Odd Lots - What To Know Ahead Of India's Election

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

India is going to have a general election in the months ahead, and so it's important to understand the state of the economy, and what incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi has accomplished during his five years in office. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Oddlots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, Oddlots on Amazon music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthol. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, remember, I think it was just last week's episode. And I was saying for however much we talk about it, I really feel like I have no understanding of what's going on in the Chinese economy. Yes, it was just last week's episode. And I think you're not alone in that sentiment. I think a lot of people who are actually actively involved in that market are probably just as confused as you are. And I remain confused, although I did learn a bit after last week's episode.

Well, you know, there's another gigantic economy. And after thinking about it this morning, it's also really huge. And I probably even know less about this economy than China's. Wait, an economy almost as big, you said. Yeah, well, it's not China and it's obviously not the U.S. So what's another really huge country? It has to be India. Yeah.

So, India. Right. Here's another country with a billion people, huge emerging market. And when I think about it, I realize, wow, I even know less about how the Indian economy functions in the state of the Indian economy right now than China's. Yeah. And obviously, India is, well, it's a big economy. It's also a fast-growing economy relative to a lot of others out there in the world. But it's also kind of unique in many ways. And whenever I think about India, one of the things that always brings to mind is the uniqueness of its market. Like, it's still a very closed-off market in many, many ways. Do you mean financial markets specifically? Financial markets, yes. I should be clear.

Right. So I think not a lot of people talk about it, not a lot of people. discuss it. Certainly it doesn't get as much attention in China and perhaps for a good reason. But I think it's an important time to be talking about it more. As you mentioned, it's growing rapidly. There's also an election coming up this year. So I think it's time that we had an India episode. I'm excited. I'm actually really, really interested in the upcoming India elections. They haven't, the dates haven't actually been announced yet. But they could be announced basically any day after we publish this episode because we are recording the day before India is also due to release its latest government budget. And this is like the big set piece from the current

administration, the Modi government, the nationalist government. And it's going to be really interesting to see what they do, whether they pull out all the stops to try to win support ahead of the election. So in light of all of this news that's about to happen, I think we should get started. Today we have two guests, two very smart commenters on all things macro and they know a lot about India, Mayank Saxaria of macro risk advisors and Srinivostira Vedantai of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, both of them joining us here in studio to talk about the election and the economy and the markets.

And thank you both for coming in. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Tracy. Thanks, guys. So let's get started first. Let's talk about the election. It's coming up. As Tracy mentioned, we don't know the exact dates. But both of you and Srinivis, you could start first. What are you going to be watching for in this election? Well, you know, I mean, it all comes down to the economy. As James Carville famously said, it's the economy stupid. And, you know, curiously, all the discussion in India is not much about the economy. It's all about, you know, combinations, caste politics and all that stuff, you know. It rarely is. about the economy, but I actually

looked back into the history of the last 11 elections, and I looked at just simple prediction using a simple model of how GDP has done during the term of the incumbent government compared to the previous five years. And that has predicted nine out of the 11 directions.

It is the economy stupid. And I think Indian electorate is not given enough credit. They are actually pretty savvy in that regard. I think that's exactly right. The participation rate in India for elections is in the 60s much higher than, say, most developed markets, and that has trended higher over time. And the sort of incumbency, anti-incumbency that

Shunemas mentioned, has become more correlated with economic outcomes than social or, you know, religious related outcomes than it used to be in the past. So in many ways, I sort of see this as a maturation of the Indian electorate. It's very easy to forget sometimes that the country is not even 70 years old, basically starting at 1947. So it's a very, very young country. And I sometimes think about it as a parallel to the U.S., maybe 100 years ago, where you have a sort of state laboratory style model where you can have massive variation between what's happening in one state versus another. Mayak, on that point, could we maybe back up for a second and could you perhaps walk us through how we got to the current point? Because Modi, you know, Modi won his current position. He sort of ran on a big, big economic platform.

Walk us through what he's been promising the Indian electorate and how the governmental system actually works. Because as Joe alluded to, like, it's quite different to what we see in other places like the U.S. So at the very high level, the political system or the government system in India is a parliamentary system. It's sort of a variant of the British system. The voters don't vote for a person like in the U.S. to become the head of the state. They vote for local elections. Sort of like essentially if you imagine you voted for everybody in Congress and then Congress came together and picked based on whoever had the votes in a party sense, who's going to lead the government.

The other difference is that it's not a two-party system like in the U.S. It's a multi-party system similar to, say, closer to something which people might be more aware of, like Germany, where you have a number of parties come together and then they form the government and then they pick someone based on electoral math to be the leader. More specifically to the current government, so since 1947, and Shreda Mast might have a more specific answer on this. I would say more than 80% of the time, the government has been run by one party,

which is the Congress party. And only since the late 90s has the BJP become a national-level party of any comport. And they had power from 99 to 2004 previously, and 2014 was when Modi won. And obviously, there's a lot of different things that people will promise, but really I think it boils down to two things. One thing which Trinavas already mentioned, it was a very poor five-year run for the Indian economy

from 2009 through 14. And on top of it, there was an extremely negative sentiment environment for the current government of the time centered on corruption. So Modi came in and sort of made himself the centerpiece of this idea that he's going to give you good governance, which is essentially anti-corruption and economic outcomes that are better. And has Modi delivered on that both the anti-corruption and the good governance? You know, I mean, I'm not privy to all the corruption things.

This is always hard to prove. But from what I have heard, the high-level corruption is down for sure. And one of the signs that corruption is down is also that if you look at real estate deals, they are down and real estate prices are down because you can't use mostly real estate deals are done. heavily on cash and there's not enough cash in circulation. So in that sense, corruption is down, yes. And you mentioned, and just on the sort of delivery of economic growth, you talked about the strong relationship between electoral results and growth. Has the growth been strong enough over the last five years that Modi is likely the favorite? No, it is touch and go. I would say

it's a toss-up. The growth has not, real growth has been okayish, but not strong enough to make it a slam dunk. So it is touch and go. And part of the reason, reason why it has not been is the government actually has been on an austerity, austerity binge, much opposed to my advice, which I've been consistently writing about. They, see, coming into 2004, when this government was taking the office, India was facing a corporate sector de-leveraging, there was huge amount of corporate sector debt, and banks were struggling with non-performing loans, huge amounts of non-performing loans. So basically, credit system was short.

So in that environment, the government has to do the lifting. If you're going to listen to advice that the government has to consolidate its fiscal house, which the Modi government started doing, on top of that, they took two major, very disruptive reforms. One was demonetization and the other was GST, the generalized sales tax. So it's a national VAT kind of a thing, replacing a huge mess of a labyrinthine taxes around the country. So you're doing those kind of reforms. At the same time, you're tightening belt. It's not good for growth.

I mean, obviously, it's remarkable that growth has still been reasonably good given this kind of policy. So I mentioned in the intro that we have the budget coming up. It's supposed to be released on Friday, February 2nd. And it does feel like both sides are basically sort of ramping up or trying to ramp up. their spending now. Like, I think the opposition party recently was pledging a minimum income guarantee for farmers. So how serious are people about, I guess you'd call it, sort of competitive populist economic policies? Are they actually going to start spending in significant amounts now? Well, you know, I think the populist tide in Indian economy has turned. It is no longer

as populist, even though they make these statements. And surely the opposite. is far more populist. And I don't think Modi is as competitive populist. You know, one of his things is he just doesn't give into this kind of a populist blackmail. That's been his gig all the time, you know. That's why all the time. People have been talking about him stimulating the economy for two, three years now.

He has not been doing it because that's not what he believes in. He doesn't believe in giving people, buying people's vote through Phoebe's. He says, look, you trust my policies and it's going to work. And so maybe he will do something in tomorrow's budget, but that would be very much against his instinct. If you go back to him when he was chief minister in Gujarat, one of the things that he did was he took away free power. You know, one of the things that all governments give is free power to farmers.

But effectively, what good is free power if you don't actually get the power, right? So he said, look, I won't give you free power, but I will ensure that you will get power at a reasonable rate, but it will be reliable and will be supplied all the time. And he eventually won on that platform. So, you know, I mean, I think I don't think he will compete on populism. Well, so on these sort of, I guess you would call him supply-side reforms or structural reforms to the economy, whether it's the nationwide tax system to unify the patchwork, whether it's on just making sure the power system run.

Has he, in your view, been successful on those things? Does he get the structural reforms done that he claims he can do? He has done quite a bit, but there is still a lot to be done if you look at it from a purely macro point of view, you know, with labor and everything. But I think his major plank is delivering the stuff that most of us take for granted and developed countries, stuff like, you know, toilets and electricity. You know, India is not even now fully electrified. You cannot believe this, but it's still not fully electrified. So delivering electricity, delivering toilets, clean water, you know, those kind of things.

immunization, health, you know, those kind of things, very basic grass-tech stuff. I think that's what his blank is going to be, is that, look, I have given you guys this. And that's his populist message. So a few points here. One, I think where I disagree with Shrinivaz, because I want to make sure that this podcast is not everybody agreeing on everything. Yeah, good. Is that coming into 2014, there wasn't, in my view, much of a choice. in terms of what the government had to do.

If you remember at that time, Morgan Stanley had coined this popular phrase, fragile five, and India was one of them. And nobody talks about it that way anymore. And a large part of that has to do with what the central bank did, with Rajan at the head at that time, and the central government in adjusting, one, the oil subsidy policy,

and essentially they disentangled the negative feedback loop from higher oil prices to both, both a bigger deficit of the government and the external sector, and generally sort of changing the trajectory of the fiscal side. Now, it is fair to maybe say that, okay, at what point do you turn that around and you stop doing that and add sort of government resources that are going to be sort of deficit expansionary, but maybe you can handle it now? That is a fair point of debate, but I don't think that the overall action was,

entirely unjustified, given what the situation on the ground. This is a difference between an EM and a DM, not being able to do countercyclical policy when you want to. If India could do countercyclical policy when they wanted to, they would be the US, but they aren't. The other point would be in terms of what are they likely to do. I do think that they will engage in competitive populism. Maybe there will definitely be a gap between what the opposition,

is promising and what the current party is going to promise. But while I understand the point that that is not his instinct, the instincts get overridden when the election is three months away. The news doesn't stop on the weekends.

Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis and big interviews, all the stories that hit home on your days off.

And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you.

Watch us on Bloomberg Television. on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. I'd be curious to get both your thoughts on the structural reforms that have already been mentioned. The demonetization move was, I guess, is now widely considered a pretty unpopular one within India. But typically foreign investors love this kind of thing, right? Like everyone talks about EM and the need for structural reform

and India is actually doing some of it with some degree of success or at least conviction. So how is that playing out both domestically and on the international scene? So here is what's happening with demonetization. Whatever the original logic for it was, I don't know whether that has planned out. But here is what are three good things. that have come out of it. First of all, the decline in growth that came from demonetization was pretty temporary. In fact, World Bank has a paper on this based on using satellite imagery of electricity intensity. So it was a sharp decline, but quickly reversed. The benefits are,

one, tax buoyancy and tax collections in the tax base has increased. Even FTA had an article on this. What's tax buoyancy? I saw you use that term in a tweet the other day. Tax buoyancy is how fast your revenues grow relative to GDP. So that has improved, number one. Number two, the tax collection and the tax base have improved. Followed up with GST, the tax base is widened by 50%. Okay, so that's one, that's a major thing. So in future, as Mayang just pointed out, India is not the U.S.

And one of the reasons India is not the U.S. or any EEM is not a developed market is because it doesn't have the fiscal capacity or the tax base to be able to sustain large programs. Well, before we go further down this line, what do you say to Mayank's claim that, look, even if it wasn't the time for austerity, due to the external situation, India just didn't have the capacity from 2014 to now to do much more on the fiscal front? No, no, I disagree with that. I think there was more capacity than, doesn't mean that they should have, they should be doing five, six percent like China does. You know, nothing of that start. but significantly more than what they did. So I think it's one of degree. I think he probably would agree with that.

Yeah, I think maybe two years ago they could have turned things around. But once it became clear that the currency was sort of generally stabilized, because I don't think foreign investors, honestly, are looking at, oh, my God, the GDP, debt to GDP is like 30 basis points higher, so I'm not going to take all my money out. The other thing related to that is to Tracy's question around how are, foreign investors, you know, sort of generally involved in this market. I think initially she made the point that it's sort of a, you know, low connectivity market for foreigners.

I don't think actually that's right. On the equity side, it's a 40 plus percent ownership by foreigners. So, but on the dead side, it's in the single digits. So the difference is compared to most other EM, it's the equity ownership that tends to be the capital account risk, as opposed to the debt ownership. India has very little, compared to most countries, dollar debt. So it's a very low dollarization economy. And therefore, it can sort of sustain a lot of these other problems that happen in,

say, a place like Indonesia or Mexico, where foreigners own a lot of bonds, they own a lot of dollar debt. Well, I was just going to ask, I mean, this summer of 2018, we saw various countries get in trouble, Turkey, Argentina, coinciding with the, a pretty sharp jump in oil prices. And so that really exacerbated some of their external tensions. And I think in both those cases, pretty high levels of dollarization in the economy. India also doesn't produce any oil, has a lot of oil import bills. But they didn't struggle as much. Well, the rupee did come under pressure, but they didn't struggle as much because the reserves were high. And, you know, the situation was much better as compared to 2013.

But on the point on equity ownership, you know, what has happened is here the one of the consequences of demonetization is what you have done is you've pushed people out of the cash economy, right? So a lot of people who had black money, what they would typically do is either keep it in gold or buy real estate, right? So those were the two favored destinations. By pushing people away to more formal sector, you are actually financializing the economy. So the financial participation in equity markets. has increased leaps and bounds since 2016. After demonetization, there's a big break in mutual fund inflows, steady inflows, steadily increasing.

So domestic participation has actually been a buffer against foreign, this year, last year, foreign institutional investors have been actually taking money out of Indian equity, but it was buffered by the domestic investors bringing in money. So that's been one other impact of, you know, eventually stabilization of the economy and more formalization of the economy. One thing that's helped on that front

also from the policy side is that the government pushed for significant increase in simply linking people to bank accounts. So in India, say five years ago, it was probably in the teens in terms of percentage of people who even had a bank account,

let alone people who had credit. And that has jumped massively. So now you have people who are linked into some sort of a system and Azar, and maybe Shundamask and talk about it a little bit more, is a sort of social security number type system that is also, this is not a current government thing, this has been existing and been pushed for the last 10 plus years,

but it has sort of gone exponential in terms of coverage. So you have a lot of simply formalization of the economy that is taking place, which is not very sexy, it's not accretive to GDP in the moment, it might not even be accretive to GDP in five years' time, but what it is doing is building institutional or state capacity, to use a sort of more formal term, that sort of bode wells for putting a floor on growth over time. On oil, to the earlier point, I'd make two comments.

One, actually, oddly enough, India has become a pretty significant exporter of oil from a product side because there's a big oil industry, and actually the biggest company in India is reliance, which is an oil producer. So oil is a bit complicated. But also, and this, you know, going back to the fiscal sort of contraction point, the one of the ways that the fiscal used to expand when oil prices went up was because the government essentially would step in and protect the consumer completely. So the consumer would not see any price increases.

So you would have current account increase into more deficit and the fiscal increase dollar for dollar. They essentially broke that linkage. And that's part of the reason why when you had this big problem in Turkey, you did not have that in India because the fiscal reform had taken place. And, you know, this is part of the small disagreement that Trinerson are having here. I think that was the right thing to do because would it have been better if they'd spend a little bit more money versus so the currency getting smashed 10% further? It's not obvious to me that the tradeoff was wrong.

But this was my point about structural reforms and attracting foreign investors versus how the domestic population might feel about these reforms. At what point does, you know, strengthening institutions in various ways, introducing these supply-side reforms, at what point does that actually feed into the economy and make everyone feel much better about their own place in the world? Because I imagine at some point people start to run out of patience, and that's when you come to sort of a crunch point for the government. And at that point, that's when they might start introducing these sort of competitive populist fiscal policies. like we were talking about earlier. These things, you know, they are complicated because what they are doing is they're setting the scene

doesn't mean that the growth is going to take off, right? And if you look through India's history, a lot of things have happened by serendipity, but because the structure was in place, they were able to take advantage of it. For instance, the software boom, right? The investments in software boom, whether it was in the technical education infrastructure

or whether it was in the domestic software industry, which had been developing since the 1960s, 70s, all those things, they were like nobody even cared about those things. And suddenly when there was a software, boom, oh, suddenly all those things became a strength, right? So it doesn't, but that's a long time. We don't know when these things are going to benefit and how long it will take.

And your point is absolutely right. In the meantime, people, the electorate gets angry and frustrated. And clearly there are huge aspirations in a young country like India where the youth population is huge. They just don't want simple things like freebies. They want jobs. They want better prospects. And that comes from growth.

And yeah, sure. I mean, I think those pressures are there in democracy. And they will spill over, yes. This is where I would go back to a point that I made earlier about sort of a state laboratory type setup. A perfect example of the question that Tracy had already happened. So Rajasthan is a state on the west. coast of India and there you had a sort of state government which is also a BJP one but a much more aggressive one in terms of the reforms that they were trying to pursue including on the labor side

which is one of the sort of biggest problems in India and they pushed them through but it it came with a cost in terms of sort of for a while depressing growth relative to the rest of the country and they were thrown out of power so you are always sort of dealing with the situation where if you push things too far at the cost of growth in the moment, are you then taking yourself out of doing better reforms in the future? So it's really an optimization problem that I don't think there's any right answer, but yeah. It's interesting talking about that sequence because it now strikes me, listening to this as kind of the opposite of China, which we were talking about last week,

which has just been sort of pedal to the floor growth all around the country for a long time and now is sort of having to deal with these things. It was like, well, what if that model is at working? We actually have to deal with restructuring and restructure where the demand came from. It sounds like India is kind of doing the opposite, not going pedal to the metal with growth, but actually trying to address some of these things preemptively

to hopefully have a brighter point in the future. Right. But India also faces, as opposed to China, more balance of payments constraints compared to China, right? And the other thing is India goes through these phases all the time, right? I mean, it has these pedal to the mental growth phase, which it had from 2004 to 2014, but then it became unsustainable. It showed up in inflation and then eventually balance of payment problems.

And then the government got booted out because people don't like inflation either. That's one of the beauties of democracy. You get instant feedback, right? And so then you get through this period of consolidation. But most of the time, what happens is a government that consolidates does not reap the benefits of the consolidation. Same thing happened from 98 to 2004, the government got booted out, and the next government enjoyed the benefits of the boom that came. You know, that's sadly part of democracy. The other sort of the comparison with China is really interesting, and people make that all the time,

a sort of a clarification thing or something that really puts us into stock contrast. Think about where India is in the credit cycle versus China. Real credit growth over the last seven years has been near zero in India. And there's been a lot of debt consolidation. Even three years ago, post-GFC, in dollar terms, more NPLs had been recognized in India than China. And you think about these two countries are not actually similar in terms of what their size is, and in terms of definitely not similar in terms of what the credit in the system is.

So a lot of this is not by design. I must say that this is not as if there's some set of people who are trying to say, okay, this is how we want to do it. A lot of things happen in India. I like Srinivas's word, serendipity. It just sort of happens. Maybe it's because of the democratic structure. Maybe it's because of the sort of, you know, EU style.

They're like, you know, I don't know how many states even anymore. They keep changing all the time. It's very, very varied. And what it does is it reduces the chances of, I think, making bad mistakes. It doesn't have the ramp like China does. But it does also, it sort of puts a floor in some ways in terms of how. how badly things can get screwed up. All right.

So we started this podcast by saying it's the economy stupid. So if the upcoming elections are all about the economy, then I have to ask, who do you think is going to win? It's a toss-up. I think at this point it's a toss-up. It's going to be really close, and it's going to come to managing the local coalitions. No party is going to get enough to form a government on its own,

like in 2014. So you are going to be, I think, back to what in India people call coalition politics, which is you sort of cobbled together seemingly people with not lined up ideologies and trying to run a government for five years. That is the period where things don't tend to happen quickly enough and people get very frustrated. And I think the risk of that is higher now than it has been in the earlier part of this decade. Well, will you both? come on for a after the election wrap and then we sort of analyze what happened and then talk about what's next. Sounds good. Great. So we'll plan to follow up. Srinivodontas and Mayank, I'm like, sorry. Thank you very much for joining us. I feel like my knowledge is still just like

scratching the service, but that's more than it was this morning. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Tracy, well, like I said there, I still feel like I probably know nothing, but maybe a little bit more than I did before. But I did think, I mean, I did learn quite a bit. And thinking about all these different structural reforms, you know, so often you hear that term structural reform. And it's kind of just some nonsense term that gets thrown around by someone trying to sound smart or it's just code word for cutting spending or cutting pensions.

But it actually seems like the story in India is sort of far more nuanced and complicated than a lot of discussions about so-called structural reform. Yeah, I totally agree. And I feel a little, well, I feel like you. I feel like I should know more about India. But sadly, I think most of my knowledge comes from Bollywood movies, which sadly don't have enough political content to satisfy a discussion like this. Although I did know that many villages in India do not yet have electricity

because I watched that Shawrock-Kahn movie where he goes back to his home village and works on electrifying it. Anyway, sorry, I'm going to go off on a Bollywood tangent. It is really interesting. The last bit of the discussion where we were talking about the possibility of a coalition government post the elections, that'll be an interesting one because if we think that people aren't satisfied right now under a Modi government that has actually been able to get quite a few things done, it's going to be really, really interesting to see how they react to a coalition government where there's a lot of uncertainty and maybe the possibility that the agenda sort of gets fought over and not much gets accomplished.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to watch. And I really liked Serena Voss's point about how, for better or worse, in a democracy, the government that maybe does the difficult stuff of the structural reforms that aren't short-term growth often doesn't get to reap the reward. I mean, I think there's probably, you could certainly point to several examples in the U.S. where the president, who gets credit for the booming economy just happens to be the one who came in after the last one got booted out for recession that maybe was caused by something their predecessor did. So, yeah, that's just how it goes. But I'm now feel a little bit prepared at least to watch the election and have some knowledge of what people are voting on. Oh, it's going to be great. And also, I know we're recording this before the budget announcement, but to the earlier conversation about whether or not Modi is going to go full on populist economic. Policy, Friday, February 2nd will have revealed a lot of clues by the time we actually release this podcast.

Okay. So when you're listening, go read the articles about what happened a couple days before. And on that note, this has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And I'm Tracy Allaway. I'm on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And you should follow both of our guests because they're also two of my favorite people

to follow on Twitter for all things, India and macro and politics and just a bunch of other stuff. Srinivas Tiravidante, he's at T-Sri on Twitter and Mayank Saxaria. He's at Mayank Saxaria. So definitely you should follow them. And you should definitely follow our producer, Tofer Forges. He's at Forges T on Twitter, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now.

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