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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | FRDI: Grossly at Odds with the Indian Financial System -Sucheta Dalal

FRDI: Grossly at Odds with the Indian Financial System -Sucheta Dalal

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published Published on Dec 21, 2017   modified Modified on Dec 21, 2017
-MoneyLife.in

The government’s penchant for painting all legitimate questions about its faulty policy-making as scaremongering or anti-national is getting rather irksome. Prime minister Narendra Modi (at the FICCI annual general meeting) and finance minister Arun Jaitley have both responded to fears over the implications of the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill (FRDI Bill) , 2017, by lashing out at critics and reassuring people that the government will protect bank deposits.
 
Yes, we are quite certain that the government will not confiscate bank deposits and convert them into equity to bail out bleeding public sector banks (PSBs) in the year and a half before the 2019 general elections when this government’s term ends. It is true that people have been rattled by social media messages into believing that such a move is imminent. But whose fault is that?

The government certainly wants to enact legislation that will enable such action and public assurances by ministers will have no sanctity, especially if there is a different government or even different ministers in relevant positions. What is worse, the legislation itself is completely at odds with the structure and operation of Indian banking.
 
Moneylife Foundation has sent a representation to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) which is examining this Bill. In my last column, I had also written about the ‘bail-in’ provision that would allow a bank, on the verge of bankruptcy, to convert un-insured deposits above a threshold into equity in order to recapitalise banks. But I realise that it makes no sense to present the bail-in as a last resort action, when the FRDI Bill itself is so drastically flawed that it is bound to cause a wanton destruction of PSBs.
 
The main reason why the FRDI Bill must be withdrawn is this: The only part of Indian financial sector where it can be potentially applied to is wobbly PSBs which account for over 63% of Indian banking; but then it is illogical to apply it on them. If a bank goes bankrupt the owner is responsible; and, in case of PSBs, the government is the owner. You cannot have a bail-in clause where the owner pays no price but depositors are made to take the risk.
 
If the FRDI Bill has to be made applicable to PSBs, they must be privatised and the government holding brought below 26% in order to insulate them from political interference and behest lending. Clearly, this is impossible without resolving the massive bad loan issue; because, without a sovereign guarantee that ensures the safety of depositors’ money, deposits will instantly flee to profitable private banks with a low incidence of bad loans. This would end up destroying the Indian banking system instead of curing it of a hypothetical problem that does not apply to Indian banks in the first place.

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MoneyLife.in, 18 December, 2017, http://www.moneylife.in/article/frdi-grossly-at-odds-with-the-indian-financial-system/52472.html


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