Rajan meets Mayaram ahead of monetary policy review

Ahead of monetary policy review on September 30, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan today met Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram and is believed to have discussed macroeconomic issues, according to sources.
The RBI is scheduled to announce its fourth bi-monthly Monetary Policy Review on September 30.
Usually the RBI Governor meets Prime Minister and Finance Minister ahead of policy review. Since the Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the US and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is unwell, Rajan met Finance Secretary.
Even as the industry is pitching for a rate cut to boost industrial activities, the Reserve Bank is likely to maintain status-quo in the policy review.

The GDP growth has risen to a nine quarter high of 5.7 per cent in the April-June period, while industrial output for July slowed to 4-month low of 0.5 per cent due to contraction in manufacturing and poor offtake of consumer goods.
Further, the retail inflation in August stood at 7.8 per cent, while the wholesale price based inflation cooled to a 5-year low of 3.7 per cent.

In its last policy review on August 5, the RBI had kept key policy rates unchanged.
However, Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR), the portion of deposits that banks are required to keep in government bonds, was cut by 0.5 per cent to unlock about Rs 40,000 crore into the system.

It also said that RBI remains committed to taking CPI inflation to 8 per cent by January 2015 and 6 per cent by January 2016.
Rajan, who has for the third time in a row kept the rate unchanged in August, had then said that there are upside risks to inflation in view of uncertain monsoon and its impact on food production as also volatile international oil prices.
"It is...Appropriate to continue maintaining a vigilant monetary policy stance ..., while leaving the policy rate unchanged," Rajan had said.