#178 How Do I Raid Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

India Policy Watch #1: To Catch A Falling Rupee Insights on burning policy issues in India — RSJ The Indian rupee this week declined to an all-time low as it went beyond 80 per dollar. For reasons that aren’t always clear to me, this kind of thing makes a lot of news in India. I mean, it was 79.9 the week before. There isn’t a yawning gap between that and 80. Yet opinion pieces are written, cartoons sketched, and old tweets of macroeconomic theorists like Akshay Kumar, Juhi Chawla and Sri Sri (Sri?) Ravishankar are dug out to contrast their current reactions to this phenomenon with their past asides. The WhatsApp factory also rolls out their new models that suggest how a strong dollar is bad for the US economy and how this is some kind of a switch and bait move that we are making on them. Somewhere in many of our heads, the strength of the Indian rupee is no longer subject to the dynamics of the currency market. Like many things these days, it too is anchored to our self-respect. And since our national clarion call is desh nahin jhukne doonga (won’t let the country down), we then start working on the narrative that shows all of this in a warm, positive glow. All in a day in the life of India. Anyway, I thought it would be useful to take this moment to appreciate the winds that are buffeting it, the long-term view of what will actually strengthen the rupee and then zoom out a bit to appreciate what’s happening to the US economy and what it could mean for India. The Safety Of Dollar We will start with why has the rupee gone to 80 a dollar? The simple answer is the US dollar has been more in demand since the start of the Ukraine war than before. This is true for all currencies, not just the rupee, as the chart below shows. There are reasons for this. The 40-year high inflation print that the US is witnessing month over month has turned the Fed hawkish. It is likely to raise rates by another 75 bps in its meeting next week, and the consensus suggests the benchmark rates will be around 3.4 per cent by the end of the year. These rate hikes make storing money in dollars more attractive. This potent cocktail of uncertainty around the Ukraine war, the high oil and commodity prices that make emerging markets more vulnerable and the prospect of a global recession is starting to give global fund managers a massive hangover. Their most obvious response: flight to the safety of the US dollar. The dollar demand has gone up as foreign portfolio investors have checked out of domestic equities across the world. In India, we have had over ₹2.3 trillion of outflow from the equity market so far this year. Things would have been worse had it not been for the domestic investors (mutual funds and insurers) who invested about ₹1.4 trillion during this period. The price of oil—averaging over US$ 120 or so during this year—has made things worse because we import over 90 per cent of our requirements. The across-the-board rise in commodity prices has further increased our import bill. Almost simultaneously, the high rate of inflation, the rise in interest rates and a prospect of a recession have meant our exports are beginning to soften. The commentary from our software services giants suggests the demand pipeline isn’t what it used to be. This might also show up in other export-dominated sectors as the steep rise in interest rates starts to kill off growth in developed markets. This has meant the consensus forecast among analysts for the current account deficit has inched up to 3 per cent for the year-end. We will need more dollars to support that kind of deficit. That apart, our own inflation numbers have remained high, and we are running a negative real interest rate (the difference between interest rate and rate of inflation). This will continue to support riskier assets and reward consumption that will feed back into inflation. So, expect further interest rate hikes, and that will impact growth. All of this indicates the dollar strengthening against the rupee is here to stay. Propping Up The Rupee What can be done to address this? This is market dynamics at play. There are too many interlinked factors here. Beyond a point, there are only tweaks that you can do in the short term to support the currency. The RBI has tried to ensure that the depreciation is orderly and gradual, which is the best it can do now. It has increased dollar inflows by loosening norms in multiple areas, helping curb volatility. The raft of measures taken here shows how many short term levers are available with a central bank to manage currency volatility. These included removing the interest rate restrictions on banks for foreign currency and non-resident deposits. Such deposits have also been exempted from the statutory liquidity requirements that Banks need to carry for their deposits. This has allowed banks to hike their savings rates for such deposits by almost 75 bps. This will attract dollar deposits from non-resident Indians. The RBI has also relaxed foreign investments in debt instruments and allowed the use of overseas foreign currency borrowing for lending domestically in foreign currency. Even the amount of external commercial borrowing businesses can do through the automatic route has been doubled to US$ 1.5 billion. These immediate measures will smoothen the flow and increase the supply of dollars. The idea here is to weather through the Fed interest rate hike storm for the next two quarters and then take stock. The RBI also made an interesting move last week that was reported as the ‘internationalisation’ of the rupee. It allowed special accounts (rupee Vostro accounts) to pay and settle exports and imports in rupees. Further, the surplus in these accounts could be invested in government T-bills and securities. What does this mean? Simply put, if Indian firms can find counterparties who are willing to trade with them in rupees, they can do so more easily than before. On the face of it, this means very little. Because there aren’t many global firms who would want to settle their trade in a currency like the rupee that will depreciate in the long-term and which isn’t useful for trade with non-Indian partners. But it allows us to trade with Russia without getting the dollar involved. In fact, it is both an economic move and a geopolitical one. We run a trade deficit with Russia. We can now pay for Russian oil in rupees. Russia can use those rupees to buy our exports. The surplus in these accounts can be used to buy government bonds. So we save on buying more dollars to settle this trade, and we create demand for government bonds because the surplus in this account will be invested there. Seems like a neat solution, and I guess the US and the west won’t mind because we have pointed out their hypocrisy on Russian gas and Saudi oil more than a few times now. Apart from this, the government has done its usual quota of excise duty tweaks to manage the situation. We have increased duties on the export of petroleum products and limited sugar and wheat exports. And we have cut import duties on key raw materials and on cooking oils to manage inflation. These won’t add to much, but it gives an impression that something’s been done to address inflation. When inflation stabilises, we will take ages to dismantle these duties. That is an old and different story. That takes care of the short term. In the long run, the rupee's strength depends on the fundamentals of our economy. We must run a current account shortfall below 2 per cent, bring down the fiscal deficit and debt to GDP ratio that have gone up significantly in the past two years and keep inflation in the four per cent range, which was the RBI mandate. All of this is hard work and will need the government to translate its words into action. Structural reforms in labour and capital have been pending for ages, the infrastructure push promised in the last budget is still in the works,… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com