Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Bank Reforms - preparing for the next crisis?


The Public Sector Bank (PSB) recapitalisation plan announced by the government has sparked off renewed debates on the shape and future of Indian banking. The big policy and philosophical question is — what should the Indian banking system look like in the future? Unfortunately, we are saddled with seriously flawed assumptions on what constitutes “reform” in India — some of them borrowed wisdom from the West, yet some more are ideological postures. Let us look at some of the key postulates.
One, the idea of having fewer, (much) larger banks. It’s an old idea, but embedded firmly across the political divide, and was first mooted by P Chidambaram as Finance Minister. Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian reiterated its salience a few days ago. Ironically enough, this is one idea where India is bucking the global trend. Since the global financial crisis in 2008, regulators globally have become extremely wary of banks that are too large. The reason for that is intuitive.
First, larger the bank, larger is its footprint, and hence greater the damage to the wider economy should it fail. Second, Risk Management 101 dictates diversification is a key mitigant of risk, while concentration is a contributor to it. Ergo, smaller, more numerous banks are preferred to larger, fewer ones, from a systemic risk management perspective. Globally Systematically Important Banks, or GSIB — a list of essentially Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) institutions — have been identified, and they are required to have more stringent control around capital and risk. In this context, the idea of having larger Indian banks is bizarre, because its stated aim would be to merge small banks into fewer TBTF ones, thereby increasing risks to the system!
Two, assumption of public ownership of PSB to taxpayer-funded “bailout” through recapitalisation. It has been established many times over the years — banking obligations, when banks are under stress, automatically devolve to the taxpayer, irrespective of ownership. Whether Korean banks post the 1997-98 Asian Crisis, US/European banks post the 2008 global financial crisis, or Indian banks many times over (remember Global Trust Bank, Bank of Rajasthan?) — in a crisis, banks need to be bailed out by the government, irrespective of whether they are owned privately or publicly. Banks aren’t ordinary corporate enterprises — failure of a bank has large social impact. Further, increasing complexity of the financial system means there are snowballing effects of a bank failure that are difficult to assess. Therefore, the taxpayer liability isn’t an issue of ownership, but the quality of regulation to ensure risks are appropriately managed.
Three, privatisation as a panacea for all ills. This is an ideological position — based primarily on faith rather than reason. The assumption is the issues afflicting PSB are on account of its state-ownership, which somehow make them structurally vulnerable to taking poor-quality decisions, sometimes compromised with integrity issues. From Leendert Neufville in Holland in the 18th century to a range of Asian banks in the 20th century to American and European banks in 2008 — history is replete with privately-owned banks collapsing on the weight of poor decision-making. Regulatory investigations in the last few years in private sector banks have shown up numerous cases of moral turpitude too. Even in India, large private-sector banks have been found out making poor-quality decisions on transparency, risk-management and governance. In other words, there is too much data disproving the hypothesis of superior governance of a privately-owned banking system.
The question then is, what should policy-makers focus on? The focus should be at the core of the issue, i.e., risk. Banks are fundamentally risky enterprises, allowed a level of leverage in their capital structures and a level of interconnectedness with large parts of the economy that no other commercial enterprise (barring perhaps insurance) is allowed. The example of Lehman Brothers is illustrative. It was a mid-sized bank with no retail deposits — and its collapse engendered a crisis to the global financial architecture. No wonder, banks have a social compact of “backstop” from the taxpayer.
That is where the real issue lies — not in ownership, not in size. Regulators should be concentrating on mitigating that risk on society. Fundamentally, it means converting banks into utilities — essential institutions, but ones that don’t take risks that can put society at risk (similar to, though not the same as, a telephone company). Solutions lie in the domain of smaller (not larger) banks, higher capital requirements, lesser risk-taking, greater state oversight (and not lesser via privatisation) and higher governance. In other words, make banks (and banking) a boring affair. Unfortunately, most of the oft-discussed, clichéd solutions today are taking the other direction — taken to their conclusions, they will increase the risks to the system, and make it even more vulnerable to future taxpayer bailouts.
Through history and literature, bankers have rarely been boring. From the usurious Shylock in Merchant of Venice to the murderous Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to the philandering Humphry Wellwood in The Children’s Book — bankers are usually flamboyant, somewhat unscrupulous characters. The real objective for regulators would be around converting bankers (and banks) into Mr Banks, the benign, boring Bank of England official in the Mary Poppins books. That, and not ideological positions around size and ownership, is what will shape for a safer, better banking architecture for India in the future.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Credit Growth - the real issue is demand, not supply

This was published in the Op-Ed pages of Mint newspaper on 19th Oct, 2017

A constant lament around the state of the economy today is on “low credit growth”. Generally, the twin balance sheet issues are the identified villains. As fresh data on non-performing assets (NPA) keep coming in with numbers worse off at the margin, the noise levels keep getting institutionalized.
The narrative is simple enough—banks are not lending because they don’t have balance sheet capacity to lend (most banks, especially public sector ones, do not have enough capital to write off NPAs and write fresh loans). As a result, credit supply to the larger economy is being crimped, thereby constraining growth. Anaemic growth in non-food bank credit growth (9% in financial year 2016-17, or FY17, in negative territory this fiscal year) is held up as empirical basis of the hypothesis. Weaker-than-expected quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth (at 5.7%) provides the ostensibly clinching evidence that weak credit growth is pushing down growth.
Like many popular hypotheses though, this too has a case of missing some really large woods for the trees. First, the popular narrative conflates one source of supply of credit (bank loans) with the overall demand for credit. However, one of the remarkable changes in the Indian financial sector over the last three-four years has been the steady erosion in the importance of banks as financial intermediaries. A host of other credit suppliers—mutual funds, insurance companies, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs)—have taken market share away from traditional banks. These new suppliers of credit are also experimenting heavily with alternative credit instruments (away from loans), like corporate bonds and structured financing instruments. These are often more flexible and cheaper than vanilla bank loans.
Consolidated credit growth (bank loans, corporate bonds, NBFC loans) has been 13% in FY17, while bank loans alone grew only by 9%. The former represents a more representative estimate of real credit growth in the economy, than bank loans alone. The popular press (and even some of the more informed commentary) tends to focus only on bank credit, missing the real big story on disintermediation of credit. The real growth in credit demand is quite in line with nominal GDP growth and the 70% capacity utilization levels in Indian industry.
Second, the base effect of the Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (Uday) bonds. Since March 2016, the adoption of the Uday programme by state governments has transferred a large chunk of bank credit from state electricity distribution companies (discoms) to state government-issued Uday bonds. As the latter don’t get counted as “non-food credit”, growth numbers are automatically depressed going forward. Adjusted for Uday bonds issuance of Rs1.7 trillion in FY17, total credit growth in the year would have been about 11.4%, higher than the headline number of 9% and partially higher than the FY16 number of 11%.
Third, even for bank loans, the issue doesn’t seem to be so much about supply (or the willingness of banks to lend) as it is about finding bankable borrowers to lend to. In the recently released Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data on sectoral deployment of bank credit, banks have registered healthy growth in loans to the personal segment, trade, NBFCs. On the other hand, large swathes of manufacturing industries show barely any growth in bank credit.
There are multiple factors at play here. Highly rated (AAA) borrowers are increasingly finding the corporate bond market a cheaper source for fund-raising, compared to traditional banking channels. On the other side of the spectrum, in the riskier (and stressed) segments of borrowers, bank funding has shrunk—partly on regulatory diktat, and partly on account of the diminishing risk appetite of banks. These borrowers have tapped alternative sources of funding—via structured finance instruments—from NBFCs, private equity and alternative investment funds (AIFs).
Fourth, and somewhat non-linearly related, is the dramatic increase in equity raising by Indian industry over the past two years. Total equity raised via public (and rights) issues has risen by 200% over the last three years. At least part of the fresh equity raised has gone towards replacing debt in the capital structure.
We have a fundamental demand issue today in the economy. Total credit flows into the economy mirror the aggregate demand, and as we have seen above, are not a constraint. We looked at commitments raised by AIFs, a key emerging source of “risk-funding” today. As of FY17, only around 40% of the total funds raised by AIFs (in excess of Rs80,000 crore) have been deployed—thereby illustrating a paucity of deployment opportunities even for risk capital.
Unfortunately, most policy actions are concentrating on supply-side fixes (bank consolidation, NPA resolution, etc.). While these are important and necessary, they won’t help kick-start growth. As seen above, there is enough capital available to fund any amount of bankable projects coming on stream. The real issue is elsewhere—it is around lack of demand (both domestic and exports) for Indian industry. This is resulting in capacity utilization picking up painfully slowly, and constraining fresh investments by industry. Paraphrasing Cassius in Julius Caesar, the fault lies within (the industry), not in our stars (of the banking system).

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

A blueprint for job growth - Urban Employment Guarantee, an idea whose time has come

This article appeared in the DNA opinion page on 29th of September, 2017

The decibel levels have suddenly shot up. The lament of jobless growth is a long-debated one. The last quarterly GDP growth print (at 5.7 per cent) has now seemingly thrown up risks of significant economic slowdown too. To be sure, quarterly GDP numbers are estimates that are prone to massive revisions in the best of times, and we have a still-stabilising method of national income accounting. The issue is even starker for jobs, where almost no standardised, empirically robust data is available on a high frequency basis to make sure determinations.
However, policymaking cannot wait for perfect data. What is certainly verifiable are some indicators that point towards enduring weakness the economy. Capacity utilisation of Indian industry has hovered around the early 70 per cent range for many quarters now (RBI Capacity Utilisation Survey shows a slight decline in Mar 2017 from Mar 2016, at 74.1 per cent). Aggregate credit growth, while much higher than the oft-quoted bank credit growth, is in high single digit levels, and at the margin lower than previous year. Topline sales (and profit) growth numbers of listed firms display the same trend — and are generally undershooting beginning-of-the-year forecasts. On jobs, with the general collapse of private investment (especially Real Estate, the biggest jobs-creating sector), and struggles in the big employment-intensive services (IT and Financial Services) — it is safe to assume that we have a problem.
What should the policymaking response be? While there is never a dearth of ideas in India, is there something that can boost growth and generate additional employment at the same time, and quickly? Often, lessons are closer home than we realise. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGA) provides an interesting template. NREGA by design is an employment generating programme, and by many accounts was a big factor in India quickly bouncing back from the effects of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.
There is, therefore, merit in considering a National Urban Employment Programme (NUEP) on similar lines. A well-funded NUEP will provide a soak for the urban and semi-urban unemployed, and provide an immediate Keynesian consumption boost to the economy. In principle, the consumption boost should enhance capacity utilisation levels, and hasten a revival of private investment, which is really the big driver of growth and employment. There are three big questions to be addressed though.
First, why a cash transfer programme (which is what employment programmes are), and not enhanced infrastructure expenditure? A couple of reasons. First, NUEP-type programmes are quicker on execution than large infrastructure projects, and hence would tend to have more immediate macro impact. And second, this provides for an immediate employment safety net to the most vulnerable, again something that would come only with a time lag in an infrastructure investment programme. Above all, some of the traditional assumptions around employment-intensity of infrastructure spending have been revisited in the last few years — it takes far fewer people to build a 100 km of highways than used to be the case a decade back.
Second, what would be the sort of jobs created under this programme? NREGA is designed around basic earthworks projects in rural areas, targeting employment for primarily untrained, barely literate farm labour. The workforce available in urban areas is likely to be better educated, and equipped to be trained for more.
They can, therefore, be deployed in auxiliary units for a range of urban services — municipals, schools, traffic control, even elements of basic policing – with a certain amount of training. India suffers from very large capacity gaps in all these areas.
For example, there is one police officer for every 720 Indians. The UN-prescribed standard is one for every 454. While a semi-permanent workforce with rudimentary training cannot be used for cutting-edge frontline policing duties, they could certainly be used for basic administrative and support services to enhance capacity.
Third, and perhaps most important, what should be the size of this programme? Targeting to create how many jobs? As a benchmark, the allocation to NREGA in the current year is Rs 48,000 crore. Let us assume that NUEP has a similar outlay. At an average wage of Rs 1.2 lakh/job (the approximate level at which a single wage-earner can ensure a family of 4 is above the urban poverty level), and assuming a 20 per cent support cost (ie, part of the outlay not accruing to wages, NREGA average is 30-35 per cent), this would create around 32 lakh jobs. India has around 1 crore new entrants into the jobs market every year. 32 lakh vacancies-on-demand will create a material tightness in the labour market to make a dent in wages and opportunities.
The last point would be, is it affordable? The amount in question would represent around 0.3-0.4 per cent of GDP. In a scenario where the banking system is flush with post-Demonetisation liquidity, that amount of excess government borrowing can be easily funded. It will have an electrifying message politically, while giving an instant consumption boost to the economy, with all-round multiplier effects. It is an idea whose time has come!