ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s private credit is recovering from the latest currency crisis triggered by rate cuts to target output and high cost of living increase of 5 percent, and red flags are going up.
There are several red flags and one green one.
The biggest red flag is the single policy rate and state liquidity forecasts for private banks for which technical assistance has come from the International Monetary Fund.
As Sri Lanka is celebrating its independence, the macroeconomists are giving some limited freedom to buy cars. Gazette issued shows penalty taxes for holding stocks.
Meanwhile there are price controls for rice and heavy import duties. Exchange controls are also in place.
It is a sad plight for a country to be in 76 years after independence. And that is the second red flag.
From Scare Reserves to Excess (or Ample) Reserve Framework
The single policy rate is the reddest of the red flags.
Under a corridor system, especially a wide corridor, the central bank only prints barely enough money for commercial banks which mis-manage their liquidity to clear transactions.
Without liquidity auctions, banks have to borrow at the top of the corridor at a rate slightly higher than the overnight market rate at times.
However when a mid-corridor rate is targeted, or a single rate is targeted, there is excess liquidity with banks bidding for easy money at low rates.
This was seen in October 2024 in particular.
For example, on September 03 the central bank offered 15 billion rupees through a liquidity auction, for which there were 36.28 billion rupees of bids came from banks. But since 15 billion was offered 15 billion was given at 8.51 percent, when the ceiling rate was 9.25 percent.
At 9.25 percent only 0.65 billion was borrowed. Thought bans bid 36.58 billion rupees the days transactions were cleared at 15.65 billion rupees, which is less than half the volume bid.
Banks will clear transactions by borrowing from client or reducing credit if they were forced to do through a corridor system.
On September 05, 20 billion rupees was offered, 25.61 billion was bid. Since 15 billion rupees was offered, only 15 billion was given. There was no borrowings from the window.
If there was no liquidity offered, banks will soon learn to operate without central bank money. Foreign banks usually do that.
This is how scarce reserve frameworks work or borrowing small amounts from the ceiling window.
On September 09, 60 billion rupees was offered, 54.05 billion was bid and all bidders were given printed money. The lowest rate was 8.26 percent, which was one basis point about the lower policy corridor. The bidder obviously did not care whether they got any cash or not.
The big changes are because some money is also offered for a week or two through term auctions and some of them mature.
The lesser the variation in the daily rates, the higher the excess liquidity that is required. They have to be injected for days on end and weeks.
Ample or Excess Reserve Framework
Modern central banks in the age of inflation and volatile commodity and food price give liquidity at the drop of a hat, like this.
If there is a ceiling rate it is reduced.
Up to the last quarter of 2024 the central bank was steadily selling down its Treasury bills portfolio, that is was a deflationary framework where there liquidity was constantly withdrawn and dollars were bought.
Now the central bank has run out of Treasury bills to sell.
When liquidity is injected, reserve money is inflated.
The current madness with excess liquidity had its roots in the end of the Great Moderation where in the US a narrower 25 basis point rate was targeted.
And then the policy rates was brought to almost zero mis-understanding a productivity driven price index fall as a deflationary collapse (debt deflation).
After firing a Housing Bubble, in the style of John Law’s Missippi Bubble, through what was then called the ‘mother of all liquidity bubbles’ the problem worsened.
After the collaps of the housing bubble, =with quantity easing large volumes of excess liquidity was created.
Banks – which had a lot of bad loan and were also hit by the Frank Dodd Law – were initially not using the liquidity, and the Fed started to pay interest on them as well.
As the excess liquidity got normalized, the Fed then said there was no reserve requirement at all.
And then suddenly it was an ‘ample reserve’ framework.
Excess reserves are now ‘normalized’.
It is in this context that Sri Lanka is going into a single policy rate, regular liquidity auctions and targeting call money rates very narrowly.
This is deadly for a country which is trying to collect foreign reserves.
Reserve collection requires deflationary policy – gentle deflationary policy will keep the exchange rate stable through a scarce reserves regime.
Mis-pricing Risks, Destroying Market Discipline
The single policy rate and narrowly targeting the call money rate has other implications.
The call money rate is a clean rate which is supposed to be risky. However, it is happening among some prime banks with some limits to each other.
At the moment the un-backed call rate is below the treasury bill backed, repo market.
This is not normal.
However, we can argue like this. The foreign banks are safer than government securities which is from a defaulted government.
Whatever it is, when the central bank gives liquidity, for days on end and weeks on end, banks that cannot borrow in the market, can escape the market discipline and trade with printed money, for day and weeks on end.
Eventually this money will turn into credit and imports, leading to loss of reserves, especially in the context of debt repayments.
One of the reasons banks in central bank regimes collapse and those is currency boards and dollarized areas do not collapse is due to the lack of these easy money.
Banks then become tightly managed.
When the US collapses due to the policy rate and open market operations, Hong Kong which is a currency board do not see banks collapses. Therefor when US rates fall there is a spike in property prices in Hong Kong because banks are healthy.
When the Housing Bubble collapsed, Dubai saw only one or two banks fail or threatened to fail. In Panama which is dollarized, only one bank failed or threatened to fail.
That is why areas like Hong Kong, Cambodia, or Panama have low debt to GDP ratios.
The Vehicle Import Debacle
The vehicle import, restrictions also show that there is no knowledge about the matter.
In the absence of (inflationary) open market operations there is no problem with the balance of payments.
This column has previously explained why.
Nobody can buy anything without money they do not have. The only way to do that is to get credit – and in the absence of open market operations – one type of credit has to crowd out another.
If cars are imported through a loan, then a hotel project will have to wait until deposit and loan repayments come to banks or finance companies.
The reason countries have foreign exchange rate shortages and currency crises is due to credit being financed by central bank credit through open market operations or other means which allows the car and some other credit like that for a building to be also given at the same time.
There is no need to put restrictions on the import of cars, or on stocks of cars kept by dealers. It is up to the dealers to waste money and keep fleets of unsold imported cars paying the correct market interest rate on working capital.
All vehicles stocks will do is drive up interest rates little and delay the ability of a bank to give another credit unless new deposits come.
If money is injected to target a single policy rate, or domestic market dollar rupee swaps are done, the same thing that happened in 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2020-2022 will happen – which forex shortages.
The reason Sri Lanka has had low inflation since September 2022 is due to the central bank’s deflationary policy of selling down Treasury bills and running a scare reserve framework due to the IMF’s requirement to sell down the bill stock.
It is not because of the Ceylon Electricity Board.
Green Flag
The one green flag is the Central Bank Governor’s statement that he will sell down the central bank’s Treasury bonds stock.
If there is no ceiling on domestic assets in the current IMF program, Sri Lanka will have forex shortages and have currency crises like in the 2012 and 2018 inside the program and foreign reserve targets will be missed.
Then the second default is inevitable.
If central bank securities are sold it is not a very good thing as past experience has shown.
Dollars swaps are worse in a country like Sri Lanka with the liquidity happy central bank and a single policy rate.
Central bank can convert the bonds into a markatble security, perhaps a floating rate one based on the 3-month bill yield.
The IMF lacks the knowledge to maintain monetary stability. Their technical assistance has the opposite effect. Sri Lanka had serial currency crises, and defaulted due to running an excess reserve (or ample reserves to use the modern term) from mid corridor targeting.
The mid corridor targeting which led to the excess reserve framework has now been legalized through the new monetary law and a gazette issued for the single policy rate.
The 100 billion rupees printed in October/November is a foretaste of things to come, unless the central bank held bonds are converted to a marketable instrument and used to run a scarce reserve framework.
IMF backed African nations which defaulted have had the so-called Monetary Policy Rate for some time.
Sri Lanka’s macroeconomists have battered the people with printed money for decades injecting money into banks and blaming politicians for deficits when inflation went up and people demanded salary hikes and subsidies.
Now it is open market operations after ‘monetary policy modernization’.
Then it was central bank re-finance. The Import and Export Control Act was brought in 1969 when the central bank was doing re-finance credit.
The people are innocent. Politicians are also largely innocent at least of inflation and exchange rate trouble.. Their crimes are not destroying salaries and pushing up prices.
Their problems are how they react. They impose price controls and create shortages or they become authoritative and cracks down on dissent when macroeconomists depreciate currencies.
When the current government said they did not print money when the central bank printed 100 billion through open market operations shows the problem.
Politicians have little idea about what macro-economists get up to. When they try to get advice they have to ask macroeconomists, who have rejected economics of Hume (primarily), Ricardo and Smith (then called Political Economy) in toto.
To be sure it was the 1960s that macroeconomists in the US did the same thing claiming there was a trade-off between inflation and employment and busted the Bretton Woods.
Now it is ‘ample reserves’ regime.
In the final analysis politicians are to blame. They are the people who make the law.
Deflationary Policy and Negative Unemployment
Enough countries have made laws to tie the hands of macro-economists to centrally plan interest rates and have stability. They import labour and have become countries with outward remittances.
They have deflationary policy and negative unemployment. (Employment above permanent residents)
Hard pegs (inflexible exchange rates) with floating interest rates are one type. Floating rate with very low inflation targets of two percent or below also sharply reduces the flexibility to centrally plan interest rates.
The longer the period, the more difficult it is to create inflation.
The Fed calls its new regime ‘flexible average inflation targeting’. This is much worse than the earlier ‘bygones are bygones’ regime.
All these techniques to deceive parliaments cooked up by the US stimulus brigade then end up as technical assistance through the IMF to unfortunate countries like us.
In Sri Lanka it is ‘flexible’ exchange and ‘flexible’ inflation targeting is coming from the US via the IMF.
IMF gives horrendous technical assistance that makes your hair stand on end.
The single policy rate and state liquidity forecasts which allows lending in-discipline is the latest.
Millions of Sri Lankans leave the country to the Middle East where there is an inflexible exchange rate.
But the people do not have to leave the county of their birth just because the central bank does open market operations or print money through parliament can control the macro-economists.
The have the legislative power which can be used on behalf of the poor, and stability.
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IMF problem is not the rate hikes and stabilization crises austerity and the ad hoc tax hikes it makes countries do.
Its problem is the deadly technical assistance it gives on how to print money in new and innovative ways triggering create forex shortages, import restrictions, exchange controls and ultimately external default.
Graph: Robert Barro
As economists Robert Barro once wrote, the IMF does not put out fires, it lights them.
Now that the IMF has helped restructure debt, and fix budgets, there is diminishing returns in following inflationist frameworks that will lead to renewed monetary instability.
It is not the lack of reform that keep Sri Lanka going back to the IMF. It is inflationism from the very technical advice that the IMF gives especially after the 1978 Second Amendment to its Articles.
Bad technical advice has taken a quantum jump after the US fired the housing bubble and developed nations shifted to an Abundant Reserve System making inflation uncontrollable and triggering 60s/70s style strikes and political unrest. (Colombo/May14/2025)
