Choose growth over exchange rate - 0 views
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Nehir D on 08 Nov 13The areticle is about the Reserve Bank of India stopped listening to lullabies of praise on its exemplary handling of monetary and exchange rate policies. The current policy keeps piling up useless reserves, offers wholly avoidable arbitrage opportunities to patriotic residents and even more patriotic non-residents, hikes interest rates, depresses growth and widens the fiscal deficit. People are raising dollar debt and not bothering to cover forward. They are confident that the rupee would either appreciate against the dollar or at least hold steady till repayment time.When dollars come into India, they have to be converted into rupees. This conversion bloats our forex reserves and injects rupees into the system. If all the rupees created as a result of dollar inflows were to be allowed to add to the money supply, that would reduce interest rates and also create the potential for inflation. So the RBI sterilises such rupee injections by selling government bonds and mopping up rupees from the system. The increased supply of government bonds brings down their price, hiking the yield. Thus, sterilisation pushes up interest rates.