01/07/2017 - The Roundtable Insight – Update On India’s War On Cash From Jayant Bhandari
FRA is joined by Jayant Bhandari in discussing the continued effects of India’s war on cash on the Indian economy.
Jayant Bhandari is constantly traveling the world looking for investment opportunities, particularly in the natural resource sector. He advises institutional investors about his finds. Earlier, he worked for six years with US Global Investors (San Antonio, Texas), a boutique natural resource investment firm, and for one year with Casey Research. Before emigrating from India, he started and ran Indian subsidiary operations of two European companies. He still travels multiple times a year to India. He is an MBA from Manchester Business School (UK) and B. Engineering from SGSITS (India). He has written on political, economic and cultural issues for the Liberty magazine, the Mises Institute (USA), Mises Institute (Canada), Casey Research, International Man, Mining Journal, Zero Hedge, Lew Rockwell, the Dollar Vigilante, Fraser Institute, Le Québécois Libre, Mauldin Economics, Northern Miner, Mining Markets etc. He is a contributing editor of the Liberty magazine. He runs a yearly seminar in Vancouver titled Capitalism & Morality.
INDIA’S WAR ON CASH
With respect to Alasdair Macleod’s recent writings, India will completely fail in trying to making this country cashless. They don’t really have the competency, it’s a technologically backward country, and almost a billion people do not have internet or telephone connections, even in big cities. Electronic transactions won’t be able to work.
This is a country of GDP per capita of $1700, the government has done absolutely no planning, and in the last 55 days since they announced demonetization, they have released 70 notifications of changes. The government has done no planning. All they have done is print two different bank notes, and they are extremely badly printed, with errors and poor quality paper and ink. Imagine how incompetent the Indian government must be, that they can’t even print in a printing press properly.
The whole situation is absolutely crazy, and the government is incredibly incompetent.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE ECONOMY
There have been reports showing how economic activity is beginning to fall precipitously. Things are cheaper than they were two months ago, and the reason is that poor people don’t have the cash to buy anything. Remember that 80% of this country is poor, and this is the population that works in the informal economy. They don’t have jobs and can’t buy food. Food prices have fallen and the middle class is happy, but these are the people who are the backbone of this country. When they lose jobs, they will riot and create crime, and at the end of the day the formal economy sits on the back of the informal economy. These people earn $1-2 a day, and they can’t make banking part of their lifestyle.
70-80% of India’s population will go half-bankrupt. When the next cycle starts, farmers won’t have the money to plant seeds anymore, which means that food production will fall in the next few months and food prices will go up. This hits the middle class and the formal economy, and the formal economy is already very badly hit. People are sitting on their money because they can’t do anything with their money since government tax collectors are rapacious and corrupt. There’s so much anxiety and fear among small businesses and savers.
CURRENCY PROBLEMS
There likely won’t be a currency collapse because the government has a monopoly on currency and all the money in your bank account is frozen. The biggest problem is that one person has a monopoly on the economic blood circulation of the society, and he has completely destroyed it. The economy will suffer, and socially and culturally this society will face horrendous problems going forward.
India has always been a totalitarian country, but it’s increasingly become more and more totalitarian over the last seven years. We are reaching the peak where this will become completely totalitarian, and the only result will be massive chaos and problems in the society and possibly the disintegration of India.
The stock market is going down in Rupee and Dollar terms, but the Rupee is continuing to fall. But if you’re invested in this stock market you can’t really take your money out. The reality is that when foreign investors understand what India is doing, they might stop bringing their money into the country and the result may be that the stock market will fall extremely quickly. India has been a negative yielding economy forever and now that they have destroyed the economic backbone of the country, the stock market can and should fall going forward.
A lot of bartering is starting to happen in rural places where economies aren’t very complex. The transaction costs for bartering are huge, and create massive anomalies in the economy. It doesn’t work in more sophisticated environment where you are doing proper business and exchanging modern goods. Hopefully people will start exchanging gold in place of cash for bigger transactions, because governments’ monopoly on cash is disastrous and extraordinarily risky for any society.
EFFECTS ON GOLD
There is a chronic fear in the society and raids are happening. The government has told people that anyone owning more than 500g of gold might be assessed for tax. The problem is that you can’t prove to the government that you own gold that has been passed down or gifted. This boils down to paying unnecessary taxes and a huge amount of bribes. Corruption has skyrocketed in the last two months because this is now a police state and in a police state you don’t question the police.
The price of gold went up to $3000/oz a few days after the demonetization was announced, and now has fallen to the international rate. The street price is 10% more than the international price because there’s a 10% customs duty on imports of gold. Most of the gold come through smuggling channels, and these smugglers make a massive amount of money.
BitCoin or something similar will likely be important tin convincing Indian to move their money out of the country. The reality is that Indians have been very inward looking. But now for the first time people are considering how to move their money and gold out of the country. Governments will almost certainly institute capital controls and put restrictions on gold ownership sooner rather than later. If they don’t, people will buy gold with credit or move their money abroad using foreign exchange channels. The government will remove those possibilities in the near future.
Historically people have moved their money into silver and farmland, and Indians will do that to protect their wealth from the government.
India was never growing at 7.5%. The Indian economy is stagnating and this country continues to be irrational and tribal. They haven’t been using the technology they’ve gotten from the west, food habits have gone bad, and disease is growing rapidly. There’s a huge amount of chaos, and will likely disintegrate in a few years’ time.
GLOBAL PARALLELS
Similar things are happening in the rest of South Asian countries and the Middle East. Much worse is happening in Africa. These 2.5B people are in chaos right now. All of these people are tribal societies with a natural organic inclination to become tribal again. A lot of these countries will change their shape over the next few decades and go through major problems.
The problems of the emerging markets – particularly the South Asia, Middle East and Africa, is extremely high and bad.
Abstract by: Annie Zhou <a2zhou@ryerson.ca>
