financial debt-to-GDP ratio from 193% in 2007 to 211% by June 2012.

How India can become a USD 5 trillion economy by 2024-25?

In previous articles, we’ve mentioned the fact that China’s inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs) relying heavily on debt is a worrying reality. To know more about this topic, check out our publication on the marginal productivity of debt in Asia. At ixamBee, she is faculty for Financial and Management and Securities Market Awareness. She is the student’s favorite faculty for her easy to understand approach while financial repression upsc teaching in Live Classes. Financial repression has been criticized as a theory, by those who think it does not do a good job of explaining real world variables, and also criticized as a policy, by those who think it does exist but is inadvisable. Massive government spending would be required to support socialising of credit, to support infrastructure activities which would help increase employment opportunities.

In the 1980s a committee that was appointed to study the working of India’s monetary system (Chakravarthy Committee) called the SLR as a tax on the banking system and a fraud prepared by the Ministry of Finance. The banking system was used as a wing to carryout government’s debt management programme. In Latin America, severe debt crises pressured reforms upon governments in the 1980s.

The first two can result from deliberate interplay by the state into the monetary markets and can be labelled as financial repression. We clarify the historic precedents for Governments to make use of financial repression to handle their debt, look into the affect of regulation on asset allocation for insurers and pension funds, and introduce the idea of a balance-sheet recession. “The Indian banking system is troubled by what may be known as ‘double financial repression’.

What is double financial repression?

In addition, banks in public sector have clearly defined subcategories in which PSL takes place-agriculture, MSME, education, housing, export credit etc. This is done by capping of interest rate, adopting capital controls, forced treasury purchases, having negative nominal interest rates, putting curbs on cash holding (via transactional limits, etc.). Thus, central banks, apart from maintaining stability of financial and banking system, cannot do much to stimulate an economy. To fight the battle of economic slowdown the mantle would need to be passed to the central governments — signalling an end to laissez faire economics. If we refer to the quantity theory of money equation, money supply and velocity of money influences the prices of goods and services in the economy. Central banks could use various policy measures like reduce reserve requirements for banks, cut discount rates or open market operations to increase money supply.

• Bondholders misplaced money, however company income boomed, and actual wages greater than doubled.
• In Central and Eastern Europe, the socialist economies were getting ready to collapse within the 1980s.
• It is doubtful that this measure will spur economic activity enough to justify the damage visited on the type of fixed-income investors already mentioned.
• The term was introduced in 1973 by Stanford economists Edward S. Shaw and Ronald I. McKinnon[3][4] to “disparage growth-inhibiting policies in emerging markets.”
• It is crucial that you truly understand how this practice works because the scale of its influence is global.

Keynesian theory posits that governments should attempt to manage the business cycle by lowering rates during recession and raising them should the economy “overheat.” (Counter-cyclical policy) Some suggest they should even actively pop asset bubbles. First, managing the scale of capital inflows through administrative restrictions is essential. Otherwise, it will risk market-determined interest rates being pushed too low relative to inflation. Two, Indian policymakers are not prepared to let the exchange rate be constrained from capital flows. The intervention has kept the exchange rate weak at a time when it might naturally have appreciated. And, India now faces even larger capital inflows, hence the scale of intervention could rise.

After the 2008 economic recession

You can clearly see how the elite reap the savings from the masses when there’s unlimited amount of credit. But their methods of running their respective economies somewhat contradict each other. The article ‘Ten years on, in uncharted waters’ appears in The Hindu for 19th September, 2018. It traces the reasons behind the financial crisis of 2007 and highlights the lessons that can be drawn from it. A loss of confidence in paper money could result in searing and startling inflation, evaporating life savings and turning every stolid worker into a frantic speculator.

The stress tests and updated regulations for insurers essentially force these institutions to buy more safe assets. This buying of bonds helps, in turn, to keep interest rates low and potentially encourages overall inflation—all of which culminates in a quicker reduction in public debt than would have otherwise been possible. Avoid bonds with negative real yields (and be skeptical of officially reported inflation data). Long-term investors should not buy U.S. government securities (TLT), or those of Germany, England or Japan.

According to the economic survey, India needs a “virtuous cycle” of savings, investments, and exports to transform India into a $5 trillion economy in the next five years. It rightly underlines the need for India to revive private investment to become the world’s third-largest economy in the near future. So for reviving India’s floundering investment rates, the economic survey highlights the East Asian model.

However, financial repression has since been applied to many developed economies through stimulus and tightened capital rules following the 2007–09 Financial Crisis. As governments failed to interact in countercyclical fiscal insurance policies over longer intervals, authorities revenues fell short of their expenditures. In many countries, the typical fiscal deficit-to-GDP ratios had been twice as excessive as the typical GDP progress for the reason that Nineteen Nineties. When the financial disaster swept the advanced economies, bailout measures added to the debt mountain (Figure 1). Financial repression may appear to be a good idea if politicians have a hard time slicing spending or bringing structural reforms that would permit the economies to prosper again. On behalf of governments, central banks stored the nominal rates of interest beneath the inflation price.

The tools and policies adopted by the central banks helps them to influence short- and long-term rates, currency, stabilise financial markets and provide necessary liquidity measures to commercial banks. Financial repression can include such measures as direct lending to the government, caps on interest rates, regulation of capital movement between countries, reserve requirements, and a tighter association between government and banks. The term was initially used to point out bad economic policies that held back the economies in less developed nations.

Bondholders misplaced money, however company income boomed, and actual wages greater than doubled. During the Golden Age, bondholders took the hit however everyone else did higher than they ever have since. Financial repression sparked spectacular economic progress and made the compensation of war debt primarily painless. Between 1947 and 1980, government “debt held by the general public” fell from 120% to 35% of GDP.