The Reserve Bank of India is concerned over the increasing shift from equity to debt to fill India's widening current account gap. The latest available data indicates that foreign debt inflows in January so far have amounted to $3.21 billion versus $1.7 billion through equity inflows.
Recent $1.1 billion bail-out of Reliance Communications by state-owned Chinese banks is the clearest indication yet that the situation is also becoming dire in India's private sector with its mounting foreign debt.
This is not the first instance of Chinese banks coming to the aid of an Indian company. Last November, Sasan Power, the project company for the Sasan ultra mega power plant and a subsidiary of RComm affiliate Reliance Power, completed a $2.2 billion refinancing, including a $1.114 billion 13-year tranche. Bank of China, CDB and Chexim took $1.06 billion of that tranche, for which Chinese export credit agency Sinosure provided insurance.
Reliance Com is not alone in facing cash crunch in their ability to service debt. More than two dozen Indian companies included in the BSE-500 index face redemptions on foreign currency convertible bonds worth a combined Rs330 billion ($6.5 billion) by March 2013, according to brokerage Edelweiss. These include RComm’s US$925m outstanding CB, which the loan will repay.
Unless other Indian borrowers can somehow find lenders, they will be facing deteriorating debt market conditions that have led to shrinking liquidity in the loan markets and a rise in pricing.
“Top-tier Indian firms will have to pay between 250 basis points (2.5%) and 300 basis points (3.0%) over LIBOR (London Inter-bank Borrowing Rate) to borrow five-year money offshore. Even at that kind of pricing, there isn’t a lot of liquidity available,” said a Hong Kong-based lender quoted by International Financing Review. Over $20 billion worth of Indian debt is set to mature in 2012 and, of that, about $6 billion each of convertible bonds and rupee loans are up for redemption, with the balance in offshore loans.
India continues to run huge twin deficits of current account and budget. It depends heavily on foreign inflows. United Nations data shows that India received less than $20 billion in FDI in the first six months of 2011, compared to more than $60 billion in China while Brazil and Russia took in $23 billion and $33 billion respectively. Stocks in all four countries have underperformed relative to the broader emerging markets equity index, as well as the markets in the developed nations. Pakistan's KSE-100 has significantly outperformed all BRIC stock markets over the ten years since BRIC was coined.
Noting India's significant dependence on foreign capital inflows, Jim O'Neill recently raised concern about the potential for current account crisis. "India has the risk of ... if they're not careful, a balance of payments crisis. They shouldn't raise people's hopes of FDI and then in a week say, 'we're only joking'". "India's inability to raise its share of global FDI is very disappointing," he said.
In addition to Jim O'Neill, a range of investment bankers are turning bearish on India. UBS sent out an email headlined "India explodes" to its clients. Deutsche Bank published a report on November 24 entitled, "India's time of reckoning."
"Suddenly everything seems to be coming to a head in India," UBS wrote. "Growth is disappearing, the rupee is in disarray, and inflation is stuck at near-record levels. Investor sentiment has gone from cautious to outright scared."
India's current account deficit swelled to $14.1 billion in its fiscal first quarter, nearly triple the previous quarter's tally. The full-year gap is expected to be around $54 billion.
Its fiscal deficit hit $58.7 billion in the April-to-October period. The government in February projected a deficit equal to 4.6 percent of gross domestic product for the fiscal year ending in March 2012, although the finance minister said on Friday that it would be difficult to hit that target.
As explained in a series of earlier posts here on this blog, India has been relying heavily on portfolio inflows -- foreign purchases of shares and bonds -- as a means of covering its rising current account gap. Those flows are called "hot money" and considered highly unreliable.
Indian policy makers face a significant dilemma. If they do nothing to defend the Indian currency, the downward spiral could make domestic inflation a lot worse than it already is, and spark massive civil unrest. If they intervene in the currency market aggressively by buying up Indian rupee, the RBI's dollar reserves could decline rapidly and trigger the balance of payment crisis Goldman Sachs' O'Neill hinted at.
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India's budget deficit threatens to explode, according to Bloomberg:
Mumbai: India's budget deficit reached 92.3 per cent of the fiscal-year target in the nine months through December, imperilling the government's aim of reining in the gap.
The deficit was Rs3.8 trillion (Dh282 billion) in the period, the Controller General of Accounts said on its website yesterday. The shortfall was 44.9 per cent of the annual objective in the same period a year earlier.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said cutting the deficit is a "serious challenge" and Standard Chartered Plc has predicted India will miss its target of lowering the gap to 4.6 per cent of gross domestic product by March. Slowing growth threatens to hurt tax receipts even as subsidies spur spending and the government struggles to sell stakes in companies it owns.
"The fiscal slippage this year will be substantial," Shubhada Rao, Mumbai-based chief economist at Yes Bank Ltd, said before the release. "As the economy slows, revenue collections are also getting hit."
The yield on the 8.79 per cent bonds due in Nov-ember 2021 fell two basis points, or 0.02 percentage point, to 8.26 per cent in Mumbai yesterday. The rupee strengthened 0.6 per cent to 49.3675 per dollar, while the BSE India Sensitive Index of stocks, which lost about a quarter of its value in 2011, climbed 1.2 per cent.
Bonds rose after Subir Gokarn, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said in New Delhi that the central bank may consider more government debt purchases if a cash squeeze fails to ease.
Reserve ratio
The Reserve Bank on January 24 lowered the amount of deposits lenders need to set aside as reserves for the first time since 2009 and signalled future interest-rate cuts, moving to shield growth from the impact of Eur-ope's debt crisis. The reserve-ratio reduction was effective January 28.
Overnight interest rates remain elevated even after the reduction in the cash reserve ratio, indicating liquidity pressures are persisting, Gokarn said.
"Based on that, obviously, we will consider" open-market operations, he said, referring to bond purchases. The possibility of another reserve-ratio cut at the mid-quarter monetary policy review also remains on the table, he said. The Reserve Bank also said last week that inflationary threats make it "premature" to start lowering its repurchase rate, adding that without "credible fiscal consolidation" its scope to cut rates will be constrained.
It left the benchmark at 8.5 per cent for a second month at the January review. Indian inflation was 7.47 per cent in December, a two-year low, while remaining the fastest among the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations.
http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/india-39-s-deficit-threatens-to-explode-1.974039
Good analysis...
ahmedabadonnet.com
Here's Russian analyst Anatol Karlin on India's prospects and its comparison with China:
It is not a secret to longtime readers of this blog that I rate India’s prospects far more pessimistically than I do China’s. My main reason is I do not share the delusion that democracy is a panacea and that whatever advantage in this sphere India has is more than outweighed by China’s lead in any number of other areas ranging from infrastructure and fiscal sustainability to child malnutrition and corruption. However, one of the biggest and certainly most critical gaps is in educational attainment, which is the most important component of human capital – the key factor underlying all productivity increases and longterm economic growth. China’s literacy rate is 96%, whereas Indian literacy is still far from universal at just 74%.
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The big problem, until recently, was that there was no internationalized student testing data for either China or India. (There was data for cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, but it was not very useful because they are hardly representative of China). An alternative approach was to compare national IQ’s, in which China usually scored 100-105 and India scored in the low 80′s. But this method has methodological flaws because the IQ tests aren’t consistent across countries. (This, incidentally, also makes this approach a punching bag for PC enforcers who can’t bear to entertain the possibility of differing IQ’s across national and ethnic groups).
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Many Indians like to see themselves as equal competitors to China, and are encouraged in their endeavour by gushing Western editorials and Tom Friedman drones who praise their few islands of programming prowess – in reality, much of which is actually pretty low-level stuff – and widespread knowledge of the English language (which makes India a good destination for call centers but not much else), while ignoring the various aspects of Indian life – the caste system, malnutrition, stupendously bad schools – that are holding them back. The low quality of Indians human capital reveals the “demographic dividend” that India is supposed to enjoy in the coming decades as the wild fantasies of what Sailer rightly calls ”Davos Man craziness at its craziest.” A large cohort of young people is worse than useless when most of them are functionally illiterate and innumerate; instead of fostering well-compensated jobs that drive productivity forwards, they will form reservoirs of poverty and potential instability.
Instead of buying into their own rhetoric of a “India shining”, Indians would be better served by focusing on the nitty gritty of bringing childhood malnutrition DOWN to Sub-Saharan African levels, achieving the life expectancy of late Maoist China, and moving up at least to the level of a Mexico or Moldova in numeracy and science skills. Because as long as India’s human capital remains at the bottom of the global league tables so will the prosperity of its citizens....
http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2012/02/04/china-superior-to-india/
Equity market analysis- Will risk assets bounce back from lows?
The question is when would the risk aversion trades come off and what could trigger them? Greek elections are in mid June and talks of Greece exiting the Euro will persist. Economic data in the form of better employment numbers in the US and better manufacturing growth across geographies could provide relief to markets. Read More...
http://investorsareidiots.com/2012/05/weekly-equity-market-analysis-week-ended-18th-may-2012/
Here's an Economist story "A Bric hits the wall":
INDIA’S economy has had some bad economic ideas inflicted on it over the past century, from imperial neglect to the cult of the village and big-ticket socialism. Maybe the concept of BRICs—a handful of emerging economies including India that were destined for fast growth—should be added to the list. It led to a bubble of complacency that is now being popped rather brutally. Growth in India was 5.3% in the three months to March—worse than the 6% expected, below the prior quarter and way below the close-to-double digit rates that were meant to be preordained and propel India to economic super-power status.
Other BRICs have slowed too, including China and Brazil. But India's GDP figures, the worst for at least nine years, will have a deep impact on the sub-continent. The country was meant to grow in its sleep—regardless of what happens in the rest of the world. A quick bounce back looks unlikely. The central bank has cut interest rates a little this year, but will struggle to loosen policy further given high inflation. The ruling coalition keeps on promising a bout of reforms to boost confidence, but it is so divided, its behaviour so erratic and its record of delivery so poor that few believe this will actually happen. Expectations for growth over the next couple of years will probably slip further, to 6%.
A 6%-growth-India raises three issues. For one, the old orthodoxy was that after liberalisation India had been on an accelerating path, driven by demographics and its high rate of savings and investment. A rival view is now likely to take hold. It notes that India has grown pretty consistently at 6% since the mid 1980s, with the exception of a faster period in 2004-2007. What looked like a step up in trajectory now looks like a one-off blip driven by a global boom, an uncharacteristic bout of tight fiscal policy and an unsustainable burst of corporate optimism. Political history may have to be rewritten too. The reformers of 1991, who include the present prime minister, have turned out to be not visionaries, but pragmatists without a deep commitment to liberalisation who have been unable to build a lasting consensus among voters and the political class in favour or reform.
Second, financial stability will become trickier. Nominal GDP growth (including inflation) has slipped to the low teens. This is still above the rate of interest India's government pays on its debt and thus in theory enough to avoid a debt spiral—despite high fiscal deficits running at almost a tenth of GDP. Government bond yields are artificially depressed because banks are forced to buy government paper and because the central bank has been buying bonds actively in the last six months. Although this can go on for a while, the stress is showing up in two different areas. One is the banking system where gross bad debts plus "restructured" loans have risen to over 8% of the total—a figure high even by western banks' standards. Bankers and the central bank argue that "restructured" loans are unlikely to result in large losses. But with lower growth more corporate borrowers will come under strain, as will the credibility of those reassurances.
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Perhaps growth will bounce back. And if it doesn't, perhaps public frustration will be expressed at the ballot box, creating a new, less complacent political climate. The view that India's democracy is a self correcting mechanism that steers the country back onto the right course when things go wrong, was an integral part of the bulls' view of India. Hopefully it is one idea from the boom that proves to be correct.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2012/05/indias-economy
Here are a few excerpts from Wall Street Journal story titled "India Fades":
India's growth prospects have been fading for some time. Multinationals are walking away from the country, withdrawing some $10.7 billion worth of investments in 2011 alone, according to Nomura. Manufacturing contracted by 0.3% for the year that ended March 31. Agriculture and services faltered as well.
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Delhi managed to keep the party going after the 2008 financial crisis with more government spending and easier credit. But that only postponed the reckoning—while sending the inflation rate north of 8% for the better part of the last two years.
After growth dipped below 7% late last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turned to gimmicks, like having state-owned Coal India boost coal supply to power producers in a one-off manner or proposing to set up special manufacturing zones where factories would get tax breaks. But businesses want less red tape permanently, especially when it comes to energy investments, as well as labor reform to make hiring and firing easier. On both fronts, the Prime Minister has done nothing.
Then there was his one serious attempt at reform. In late November he announced plans to allow foreign investment in big-box retail stores. The reform would have been a boon for consumers, and would have helped import some crucial supply-chain know how. But the reform met the usual combination of populist and special-interest resistance, and the government folded in 10 short days.
Indians are increasingly disenchanted with Congress's failure to push for pro-market reforms, and have voted accordingly in recent state elections. That's the good news. There's been a lot of talk about India's emergence as a new economic superpower. An India with the ambition to rise in the world will not treat a high-growth economy as a national birthright.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303640104577440103460087194.html
Here's a Wall Street Journal story on falling Indian rupee:
For almost a year, India's central bank has spent billions of dollars to support the beleaguered rupee. And yet the currency is Asia's worst-performing against the U.S. dollar over the past year.
The fruitless efforts by the Reserve Bank of India shows how central banks, especially in emerging markets, often are powerless to manage pressures on their currencies if international market forces are ranged against them.
The rupee has been declining partly because of flight of capital from emerging markets, but also because of concerns over India's deteriorating financial health. The country's current-account deficit recently hit its highest level ever, and the federal government's heavy spending has widened its budget deficit.
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Things worsened for the rupee after March, when the Indian government introduced tax rules in the federal budget that could potentially hurt foreign investors. Spooked, foreign funds pulled money out of the economy.
Between April and June, for instance, foreign institutional investors pulled out $350 million from Indian stocks versus net inflows of $1.15 billion in the same period a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the bank came under intense pressure from the government to cut rates. Growth in India fell to 5.3% in the first three months of 2012, its slowest rate in almost a decade.
In April, the central bank cut rates for the first time in three years. But it hasn't followed with additional cuts, citing inflation and currency risks.
In May, the bank stepped up its actions, ordering exporters to convert half their foreign-currency earnings held onshore into rupees within two weeks. The move failed to lift the rupee as exporters were able to keep their earnings overseas.
At other times, the government has raised hopes of enacting strong measures to boost the rupee, or foreign inflows, but failed to deliver.
"There have been a lot of dashed expectations," said Killol Pandya, head of fixed income at Daiwa Asset Management in Mumbai.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303933404577504792500177750.html
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