The recent Financial Stability Report should have analysed central bank’s own contribution to rising banking risk..

Blogging is back after a short break. One remonetised energies but time to get back to demonetising it..

One does not know in recent history a central bank/banking regulator which has enforced the kind of stress on its own banking system. The kind of stress Indian central bank has imposed on Indian banks (and its staff is appalling) and shocking. A former RBI Governor once said the purpose of Indian central bank is to safeguard the Indian public from the Government! But what happens when a central bank attacks all possible safeguards itself? Who saves from the so called saviour?

What is even worse is to see the central bank just excuses itself from the ongoing mess so easily. In the recent Financial Stability Report (Nov 2016), RBI raises concerns on the banking system:

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Blogging to resume in a few days

A big hi to all the visitors.  Blog is on a break for a few days. Happy holidays to all.

Just 8 of the 10 members present at RBI Board meeting on 8 Nov 2016!

Against expectations, there was a RBI Board meeting on demonetisation evening. However, the number of members present were 8, even lesser than the 10 appointed members.The 10 appointed members at the first place are even lesser than the required 21 as per RBI Act. This blog was quite early to point to this governance issue and now others are waking up to it as well.

HT got this crucial info via RTI from RBI (another RTI revealed puzzle about currency data and Rs 2000 printing).

Argentina’s continued love affair with inflation…

Prof Martin Feldstein points to recent valiant efforts by Argentina to lower inflation:

Demonetization on Five Continents..

Prof Jeffry Frankel says demonetisation is the new trend in world economics.

Around the world, several countries are currently undergoing “demonetization,” or currency reforms in which the government removes banknotes of a certain denomination from circulation and replaces them with new notes. Governments pursue demonetization for a variety of reasons, and some of the recent initiatives are going better than others.

He says there are three kinds of demons:

1. To tackle hyperinflation like in Venezuela
2. To decommission and replace bills for more benign, technical reasons, such as to remove unpopular notes; introduce new counterfeit-proof bills; switch national currencies (like Euro).
3. To crack down on illegal activities as India did.

The experience of India shows that too much boldness also backfires:

Western leaders could probably be bolder when they phase out big bills as slowly as they do. But Modi has been too bold.

 

Community and politics around proposed KIng Shivaji’s statue in Arabian sea..

Aarefa Johri has a nice piece on the proposed statue of the warrior King in Mumbai waters:

What if currency is not a liability of the public authorities and some counter-intuitive ideas on demonetisation..

Prof Gurbachan Singh of Indian Statistical Institute has a piece which has some  counter-intuitive ideas on demonetisation.

He says currency is no more a liability of the government as we are told:

Book Review: Glimpses of Indian economic policy – An insider’s view by I.G, Patel

I just picked this book (out of stock on Flipkart and real expensive on Amazon) by late Dr IG Patel, the man who doffed many a policy hats in India.

The book was picked as one read through India’s demonetisation history in 1978 when IG (as popularly called) was the chief of Indian central bank. On the move he said:

The History Internship @ IIM-Ahmedabad

Prof Chinmay Tumbhe of IIMA has invited interested researchers to apply for internship in business/economic history at IIMA:

A curious case of printing Rs 2000 notes on 8 Nov 2016…

The recent RTI request from Indian central bank revealed that the central bank had 2473.2 million pieces of Rs 2000 notes worth Rs 4.94 lakh crore. The new 500 Rs note value was zero as they were not yet in print.

This led to the criticism that the central bank could just replace  24.1% of total currency which had ceased to be legal tender. This blog also argued how there are differences in currency figures  of the central bank, a puzzle which remains unresolved.

However, there is another issue which has cropped up due to this RTI.

Section 24 of Indian Central Bank says:

How is it that RBI MPC members have so similar and sanguine views about demonetisation ?

It is amazing to read the recently released minutes of the MPC meeting released yesterday. The meeting was held on 7th Dec 2016.

Leave questioning the modality of the move, not one member cautioned against any longer term negative outcome of the move.

The first mention of demonetisation or currency withdrawal is mentioned in para 11 which is point no 4 in assessment!

Relations between RBI, Centre strained over note ban…(have things changed?)

A lot of analysis and writing was done into how India’s monetary policy has narrowed the gap with the modern and advanced world. With things like inflation target, constitution of MPC, releasing MPC minutes and so on Indian central bank has finally taken the leap. Then came the appointment of the new central bank chief and people jumped to all kinds of conclusions (see this as well). One should list all those views  and ask the same experts of their opinions now. Am sure some would quote Keynes…

It just took one decision from the Government to change all this. Post 8 Nov 2016, we are back to what we saw in the 1950-1980s when RBI was treated just like another department of the government. Finance Ministry is back at the helm of the monetary affairs (it always is at the helm but had played a more secondary role in recent times). The major decisions are being announced by the Finance Ministry officials. Given the decision was taken by the RBI Board and most circulars come from the central bank, one should see central bank atleast taking some initiative. But nothing of this sort is happening. Even more amazing is how the old lost skills of writing circulars are back and giving us a lesson in Victorian English! The name of the bank has been changed by public given frequent changes and rollbacks.

Now Times of India tells us that the relation between the two has been strained. Central bank believes that its reputation is being compromised whereas teh government says that the central bank has been slow to enact. Really? One wonders the level of chaos if central bank was faster:

RBI’s notice restricting deposits above Rs 5000 has been withdrawn (and its new name)….

The Twitter is trending with RBI’s new name: Reverse Bank of India.

This is because the central bank has again tweaked its notice. This time it has rolled back previous notice which said deposits above Rs 5000 will be allowed only once that too under some stiff restrictions. End result was banks stopped accepting deposits above Rs 5000 asking for clarity on the matter. With clock ticking fast towards 30 Dec 2016 there was panic amidst those who were waiting for crowds and queues to lessen before despsiting their monies.

Now RBI has rolled back the notice. Even here central bank prefers to go to the older skills of writing these amazing notices:

Withdrawal of Legal Tender Character of existing ₹ 500/- and ₹ 1000/- Bank Notes (Specified Bank Notes) – Deposit of Specified Bank Notes (SBNs) into bank accounts- Modification

1. Please refer to our circular DCM (Plg) No. 1859/10.27.00/2016-17 dated December 19, 2016. On a review of the above, we advise that the provisions of the above circular at sub para (i) and (ii) will not apply to fully KYC compliant accounts.

2. Please acknowledge receipt.

I mean that is it? One has to click on the previous circular to see details:

1. Tenders of SBNs in excess of ₹ 5000 into a bank account will be received for credit only once during the remaining period till December 30, 2016. The credit in such cases shall be afforded only after questioning tenderer, on record, in the presence of at least two officials of the bank, as to why this could not be deposited earlier and receiving a satisfactory explanation. The explanation should be kept on record to facilitate an audit trail at a later stage. An appropriate flag also should be raised in CBS to that effect so that no more tenders are allowed.
2. Tenders of SBNs up to ₹ 5000 in value received across the counter will allowed to be credited to bank accounts in the normal course until December 30, 2016. Even when tenders smaller than ₹ 5000 are made in an account and such tenders taken together on cumulative basis exceed ₹ 5000 they may be subject to the procedure to be followed in case of tenders above ₹ 5000, with no more tenders being allowed thereafter until December 30, 2016.

Phew!

Why central bank models failed and how to repair them?

John Muellbauer of Oxford University has a piece which says things which we knew but conveniently forgot:

The failure of the New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to capture interactions of finance and the real economy has been widely recognised since the Global Crisis. This column argues that the flaws in these models stem from unrealistic micro-foundations for household behaviour and from wrongly assuming that aggregate behaviour mimics a fully informed ‘representative agent’. Rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’ monetary and macroprudential policy, institutional differences between countries imply major differences for monetary policy transmission and policy.

….

To take into account all the feedbacks, a macroeconomic policy model needs to explain asset prices and the main components of household balance sheets, including debt and liquid assets. This is best done in a system of equations including consumption, in which shifts in credit conditions – which have system-wide consequences, sometimes interacting with other variables such as housing wealth – are extracted as a latent variable.⁷  The availability of home equity loans, which varies over time and between countries – hardly available in the US of the 1970s or in contemporary Germany, France or Japan – and the also the variable size of down-payments needed to obtain a mortgage, determine whether increases in house prices increase (US and UK) or reduce (Germany and Japan) aggregate consumer spending.  This is one of the findings of research I review in Muellbauer (2016).  Another important finding is that a rise in interest rates has different effects on aggregate consumer spending depending on the nature of household balance sheets.  Japan and Germany differ radically from the US and the UK, with far higher bank and saving deposits and lower household debt levels so that lower interest rates reduce consumer spending.  A crucial implication of these two findings is that monetary policy transmission via the household sector differs radically between countries – it is far more effective in the US and UK, and even counterproductive in Japan (see Muellbauer and Murata 2011).

I mean what can one even say to such issues?

 

Changing colors of Indian central bank: A picture worth 1000 words…

Manjul, cartoonist at DNA has a nice cartoon today:

Was Euro a case of demonetisation and did it work?

Prof JR Varma of IIMA points to this interesting piece by Peter Guy of Regulation Asia.

Guy says:

Why don’t central bankers disagree?

An interesting piece by Richard Barwell who is a Senior Economist at BNP Paribas

He says though there is a lot of discussion on dissent in central bank monetary policy meetings, it does not mean much. It is just talk with very little action:

If the acid test of dissent within a policy committee is how people vote – rather than how they talk – then to paraphrase Lord King, all the MPC ever does is consensus. The hawks and doves are birds of a feather: they agree, all the time.  In this column, we have focused on the MPC during the Great Moderation, but the point applies more broadly.  For example, it is interesting that there is far more dissent within the FOMC over the near-term path of interest rates (e.g. ‘the 2017 dot’) than over the current level of interest rates.

Likewise, if one looks at the pattern of votes during some of the most high profile episodes of dissent within central banks that have fascinated the media and markets alike – such as ‘Svensson versus the Riksbank’ in 2010/11 or ‘Blanchflower versus the Bank of England’ in 2008 – we see the same mismatch: material differences in views but marginal differences in votes. Whether this state of affairs is optimal is debatable.  A case can be made that the quality of the internal policy debate and the external communication strategy would benefit from policymakers providing a frank assessment of the appropriate monetary stance alongside their assessment of the economy. What cannot be disputed is that either policymakers essentially agree all the time or they do not vote their view.

One has always believed much of this MPC design, communications etc is a bell and whistle thing which is mostly noise..

Recent RTI inquiry from RBI creates confusion over reported Currency in circulation figures…

Despite RBI keeping itself off on some matters under RTI, people have managed to get some interesting information. As per a recent RTI notification by a daring Mr Anil Galgali (thank you so much), we get some data on currency figures with RBI on 8 Nov 2016.

RBI said on 8 NOv 2016, it had following denominations:

RBI’s demonetisation related notifications getting better and better…

Sorry it should be RBI’s notifications on Withdrawal of legal tender as RBI prefers the term.

I had written how the lost skills of writing notifications in India is coming back due to Nov 8 move. But it seems the old art is not just being recovered but even getting better. The recent RBI notification just proves the point:

Is US becoming a banana republic?

Scott Sumner has an interesting piece titled as Banana Republic watch:

How do you know when your country is becoming a banana republic?  Let’s call our imaginary banana republic “Costaguava”.