Financial Express Editorial: Wake-Up Call Rate

It is extremely important to provide the economy with ample rupee liquidity and ample dollar liquidity.

RBI was making progress on rupee liquidity. What’s happened now? One week ago, banks had lent Rs 41,000 crore to RBI through the reverse repo, which gave the sense that the liquidity situation had eased. But on 29th October, banks borrowed Rs 58,000 crore from RBI. But even that wasn’t enough. On 29th (Wednesday), the last trade reported at CCIL showed a call money rate of 13.5%.

We are back to a situation of very tight liquidity. This surely points to a failure of policy at RBI. The repo rate is supposed to be 8% and so the call money rate is supposed to stay below 8%. But banks clearly lack the securities required to obtain money at the repo. RBI needs to urgently make much deeper changes so as to ensure this is always the case.

This requires three things. First, CRR needs to be cut, perhaps by 200 basis points.

Second, SLR needs to be cut deeper, by 400 basis points.

Third, oil bonds and fertilizer bonds need to be made repo-eligible. These three steps, put together, will ensure that the short-term rate will not go above the policy rate.