Anurag Jain's Blog
Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Borrowing (Absolute terms) Declines

Further to my post yesterday, I also came across an article in ET about credit-less growth. Apparently, credit hand-outs have declined during April-July 2003 in absolute terms! And moreover, the majority of credit lending has been for home and retail loans and not so much to corporates really. Amongst other reasons for the same (Debtors being wary of taking loans due to improved debt-recovery regulations, Banks being wary due to tighter NPA regulations, low global interest rates and hence easy availability of money abroad etc), one of the reasons is the rising profits (and hence reserves) as outlined in my post yesterday: Corporates might be using their internal kitty rather than piling on loans debts for working capial/capital investments requirements to deal better with the uncertain economic environment.

The article raised an important issue though: Credit is always a major indicator of economy. But here, we have a situation where India Inc has done pretty well over the last quarter while cutting down on borrowing at the same time. So, is it gonna continue? So much for supply side economics! I remember someone (I think Raghuram Rajan , the new IMF chief economist) recently saying that even though they have worked well for last 3 decades, Hayekian/Friedman theories are outdated today and that we need a new macro-economic theory. Guess he's about right.
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