FE Editorial : RBI’s agenda

But RBI does not directly deliver external financing to corporations. It only gives out wholesale financing to a few financial firms. The real difficulties lie in the corporate sector. RBI is making the raw material cheap. But a properly functioning financial system is required to consume this raw material and turn it into ample and inexpensive financing for corporations (both debt and equity). While the riskless rate dropped by 500 basis points, the best borrowers (the AAA companies) have benefited by only 250 basis points. The story is much worse when we go beyond this handful of AAA corporations. Bank credit growth has distinctly started decelerating. This reflects a combination of supply and demand factors. But a good part of this is surely about the peculiar incentives and compulsions of banks, which do not find it profitable to take money from RBI at 4% and give it out to companies at above 12.25% (the SBI PLR). As has been repeatedly emphasised by this newspaper, the problem lies in the faulty ‘monetary policy transmission’. When we see central banks like the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of England change the policy rate, we are used to a far-reaching impact of these rate changes all across the US and UK economies. But we do wrong to transfer this intuition into India. With a malfunctioning financial system, the good work of dropping the policy rate is not reaching out and alleviating credit constraints across the economy.

Competitive banking

So, sure, in the coming credit policy announcement, RBI can and should cut the policy rate further and sharply. Inflationary expectations are very low, and the policy rate should not be above 1% in real terms. But the credit policy must not stop there. The real challenge lies in coming to grips with the financial sector reforms so as to achieve a properly functioning monetary policy transmission in order to convert cheap money at the short end for riskless borrowing into lowered cost of capital for equity and debt capital all across the economy. This requires going after the host of issues that are usually ignored in monetary policy discussions. One immediate element is shifting administered interest rates to floating rates that are automatically linked to the interest rate on 364-day treasury bills. But going beyond that, why are banks so comfortable with where they stand? The lack of competition in banking is surely one important factor that is giving them this comfort. This needs to be addressed by deregulating interest rates on demand deposits, eliminating branch licensing for domestic and foreign banks and giving money market mutual funds access to the cheque clearing system.