Reserve Bank of India

The politics and economics of interest rate formation in this country must be studied carefully. Lowering the interest rate raises stock prices in an environment where they themselves cannot move up thanks to the fundamentals of the economy that are not conducive.

Unified Financial Code: Is India Ready? A Critique on the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission Report by S S Tarapore; Gurgaon: LexisNexis, 2015; pp xii+166, ₹295.

Foreign banks in developing countries are often found to indulge in "cream skimming," a lending strategy that targets only wealthy segments of the credit market and excludes small and marginal borrowers from the general pool of borrowers. This paper attempts to investigate whether lending patterns of foreign banks in urban regions of Indian states are indicative of such practices. Using credit data on urban regions of 21 states of India for 1999-2011, this paper finds empirical evidence of cream skimming by foreign banks in India.

India has been subject to capricious capital flows since its integration with the global capital markets in the early 1990s. In a bid to balance diverse objectives, India, like many other emerging markets, has resorted to active management of various types of capital flows. This paper finds that while the calibrated liberalisation approach resulted in altering the composition of capital flows towards more stable flows, and has helped India to negotiate the "Trilemma," the use of sporadic capital account management measures in the face of surge or stop of capital flows has not been very effective in achieving their objectives of reducing external vulnerability or mitigating macro-prudential risks.

An examination of the Reserve Bank of India's monetary policy leaves little doubt that India can be suitably characterised as an endogenous money economy. In an endogenous money environment, financial reforms will prove ineffective in stimulating credit supply to large commercial borrowers. They may, however, prove counterproductive by sharpening the credit constraints faced by agricultural and other petty producers in the economy.