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War on Cash: India Rolling Out Retail Pilot Program for Digital Rupee

War on Cash: India Rolling Out Retail Pilot Program for Digital Rupee

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We recently reported that the Federal Reserve plans to launch a 12-week pilot program in partnership with several large commercial banks to test the feasibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The US isn’t alone in experimenting with digital currency. India is working on developing a digital rupee and recently announced the second phase of testing.

After successfully running a pilot program to test its digital currency at the wholesale level, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced it will test the digital rupee in a retail setting.

According to the RBI, the central bank digital currency “is a legal tender issued by a central bank in a digital form. It is the same as a fiat currency and is exchangeable one-to-one with the fiat currency. Only its form is different.”

Digital currencies are similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They exist as virtual banknotes or coins held in a digital wallet on your computer or smartphone. The difference between a government digital currency and bitcoin is the value of the digital currency is backed and controlled by the state, just like traditional fiat currency.

As the RBI put it, “Unlike cryptocurrencies, a CBDC isn’t a commodity or claims on commodities or digital assets. Cryptocurrencies have no issuer. They are not money (certainly not currency) as the word has come to be understood historically.”

According to a report in the Economic Times of India, the National Payments Corporation of India will host the platform for the digital rupee payment system during the testing phase. The Reserve Bank of India wants each commercial bank in the pilot to test retail use of the digital rupee with 10,000 to 50,000 users.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

India Central Bank Intervenes As Rupee Crashes To Record Low

Just weeks after Urjit Patel, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, wrote an op-ed in the FT warning that should the US maintain its current pace of monetary policy tightening, it could have serious repercussions for the global economy, it is…

It was the first time this tightening cycle that a prominent foreign central banker has accused the Fed of stirring trouble for emerging markets, with its ongoing tightening, and specifically, the balance sheet reduction coupled with the Treasury debt issuance surge, to wit:

Global spillovers did not manifest themselves until October of last year. But they have been playing out vividly since the Fed started shrinking its balance sheet. This is because the Fed has not adjusted to, or even explicitly recognised, the previously unexpected rise in US government debt issuance. It must now do so.

Patel’s advice? Immediately taper the tapering, or rather, the Fed should “recalibrate its normalisation plan, adjusting for the impact of the deficit. A rough rule of thumb would be to reduce the pace of its balance-sheet contraction by enough to damp significantly, if not fully offset, the shortage of dollar liquidity caused by higher US government borrowing.”

Incidentally, the various pathways described by Patel were conveniently laid out by Deutsche Bank’s Aleksandar Kocic two weeks ago, and which we explained in “Why The Soaring Dollar Will Lead To An “Explosive” Market Repricing.”

 

And Patel’s warnings are coming true as The Fed’s actions are impacting India as much – if not more – than anywhere else.

The Indian rupee slumped to an all-time low as a resurgence in crude prices and the emerging-market selloff took a toll on the currency of the world’s third-biggest oil consumer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Banker Observes Sudden “Evaporation” Of Dollar Funding, Warns Of Global Turmoil

Last October, just as the Fed started shrinking its balance sheet, we published yet another article on what is arguably the biggest threat to not only risk assets, but also the global economy: “The Dollar Funding Shortage: It Never Went Away And It’s Starting To Get Worse Again.

While hardly a novel problem, we first discussed the return of the dollar funding shortage in March 2015, the fact that global stocks kept rising, and that overall funding conditions remained relatively loose keeping the global economy well-lubricated, prevented said dollar funding shortage from becoming a major concern to policymakers, despite occasional recent hiccups such as the Libor-OIS spread blow out, which both we and Citi explained w as a symptom of the creeping shortage of the world’s reserve currency.

Until now.

In an op-ed published overnight in the FT, a central banker writes that when it comes to the turmoil gripping the world’s Emerging Markets, whether it is the acute, idiosyncratic version observed in Argentina and Turkey, which according to JPM may be doomed…

… or the more gradual selloffs observed in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico and India, don’t blame the Fed’s rate hike cycle. Instead blame the “double whammy” of the Fed’s shrinking balance sheet coupled with the dollar draining surge in debt issuance by the US Treasury.

That’s the message from the current Reserve Bank of India, Urjit Patel, who writes that “unlike previous turbulence, this episode cannot be attributed to the US Federal Reserve’s moves on interest rates, which have been rising steadily since December 2016 in a calibrated manner.” But does that mean that the Fed is not to blame for what increasingly looks like another budding EM crisis?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Angry Mobs Lock Up Indian Bankers As Cash Chaos Soars: “We Are Fearing The Worst”

Angry Mobs Lock Up Indian Bankers As Cash Chaos Soars: “We Are Fearing The Worst”

India’s demonetization campaign is not going as expected.

Overnight, banks played down expectations of a dramatic improvement in currency availability, raising the prospect of queues lengthening as salaries get paid and people look to withdraw money from their accounts the Economic Times reported.

While much of India has become habituated to the sight of people lining up at banks and cash dispensers since the November 8 demonetisation announcement, bank officials said the message from the Reserve Bank of India is that supplies may not get any easier in the near future and that they should push digital transactions.  “We had sought a hearing with RBI as we were not allocated enough cash, but we were told that rationing of cash may continue for some time,” said a banker who was present at one of several meetings with central bank officials.

Reserve Bank has asked us to push the use of digital channels to all our customers and ensure that we bring down use of cash in the economy,” said a banker. This confirms a previous report according to which the demonstization campaign has been a not so subtle attempt to impose digital currency on the entire population.

Bankers have been making several trips to the central bank’s headquarters in Mumbai to get a sense of whether currency availability will improve.  Some automated teller machines haven’t been filled even once since the old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes ceased to be legal tender, they said.  Typically, households pay milkmen, domestic helps, drivers, etc, at the start of the month in cash. The idea is that all these payments should become electronic, using computers or mobiles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is This The Start Of India’s Gold Confiscation

Is This The Start Of India’s Gold Confiscation

On April 5, 1933, FDR signed Executive order 6102 which made illegal “the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States” in the process criminalizing the possession of monetary gold by any individual or corporation.

This was de facto gold confiscation; De jure it wasn’t, because as compensation for the relinquished gold, Americans would receive 20.67 in freshly printed US dollars for every troy ounce. Anybody who objected faced a fine of $10,000 (just under $200,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars) and up to 10 years in prison.

Once the government was confident it has confiscated enough gold, it turned around and raised the official price of a gold ounce to $35 (about $600 in today’s dollars) devaluing the US Dollar by 40% overnight at a time when currencies were still backed by hard assets.

Fast forward 82 years to a time when the barbarous relic continues to be seen as the safest store of value among India’s vast population (roughly 20% of the world’s total), not to mention the main source of financial headaches for local authorities, one of the biggest importers of gold due to its “traditional” values and where relentless Indian demand for offshore purchases of the shiny yellow metal so plagues the government’s current account and capital flow strategy, that the government may be preparing to pull a page right out of the FDR playbook.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet implemented the selling of “gold-backed bonds” when it approved the gold monetization plan and sale of sovereign bonds proposed several months ago by the Reserve Bank of India, the government said in a statement. The plans were first announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in February as measures to woo Indians away from physical gold. As Jaitley explained yesterday, the deposited gold would be auctioned, used to replenish the Reserve Bank of India’s reserves or be lent to jewelers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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