Tuesday, June 14, 2022

What are they afraid of?

"SBI Ecowrap has said that CPI (consumer price index) may have already peaked and RBI is the Fed of yester-years. Moreover, it said that Fed can borrow RBI template to control rampaging US inflation," Zee. Every school kid knows the song "God Bless America", The Kennedy Center. "In recent times there have been commentaries that have questioned whether RBI has been behind the curve in controlling inflation. We believe RBI is much ahead of the curve in controlling inflation and the Fed can borrow a template from RBI to control US inflation that is all pervasive and threatens to rip apart global financial stability." What template is that? In the April meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the "Reserve Bank of India (RBI)...kept the repo rate unchanged at 4 percent for the 11th time in a row," NDTV. "RBI has held the key repo rate at record lows since May 2020," that is a total of 23 months. Is the SBI asking the US Federal Reserve to do nothing like India's central bank? "In India, the share of energy in weighted contribution of CPI inflation is 9.2% while in the US it is 29.2%. For transport it is 36.6% in the US compared to 103% in India." In 2018, "In India, 22 people out of a thousand own car, while in the US and UK, 980 and 850 per 1000 individuals have cars respectively, Niti Aayog chief executive Amitabh Kant said," ET. In 1980, 63% of homes in the US had air conditioning (AC), which is "now present in a whopping 95% of homes in the US according to the most recent US Census", Fixr.com. In November 2021, "Currently, just about 13 percent of Indian households have air-conditioning, which would increase to 69 percent by 2020," DH. Shows how different the '"templates" are. "Earnings of listed corporates touched 4% of gross domestic product (GDP) in FY22," wrote Vivek Kaul. "In absolute terms, net profits of listed corporates in FY22 stood at Rs 9.5 trillion, against Rs 5.6 trillion in FY21, a jump of 69%," while, "After staying flat between FY20 and FY21, companies' net sales jumped by around 25.6% as post-covid demand picked up." Profits increased much more than sales because salaries grew by only 11%, use of contract labor and spare capacity utilization. "The biggest cut in expenditure was on interest expenses on debt," which fell by Rs one trillion, "because of RBI cutting the repo rate during the pandemic", which means "savers had to bear this cost in the form of lower interest rates on their savings". In an off-cycle, meaning emergency, meeting from 2-4 May, the MPC raised interest rate by 40 basis points, ET. Why an emergency if the RBI was not behind the curve? This was followed one month later by another increase of 50 basis points, ET. CPI inflation came in at 7.04% in May, well above the upper limit of 6% tolerance level of the RBI, MC, while the wholesale price index (WPI) inflation "surged to 15.88% in May as against 15.08% in April", ET. Although the RBI has seriously underestimated inflation "there has not been a single dissent in MPC on the policy rate for several months", wrote Prof Rajeswari Sengupta. The MPC is an echo chamber while the SBI writes a cringing report. Have they been ordered to do so? What are they afraid of?      

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