Breathe easy when the rupee falls

Times of India, October 13, 2022

While the Indian economy has started recovering from the pandemic, the global economy has begun to decelerate. This has complicated the task of finding an appropriate policy mix that can deliver growth amidst multiple global headwinds. Existing domestic imbalances such as high inflation and a large stock of government debt have already imposed constraints on the authorities’ ability to manouver. Now the constraints are likely to worsen as India’s export prospects have dimmed and current account deficit seems set to widen. In such a situation, is there any policy space left to support growth? It seems there is a powerful arrow in the RBI’s quiver: the exchange rate.

There are widespread concerns about an impending recession in developed economies, as they struggle to deal with the worst streak of inflation in four decades. The US Fed has already raised its policy rate by 3 percentage points since March 2022, the most aggressive monetary contraction since the 1980s. It has now signalled that this tightening cycle will last longer than previously expected. The European Central Bank and the Bank of England have also embarked on monetary contraction in order to bring inflation down to their target levels of 2%.

As if this sudden shift in the monetary environment were not enough, Europe is currently facing an energy crisis as Russian supplies of natural gas dwindle, while China’s economy is dealing with an abrupt end to the real estate boom that had been powering that country’s economy for the past decade. Owing to these developments, the IMF has lowered its forecast of global growth for 2022 to only 3.2 percent, far below the 4.4 percent it predicted at the start of the year. As a spillover effect, already India’s pandemic-time export boom has ended. In fact, September 2022 witnessed a fall in exports, with declines being particularly sharp for apparel and engineering goods.

This situation has put domestic policymakers in a bind. Ideally, they would react to the fall in external demand by stimulating domestic demand. But the policy space available to do so is highly limited. The fiscal deficit in 2022-23 is budgeted to be around 6.4 percent of GDP and the debt to GDP ratio continues to be very high, close to 90 percent. This restricts the fiscal space available to the government to provide any kind of stimulus.

On the monetary side, the RBI has now begun tightening policy to bring inflation back to the target level. The RBI’s medium term inflation target is 4 percent, whereas the CPI inflation has been averaging at 6-7 percent in 2022 so far. While oil and commodity prices have been softening, erratic monsoon is pushing up food inflation leaving no room for the RBI to go easy on the rate hikes.

This implies that using fiscal or monetary policy to support growth at this juncture will only worsen the existing macro imbalances: the high levels of inflation, government debt, and the current account deficit (CAD).

The CAD is especially a problem now. On current trends it could reach the exceptionally high level of 4 percent of GDP in 2022-23. Such a high CAD would be very difficult to finance. In fact, capital is flowing the other way, with rising US interest rates encouraging investors to take money out of Indian capital markets and deploy it instead in the US.

Given the circumstances what can the RBI do? The most obvious strategy would be to try to bridge the gap between rising CAD and falling capital flows by using its foreign exchange reserves. Indeed, that is exactly what it has been doing. However, there are limits to what the RBI can or should do. Bridging this gap using reserves makes sense only if the gap is small and temporary. It has turned out to be neither.

Reserves have now been falling for an entire year, by a staggering $110 billion between September 2021 and early October 2022. The pace of reserve loss seems set to accelerate as India’s CAD widens and the US continues to increase interest rates.

Clearly, other strategies are needed. The RBI could try to stem capital outflows by raising rates to reduce the interest differential with the US. But given that the US Fed has signaled that it will increase rates by another 125 basis points (and might do more), this strategy might require much more aggressive rate hikes on the part of the RBI than what is warranted by domestic inflation. Such a strategy could end up hurting the nascent economic recovery even more.

That leaves the exchange rate. The RBI could allow the rupee to respond to market forces, and depreciate. Such a strategy would have a number of advantages. Most obviously, it would reduce the need to spend so much of the foreign exchange reserves; these can be preserved for situations when the country is faced with temporary and unforeseen external shocks, rather than chronic drains on the balance of payments.

A second advantage of allowing the rupee to depreciate is that it would enhance the competitiveness of Indian exports. This would be a powerful way – more powerful than targeted subsidy programs -- of ensuring that India would be able to gain some of the global market share that China has been giving up. And in doing so, it would ensure that exports, the key motor of India’s post-pandemic growth, does not seize up at such an early stage of the recovery.

Of course, a currency depreciation could add to the inflation problem, by increasing the rupee price of imported goods. But the effects would likely be minor, as long as monetary policy remains tight.

In other words, the benefits of this strategy are likely to far exceed the costs. The good news is that the RBI already seems to be on this path. After a period of trying to stabilise the currency, the RBI has recently allowed the rupee to depreciate. Rupee has reached an all-time low of nearly 83 against the dollar.

For the first time in several decades US inflation exceeds Indian inflation. Looking forward, as long as the Fed persists with rate hikes, there will be pressure on the rupee to depreciate. In response, the RBI should continue to let the rupee respond to market forces. This policy should be accompanied by appropriate government support, such as moving away from protectionist policies, and taking steps to create a more export-oriented environment so that firms can reap full advantage of a weaker rupee. These policy actions may in turn help turn the growth cycle around for India, and help cement its position as a fast-growing economy.

What the term premium is (or is not) telling us?

(with Harsh Vardhan) Bloomberg Quint, October 6, 2022

An important and usually reliable measure of the future economic outlook is the yield curve in the bond market. It is particularly useful when the overall economic environment is highly uncertain, such as now. The yield curve shows the yields of government securities (G-Secs) of various maturities. The steepness of the yield curve is often used as a proxy for market expectations about future interest rates, and hence future inflation and growth. In recent times however, the reliability of the yield curve and its information content have come into question.

One simple way to measure the steepness is the term premium. It is the difference between the yields at the short end and at the long end of the yield curve. In India, the long-term yield considered is typically the 10 year G-Sec yield while for the short-term, it is usually the yield on one-year treasury bills. Monetary policy has an important impact on the term premium. The actions of the central bank directly affect the short-term interest rate. The bond market interprets the central bank’s actions and statements and transacts long dated bonds setting the long-term rates.

Since May 2022, the RBI has been hiking the policy repo rate in response to the rise in CPI (consumer price index) inflation which averaged at 6.8% between January and August 2022. Accordingly the short-end of the yield curve has gone up from 5.1% in early May to 6.7% now. This is a move of around 160 basis points in the 1 year G-Sec yield.

The RBI has also been highlighting in its monetary policy statements the significant upside risks to inflation that remain a concern. It has specified that it will continue to withdraw surplus liquidity from the system which is consistent with a contractionary monetary policy. Its CPI inflation forecast for FY 2022-23 is 6.7%, much higher than its inflation target of 4%. This implies that monetary policy may need to be tightened in a calibrated manner for the next few quarters.

Moreover, monetary policy tightening in the US has led to a strengthening of the US dollar and accordingly an 11% depreciation in the rupee-dollar exchange rate in 2022 so far. This has been the fate of currencies across the world, not just in emerging economies, and has led to central banks raising interest rates in order to defend the exchange rates. There are talks among the analyst community in India that the RBI might follow suit. Given that the Fed has said it might increase interest rate by another 125 basis points by the end of 2022, any attempt to use monetary policy to defend the rupee’s value may require the RBI to raise rates significantly.

Given the circumstances, one might expect the yield curve to steepen i.e. long-term yields should go up alongside the short-term ones, reflecting market’s expectation of higher interest rates in the future.

What we see instead is that the rates at the long-end of the yield curve have gone up by only around 30 basis points – from 7.1% in early May to 7.4% now in comparison to the increase in the short end by about 160 bps. As a result, the term premium has come down to around 50-70 basis points from a long-term average of over 90 bps. This has led to a remarkable flattening of the yield curve which seems counterintuitive.

Such a flat yield curve implies that the bond market believes that the rate actions taken by the RBI would help control inflation, which in turn would lower the chances of future interest rate hikes. In other words, the market does not agree with the RBI as far as assessment of risks to inflation are concerned. It also means the market does not expect the RBI to raise rates to match the monetary policy tightening being undertaken by the US Fed.

If the long-term yields remain as steady as they have been over the last few months, and the RBI continues to tighten the short-term rates, we may soon see the term premium moving close to 0. For an economy growing roughly at 5-6% on average with an inherent inflationary impulse, such a flat yield curve implies that the market is anticipating a severe growth slowdown and hence monetary policy easing.

Is that indeed the case? The answer is: it is not possible to answer this anymore by looking at the yield curve. Let's understand why.

During the pandemic the RBI had expanded its balance sheet by around 25%. It bought long-term G-Secs and the 10Yyields were held steady around 6%. Since October 2021 it has stopped its bond buying program. At its peak the RBI’s balance sheet was around Rs 65 trillion in October 2021. Between then and September 2022 the balance sheet has shrunk marginally to around Rs 59-60 trillion. This means that while the RBI has been withdrawing short-term liquidity using the SDF and reverse repo facilities, it has not been selling long-term G-Secs.

Typically, the RBI withdraws long-term liquidity through open market operations (OMOs) or by selling dollars from its reserves. In the former case, the stock of G-Secs goes down, and in the latter, reserves fall. The RBI has lately been relying on the second mechanism - selling dollars - to reduce liquidity (and to stem the rupee depreciation). When the RBI’s GSec holdings were small, this did not matter. Now the RBI potentially holds around Rs 15 lakh crore worth of G-Secs which is tad below 20% of all outstanding G-Secs, compared to its peak holding of Rs 15.8 trillion in September 2021. In contrast, between 2011 and 2020, the average RBI ownership of G-Secs was roughly 11% of the outstanding. As long as the RBI continues to hold such a large amount of G-Secs, the long-end of the yield curve is unlikely to respond freely to economic conditions.

A natural way for the term premium to shrink is if inflation comes down or growth slows down. But if in some part of the market there are no transactions, and a large chunk of the supply of long-dated bonds is cornered then this hampers price discovery. All interest rate sensitive securities are directly or indirectly priced with reference to the yield curve. Any such distortion of the yield curve therefore will translate into an economy wide pricing distortion. This also hampers transmission of monetary policy along the yield curve.

The RBI itself has been advocating an “orderly evolution of the yield curve”, but its own decision has important consequences for the market in general and the yield curve in particular. The current compression of the term premium suggests that the yield curve is anything but orderly.