Government investing tax money in banks equals cheating the taxpayer

The bad loan crisis in the public sector banks (PSBs) has had an unintended consequence. It has curtailed the ability of the PSBs to raise money from the stock market. The share prices of the PSBs have taken a battering and hence it doesn’t augur well for the majority shareholder i.e. the central government. However, it’s easier to raise money from taxpayers to fund the same banks. 

The real owner of the banks (citizens) don't ever demand dividend, except for when the government has run up a deficit. This money is deposited into the government kitty called the Consolidated Fund of India that we always hope is used for the benefit of citizens.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley assured the Lok Sabha, during a discussion on the union budget, that the government would fund the PSBs as and when the need arose. The central government is going to infuse around Rs. 25,000 crores this financial year and around Rs. 10,000 crores each in 2018 and 2019 in PSBs. This is required to meet the minimum capital requirements as per international banking norms and also to deal with the disastrous bad loan situation in PSBs. 

As the majority owner of these banks, the government has two options – sell shares to the public or raise taxes and pump in more money in the banks.

It’s a mystery why any shareholder would pump in money into a business that is giving bad returns. But when you can raise the money at zero cost through taxes, it ceases being a problem. Indians are being cheated of their tax money.

Banks and the economy

Banks lend money to businesses and who invest in projects. Investment in new projects will help in generation of employment. Employment leads to income generation and the income spent will lead to business opportunities for many more. This is the crux of the trickledown theory.

When a private bank needs to raise money to fund its business, it will either raise money from the market or raise a loan or sell shares to a financial institution. The government also has similar tools available to it. But, selling public resources (shares in PSBs) means the revenue has to be maximized. The shares of the PSBs are not the best available option for investors. Hence, selling shares in the stock market to raise money is out of the question for now.

The track record of the PSBs in past has been quite abysmal. After a diktat from the Reserve Bank of India in December 2015, the banking industry got its act together and started recognizing all the bad loans of the past. Many banks, including private sector, didn’t declare a lot of their loans as non performing until the RBI pushed them. This has led to a huge public outcry because PSBs use taxpayer money to fund their businesses.

Tax money and its use

The government of the day decides what it should do with the money that it has raised through taxes. But when it raises the money that these banks need from the citizens when there are competing requirements like healthcare and education, this move becomes a little tricky.

There are competing requirements for government expenditure. The fact that Indians pay taxes that is used to invest in banks means that public expenditure is funding many businesses in India. It is surprising that we have gone on with this charade for ages. Nationalization of banks has created a problem that we don't know how to get out of. And now we are spending public money on businesses that the public should never be invested in. What we should be investing in is health.

India has abysmal public health infrastructure. We are moving towards a public-private partnership model for primary health care as shown by Rajasthan. There is also a move towards a health insurance based model. This means lesser government expenditure on primary health care and in the future we may move to full health insurance model. A recent proposal by NITI Aayog also calls for outsourcing primary healthcare to private doctors.

Public health being a state subject means the central government policies will trickle down to the states eventually. That would mean less public expenditure on healthcare in the future. People who can't afford healthcare would be given subsidized health insurance at a bare minimum level and would be left to fend for themselves.

Minimum government?

The fact that we still have our central government owning banks is a joke in itself. This is not minimum government and maximum governance. This is the government being still in the business of lending money. This a far cry from the prime minister’s election rhetoric of “government has no business being in business.”

Here's hoping we find productive uses for tax money that all the government's raise. The rush to privatize most public services like healthcare, education, sanitation etc sounds nice in theory, but if we don't have a regulatory system to take care of the problems that might arise, we are killing the system. Small government doesn't mean that it's a fire sale of the government.

Would you please show me the money? I really want to see it.

Take this, a very minor offense if you consider what happens in our country as major.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2016/04/09/house-republican-busted-for-illegally-using-campaign-funds-for-personal-expenses/

The income tax law in India allows political parties to keep donations below Rs. 20,000 off the books, under the radar in a way.

Imagine that! That's donation below that amount off the radar. This has been debated to death before. A quick google search would suffice.

Then you have the retrospective amendment proposed in the recent budget that makes all indiscretions of our two major political parties legal. Google FCRA amendment in budget or something if interested. (I can't believe using Google as a verb is still in.)

So, we have one of the most opaque election funding system. Most parties are trying to increase their membership, so I as a member of any political party can give donations to both these parties below Rs. 20,000 a million times. (Damn I wish I hadn't quit CA as a career. Might have had that kinda money. NOT.)

That's like say, Rs. 2,000 crores minus a Rs. 1 crores. Where can I get that kind of money? Don't we have a black money problem?

We know the real estate sector has a black money problem. The government has set a limit of Rs. 30 lakhs for all transactions to be intimated to the income tax authorities. A really high amount I must say. But since we have had a property market boom in this country, good luck trying to find any property in major cities and nearby mini cities within Rs. 30 lakhs. If you do, then you are home free. As an aside, do you think people will fail to register their deals sometimes?

Now there are many sources of black money. There is even over invoicing in export transactions that legitimizes any money that is over paid and then routed through offshore accounts. The recent Panama Papers expose is a little close to that eventuality but I am not calling it that because all the information is not out yet.

Now let's go back to the retrospective amendment proposed in the recent budget and the limit of Rs. 20,000. Two major political parties were said to have received foreign funding and the Delhi High Court held that view as well. The parties have appealed in the Supreme Court and we will have to see what happens.

Now let's look at the amendment for a bit. It whitewashes every deed done from 2010 by these parties. The receipt of contribution from foreign sources is currently banned for political parties. This amendment would reverse that situation since it started happening. Now you're thinking what I am thinking, right?

If not, basically it's a clean slate when a legal process had concurred otherwise. In legal terms I guess the government is within its rights to change the law if it passes the scrutiny of parliament. Let's see what happens there.
I was always skeptical of the possibility of anything happening in the case, but this amendment might have changed my conviction. Hence, you are reading this.

The 20,000 limit means that if political parties had a huge membership expansion then, even if I had contributed less than Rs. 20,000, say Rs. 19,999. It's all off the books. No audit trail. Zilch. Only coupon sales. I could have gotten a million of those coupons, but as long as the denomination is below Rs. 20,000. I could print the same coupons and claimed that I contributed money to a political party. That means I could have my own laundering business. I wish I hadn't quit CA.

Now I leave you with a thought. Do you think we should have strict disclosures of the funding of political parties? Do we really need that? I saw this brilliant video of The Last Week Tonight where John Oliver did a satirical piece called Congressional Funding. Although it was funny, it made me realize something. We don't even know what happens below the Rs. 20,000 limit. We just can't find out who is giving what to whom in our political system.

That means we don't know anything. We can sit in our homes and watch TV and think we know how the political system works and find our place in it as it suits us. But we know nothing.

We can't even do a satire piece of that quality. There is litigation on right now to strike down that beautiful piece of law, which keeps the contributions below Rs. 20,000 off the books.

I am hoping for Satire. Let's see if we find out what's going on. I'll do some digging as well.

Check out The Last Week Tonight episode where John Oliver talks about Congressional Funding (American Federal Legislature. A little like their parliament.) here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

Why does one regulate a business?

The recent discussions and debates on net neutrality in the media and among people got me thinking about one thing. What’s a regulator? Why do we need a regulator for any industry? 

Well, any industry that is governed by a body that is formed by a law of parliament to regulate the functioning of an industry would be categorized as a regulator. In the Indian context, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Security Exchange Board of India (SEBI) are examples of regulators. 

RBI regulates banks and non banking financial institutions. TRAI regulates the telecom and broadcast industry. Recently it has taken up the role of even regulating Internet in India. SEBI regulates the stock markets and the forward markets.

But why do we need a regulator for an industry you say? Governments try to figure out how to regulate businesses. By the time they try to figure it out, there are calls to regulate the industry. When the regulation is demanded then the natural corollary is setting up a regulator. This satisfies the industry members because they have to go and whine about their problems to one organization rather than the government.

That was the reason why (new) regulators are setup in India. The real reason that we should setup regulators for industries is simple. Let businesses be given a set of rules to conduct their businesses. These rules are to be implemented by people who understand how the industry functions. So if we have a stock market regulator then obviously there must be people who know a little bit about the stock market working there. It would be silly to have someone, who doesn’t get the stock market like a bureaucrat who didn’t work or study to understand securities laws and stock markets most of his life, wouldn't it?

Well, that’s not what happens in India. Every law that requires a regulator would eventually have a bureaucrat manning the regulator after a while. I am not railing against bureaucrats here. I am just highlighting a simple fact that at some point we need to have a set qualification for regulators. We can’t carve out a bureaucracy from a ministry and recreate it in another white elephant of a regulator. This can’t be happening again and again.

I say this because when you watch Raghuram Rajan’s work with the RBI and his constant regulatory movements, you know the guy knows what he’s doing. Why shouldn’t all regulators be like that? They should be nimble and react to the business environment that prevails. They shouldn’t be caught napping. And neither should they come out with papers that are patently favoring the companies that they are trying to regulate, like TRAI did with Net Neutrality the first time.

TRAI should have foreseen the Net Neutrality debate coming. There was a huge hue and cry about the same subject in the U.S. last year. We are the next big market where people would try to control the future content delivery mechanism – the Internet. You can’t be caught napping.

We should move to a more professional approach to regulating industries. We can’t keep giving posts that require technical qualifications to people who might not have any. We can’t have a regulatory system that only responds to the companies they regulate but not to the consumers.

Why the consumers you say? Well, look at it this way. Laws are passed in parliament for the greater good of people right? Then the law that creates a regulator should also be interpreted and applied for the greater good of the people. That would mean the regulator should work for the greater good of the people too.

Why shouldn’t our regulators not take the consumers views and make it their only reason to exist? Businesses are important for an economy no doubt, but regulators are not meant to promote monopolies and super profits. The businesses are supposed to figure out how to make profits. That’s why when you have the largest telecom operator in India complaining about loss of revenue because of lower revenue from calls and uses that as a reason for justifying differential pricing for data, we should stop and think. Who were these regulators set up for again?

It’s the people stupid.

Net Neutrality: Why should a network be neutral?

Why is everyone debating so passionately about network neutrality in India? Why does it even matter to anyone whether a network is neutral or not? This question has popped into all our heads when the media coverage of this debate reached a crescendo before December 30th 2015 and it will again do so before January 7th 2016.

The debate here is essentially whether the network that is the internet should be controlled by a few or should it be democratic. Democracy would mean that the people who populate the would would control the content that is created on the internet.

Television and Internet

Alright, so let's go back in the past for a bit. The television revolution in this country began in the early 90s. It allowed us to watch new age programming (for those of us who remember Doordarshan) and allowed content creators to experiment with different formats. It popularized sports broadcast and also led to the eventual explosion of the television news business. There was one problem. The broadcaster had to pay our local cable operators(CO)/multi-system operator(MSO) to be available on your television screen. This payment is called the carriage fees. If I couldn't pay the carriage fees, my channel wouldn't feature on the cable network.

Long story short, those who owned the network owned the broadcasting business. This is still the case. The cable digitization drive will move the cable business from an analog signal to a digital signal. This will allow the broadcasters to measure their subscribers accurately. It will also help in sharing of the subscription revenues between . It will help in better tracking of the television rating points (TRP), the lifeblood of the cable /direct-to-home (DTH) TV industry. TRPs allow marketers to measure the audience of a particular TV show or channel. TRPs help the marketers decide where they should place their ads to maximize the reach of a marketing campaign.

So in all every medium of communication should allow monetization for it to be able to sustain itself. Take newspapers, magazines, television news channels, entertainment channels etc. The fact that television media was owned by the messenger (cable TV companies) and not the content creator (broadcast companies) is what led to the broadcasting business being a very expensive business. The listed media companies in India like NDTV, Network 18 (before Reliance acquired it) and India Today group were all in debt. This is because the television business entails huge fixed costs to get the business rolling.

Internet is democratic

The Internet is democratic. It allows the content creator and the content distributor (internet service providers and companies like Facebook, YouTube and Netflix ) an equal footing on the medium. Initially, there were only a few content creators on the Internet.

As the adoption of the Internet grew, we saw companies like YouTube and Netflix come up. These guys put the creators and the consumers on a platform, so that the consumer could choose which content he/she could consume. Hence, there was more content out there to consume and the internet made it one click away.

Facebook the behemoth

Then came Facebook. Facebook's business model is predicated on the idea that as long as people are on Facebook, it will make money. That's the whole point of the medium. It's a good business though.

Imagine having all the knowledge about the likes and dislikes of almost 1 billion users of the Internet. If you actually go through Facebook's terms and conditions, it says that Facebook can do whatever it wants with any and every byte of date you share on Facebook. This data can be used to target ads at Facebook's users. Facebook needs more people on its network to justify its valuation.

The more people it has on Facebook the more data it has to sell to marketers and advertisers to tailor ads at Facebook's users. Every like and dislike that you share on Facebook can be used to target a certain product at you. This is why Facebook is free. It's users are the product to Facebook. The customers are the companies that pay money so that we see ads on Facebook on our news feed.

If Facebook owns the platform through which you access the Internet, then they have more than the data that the need. How? An Internet user accessing any website through Free Basics would be sharing all of his/her browsing information with Facebook. This is because Facebook would be the gateway to the Internet. More information means more money. It's a simple equation.

What's in it for the telco?

In telecom parlance, this is called Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU). It means the average revenue a telco has earned from a user on its network. This would include the calls that we make and the internet usage that we indulge in on our devices.

Most telcos are obsessed with their ARPUs. A higher ARPU means that the average customer is earning the telco more money. In India, ARPUs have stagnated (put the number here). Data (i.e. Internet) is the next big play that is going to earn the telcos more money. Imagine the possibilities. There are tests that have happened in the U.S. which may provide over 250 GB per second Internet speed. Well, what does that mean Vivek? Why should that matter to me?

We are going to abandon television very soon. The sheer speed and the targeted marketing ability of the Internet is going to cannibalize the broadcasters. The broadcasters are already seeing this trend and want to turn into a multimedia players.

Don't believe me? Google your favorite television show and there might be a pay per view or even a free streaming service available for it. Do you think you're going to spend 600-700 bucks for a television package in ten years? And this is in terms of today's value of money. This amount might be higher in the future considering inflation. Internet pricing will only get cheaper over a period of time as more people would adopt the internet.

Imagine a day when you won't think twice before having 2 GB per second Internet bandwidth at a reasonable price. If the speed increases higher than that, it might just replace your DTH or cable TV. Apple TV and Amazon Fire are examples of this.

The point being telcos have realized that they would remain only a utility provider if they can't have differential pricing for data. They won't earn even a slice of the ad revenue that content providers would be earning through their content. This is because the current model means YouTube owns the platform and hence gets to collect money from the ads. The argument of the telcos is that it's their infrastructure (and since the ARPU from voice calls has gone down) they need to protect their business and be allowed to have differential data pricing.

But why should the network be neutral?

Net neutrality activists say that the Internet was formed with an open architecture. It is supposed to be a connection of several networks across the world. If I enter the web address of a particular webpage in my browser, then I am essentially directed to that webpage as fast as my internet bandwidth would allow me to. Differential data pricing would on the other hand remove this parity. If Google paid my telco more money, then they get a leg up and load faster. And if say a small time media startup couldn't pay that money, then it would have to load slowly.

What's wrong with this you say? Shouldn't anybody who is ready to pay be allowed preferential access? Remember the cable TV industry story in the beginning and the carriage fees? It created a huge entry barrier for new players in the broadcasting space. Only those with deep pockets could feature on a cable or DTH network. There was no level playing field. 

The channels that were available on the network depended more on the abilities of the content distributor and content creator to hash out their business deals. In effect, the content creator (can be you and me) couldn't negotiate from a position of strength. This led to content being created by very few people. The Internet has changed all of that. It gave the power back to the content creator. Content over the Internet could mean any information -audio, visual or text.

Wouldn't' you want a cash cow that will allow you to make money just by having a regulator make a few changes in the regulations for you? The forces of the market are too difficult to handle you see. Profits are too precious not to protect. It would be better if telcos and Facebook own the whole space and make their own deals to share the piece of a huge pie. It's better if they get the deal done before anyone is looking.

P.S. I must admit that a lot here about the media landscape in the early 90s isn't my own thinking.. Most of my understanding is borrowed from the writings of Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. She has been covering the media industry in India since the early 90s. Reading her work would be really helpful.