How the Liabilities/Assets Ratio of Indian Banks Changed from 84% in 1970 to 108% in 1998: the PurnimaMihir Graph

October 20, 2008 — drsubrotoroy

This graph was created by me in 2002 from Reserve Bank of India data published until 1998.

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Although I had been “full professor” at the time for six years at something known as an “Institution of National Importance” in India, I had received not a rupee by way of any research-assistance, and had to be assisted in the creation of this graph by two very elderly lay persons, one aged 87 and another aged 77, who read out over many hours  (despite frail eyesight) long columns of RBI data which I then typed into an Excel file.

[My Research Assistants about six years after they’d helped me create the graph from RBI data…so the graph deserves to be dubbed the PurnimaMihir Graph].

The graph came to be published for the first time to accompany my two-part article “Indian Inflation” published in The Statesman April 15-16 2008,  and available elsewhere here.

The Prime Minister of India has today spoken in India’s Parliament of how sound India’s banking seems to him compared to that in the rest of the world at present.  I  trust he has available to him vast amounts of fresh data since 1998 which  the many members of  his  “Dream Team” of government and other establishment economists  in Delhi and Mumbai have analysed adequately to justify his confidence.  The data in my RBI graph end at 1998 but  they do cover all the years of the PM’s own career as  India’s top economic bureaucrat up through his tenure as Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao Government.

As it happens, I do think India’s banks are relatively insulated from  the world economy and its present financial crisis but the reason for that insulation has nothing to do with any purportedly better bank governance in India; rather it has to do with the fact the rupee is not a hard convertible currency and therefore there has been a vast and continuing distortion of relative prices (including interest rates and wages) from world prices.

Subroto Roy, 20 October 2008


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