A detox programme

The government needs to be less hesitant about inflation-indexed bonds, or the market wont be liquid enough

India is set to join the small but growing club of nations whose governments issue inflation-indexed debt. But evidence from the United States suggests that offering these securities in small quantities  as India currently intends to  can become an expensive fiscal hobby. A bolder commitment could reduce borrowing costs. Thats the direction in which New Delhi needs to go.

Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram is probably not thinking about costs and benefits right now. His immediate motivation in offering so-called linkers to domestic savers  a big chunk of these bonds will be reserved for their exclusive participation  is to wean them off their addiction to gold.

Double-digit inflation over the last few years, a result of the governments own excessive spending, has undermined the rupees purchasing power. Indians have responded by looking for a hedge in gold, stepping up their purchases of the imported yellow metal to an annual $60 billion pace. Thats one of the reasons the current account deficit widened to an unsustainable 6.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the final quarter of 2012.

The citizens gold habit irks the government and the central bank. While Mr Chidambaram has now pledged to reduce the Budget shortfall, he has no way of knowing if people will view his promise as trustworthy. After all, his boss Sonia Gandhi wants to launch a costly entitlement programme that would guarantee the poors access to heavily subsidised food ahead of the 2014 general elections.

In theory, linkers can enhance the credibility of the governments commitment to low inflation. Thats because New Delhis borrowing costs will rise if it allows prices to spiral out of control after selling inflation-protected securities. But suppose a surprise pickup in inflation does happen and the government ends up paying two percentage points more on its inflation-linked debt than on conventional bonds. This years planned Rs 15,000-crore issuance, if maintained at the same level for a decade, will increase the treasurys yearly interest costs by 0.5 per cent. That can hardly be expected to force a major change in the governments bad fiscal habits.

The US experience with Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) suggests that flirting with these bonds can be expensive. In contrast, a genuine commitment to developing them as an independent asset class can save taxpayers money.

The US came 15 years too late to TIPS. The ideal time to launch the securities would have been in the early 1980s, which is when Britain started to offer them. Back in 1981, the US Treasury was issuing 20-year bonds with 15.75 per cent coupons because that was what investors demanded as compensation for the nine per cent inflation that they were facing.

By 1994, inflation had fallen below three per cent, lifting the real annual cost of the bonds to the US government to 13 per cent. The US Treasury felt so silly writing cheques for its high-cost borrowings of the 1980s  a 30-year bond with an 11.25 per cent coupon still exists  that it finally launched TIPS in 1997.

Like India, however, the US made a hesitant start, and the product bombed. In 2001, the US Bond Market Association called for a demise of the illiquid securities, condemning them as an expensive adjunct to Treasuries, the most liquid market in the world. It was only in 2004 that TIPS became sufficiently liquid, removing the need for taxpayers to compensate bondholders for the liquidity risk of holding the securities. Last year a study by San Francisco Federal Reserve economists estimated that taxpayers would eventually save billions of dollars on TIPS issued since 2005.

Lowering sovereign borrowing costs should be an important goal in India, too. About 42 per cent of the federal governments projected tax revenue this fiscal year will be spent on interest alone. But to harvest the potential of linkers the Indian government first needs to draw a clear road map that indicates what proportion of its future annual borrowing will take this form. Without such a plan, buyers of the 10-year inflation-linked bond at its first auction on June 4 will have very little idea of how liquid the market will be when they eventually try to sell.

Simple math suggests the market could be illiquid for a long time to come. TIPS account for about 7.5 per cent of all US government-issued bills and bonds. India, which is starting with a share of less than 0.5 per cent, would need to expand its issuance of inflation-linked debt by 30 per cent a year to reach the US level by 2023. Thats assuming that Indias nominal GDP grows by 10 per cent a year on average between now and then, and that the federal governments local debt-to-GDP ratio remains unchanged at 37 per cent.

Linkers have an important side benefit. They allow policy makers to calculate expectations of future inflation, by subtracting the market yield of these securities from that of nominal bonds. Here again, liquidity is important. An illiquid inflation-protected security will give erratic signals to the central bank and could lead to wrong decisions.

Indias decision to offer small savers a real inflation hedge is a far better strategy than raising import duties on gold and telling banks not to finance speculative purchases of the yellow metal; such draconian measures, which India has already taken, only enrich smugglers. But the new product wont serve any of its several useful purposes if the government does not come up with a strategy to make linkers more liquid in the not-too-distant future. A commitment to meeting a sizeable chunk of annual budget shortfalls by issuing inflation-linked securities would help tremendously. Mr Chidambaram has taken the first step. He shouldnt stop there.

The writer is the Asia economics columnist at Reuters Breakingviews in Singapore. These views are his own