Gold Price Skyrockets in India after Currency Ban – Part III

When Money Dies

In part-I of the dispatch we talked about what happened during the first two days after Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi banned Rs 500 and Rs 1000 banknotes, comprising of 88% of the monetary value of cash in circulation. In part-II, we talked about the scenes, chaos, desperation, and massive loss of productive capacity that this ban had led to over the next few days.

There is virtually no visible opposition to the enforced ban, for any politician who opposes the ban risks having his own misdeeds — and they are all corrupt — brought to the public space by Modi. A true demagogue, Modi, has already convinced the gullible, salaried middle class that anyone who opposes the ban is hiding corrupt money and is anti-national.

With every passing day, it has not only  become clearer that the ban was of no use to eradicate hidden cash, but has also inflicted deep, wide and irreparable damage to the society.  The economy is rapidly moving toward stagnation.  The lives of literally hundreds of millions are in deep chaos.

This event may well go down in the history books as one of the worst man-made crises ever.

Cash conversion has been reduced to Rs 2000 ($30) per person. As a result people are facing humiliation and stand in queues for as much as 12 hours or more. Often repeated visits to the bank are necessary, with no guarantee that the bank will have cash available for the conversion. Old and disabled people, the 25% of India’s society without ID-cards, and women (unless they are prepared to be molested) don’t even have this chance. For those who are able join the queues, the scene has turned into a battlefield, with people fighting among themselves and getting brutalized by the police. But so far most people seem to still carry a favorable opinion of Modi, backed by cult-like “intellectual” climate created by the salaried middle class (who lack critical thinking and reasoning capability), and supported by the international media and institutions like the IMF, i.e., people who are sitting in Western cities have no clue about the realities on the ground. But all this will change as the stories of personal suffering should eventually start to dominate over the propaganda—reality does have a way of catching up. But India’s descent toward a police state is now written in concrete. Even if Modi eventually goes, a new demagogue will take his place.

Modi suffers from worst possible type of corruption: an insatiable desire for personal glory at any cost, an extremely deep moral and spiritual corruption. He also represents the worst aspect of democracy: a demagogue who caters to an irrational populace’s cravings for self-identity and release from self-responsibility.

The government monopoly on cash economically connects 1.3 billion Indians. The perceived value of this paper currency does not comes not from any value inherent in it (it is just as irredeemable as other fiat monies), but from government edicts.

Cash is the thread that weaves relationships, transactions and commitments. For the proper functioning of society, it is absolutely crucial that people have a liquid medium of exchange, the essential lubricant to effect trade in today’s complex economy. Today, win-win transactions — except for barter, which has emerged in many parts of India — can no longer take place, for the monopolistic money instrument, India’s fiat currency, has been paralyzed by Modi.

Should a single person have the authority to flip a switch and bring all trade, transactions, indeed the entire economy to a halt?

Two millennia of progress in money have been destroyed. Rural places are increasingly falling back on barter. In a barter economy, economic calculation is no longer possible; only the most basic economic exchanges can take place. The market will have to adopt alternative media of exchange if the coincidence of wants problem is to be overcome.

What tyranny, socialism and an authoritarian order enforced from the top down mean for those who have been reduced to mere cogs

A Rapidly Evolving Police State

After just a few years under Modi’s rule, there is no independent body left in India. Courts simply do not take a position against Modi. Not that the situation was much better earlier, mind. These days, journalists and opposing voices are increasingly stifled, while people at the fringe at least spoke their mind in the past.

For the first time, Hindus who were tolerant of intellectual differences have come to believe in Hindutava (fanatic Hindu nationalism, rapidly metastasizing as a particular mutation of nationalism).

Police now reserves the right to randomly search people’s possessions without a warrant. Those who live in India — in an economy in which 97% of all consumer transactions are in cash, most salaries are paid in cash, and most revenues are collected in cash — routinely transport and carry large amounts of cash on their person.

When policemen stop them, they often find some cash, which now ends up being confiscated and used for the Modi propaganda machine. None of this means that the confiscated cash is illegal, undocumented, or involved in tax evasion efforts. But truth has no place in propaganda.

The fear among small businessmen and those with savings outside of the banking system, even if they are fully legitimate, is palpable. They are now deemed to be criminals and it is their job to prove themselves innocent.

Historically, India has been a negative-yielding economy. Interest rates have mostly been negative in real terms. Stock market returns are negative-yielding, even before adjusting for business and jurisdictional risks. In such an environment, savers have no option but to keep their money in gold, or outside the formal economy.

Any oppression of savers forcing them to direct their money into the negative-yielding formal economy will only lead to even more of their savings going into gold and escaping to foreign jurisdictions, eventually making India much less well-off. Even in the short-term, India’s economy is rapidly going into paralysis.

Corruption is Entrenched Across India

There is indeed a belief that at the very top, financial corruption has declined. I have no way to be sure of this, but I am tempted to believe it. But India’s proximal problem is with its bureaucracy and lower-level politics.

I have yet to meet a public servant who does not ask for a bribe. Simple financial corruption would have merely redistributed wealth. But the real problem with the public servant is his utter moral and spiritual corruption.

He expects citizens to grovel, a sadistic pleasure every Indian public servant enjoys in his demeaned existence. He is incapable of taking a decision or of thinking straight. It is here that the State suffocates society and wealth-creation. This is the real corruption characterizing the State.

More fundamentally, the real problem of India is not even its bureaucracy, but Indians as such.  Indians will pay and take bribes when given an opportunity. They will strive to get into positions that give them the power over other people. They know exactly how others should live. The fingers of my hands exceed the number of Indians I have known who are different.

But hasn’t the way Indians view corruption changed in recent times, given that they are supporting Modi in his fight against corruption, however erroneous his policies might be?

An irrational society is also deeply hypocritical and can exist with massive cognitive dissonance. If you delve deeper into the issue, you realize that Indians do indeed want corruption to end, but with a minor exception. They want everyone to stop giving and taking bribes simultaneously and collectively.

As in any collectivist society, the individual has no value or meaning, so the individual Indian excludes himself when he wants corruption to end. He does not see how any meaningful impact on society at large might be achieved if he were to stop his own corruption. As any rational person can see, this does not add up – but in the irrational society of India it does seem to add up.

I often find myself in social conversations in which everyone talks badly about corruption in others and in the public space and makes proposals how to end it, and in the next breath, the very same people collude between themselves, engaging in corrupt practices. When I point the contradiction out to them, they simply and honestly fail to see it.

A rational personal cannot truly understand this issue, even when repeatedly told about it, as rational people suffer from a major handicap: they fail to understand the true nature of irrationality and how entrenched it can be.

Modi was allegedly behind the massacre and rapes of thousands of Muslims in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. As a result of this, Modi was banned from entering most Western countries. Modi has no family. He left his wife soon after he married.

He does not let his 94-year-old mom stay with himself. He claims he has given up his family for the nation. In his narrow vision, he is indeed correct. While he may personally not have taken any bribes in recent years, there is no way he could have risen to his position without having made massive and horrendous moral compromises, as the massacre of Muslims to gain Hindu votes demonstrates.

What keeps India in continual penury is its irrationality, its tribalism and its superstitions, of which financial corruption is merely a visible expression. There is no easy way to make a society rational. In the past, European missionaries even tried removing babies from their parents in a desperate attempt to bring about change. This didn’t work. Making a society rational is a process that could last  millennia.

The cult-like status Modi enjoys in India is the result of a lack of self-responsibility among Indians, their hope that despite massive inherent contradictions, the pain that corruption imposes on Indians can be got rid of through a magic wand –  without self-reflection, or without them giving up corruption themselves.

Modi’s biggest support comes from the salaried middle class, whose members are mostly unaffected by the ban, and who may even have benefited as food prices have fallen as a result of the masses of starving poor people now unable to buy. Hence the middle class can claim to occupy the moral high-ground, albeit on the back of other people’s suffering.

Gresham’s Law Gone Wild

In the past two weeks, the government has completely failed to reliquefy the monetary system. With 88% of outstanding currency now illegal, people are rushing to convert the banned currency they hold into Rs 100 or lower denomination banknotes. Once these or the newly printed banknotes end up with financially strong persons, they straight-away go under the mattress.

The result is that the remaining 12% of the monetary value represented by banknotes that are still legal is rapidly going out of circulation, and so is most of the newly issued currency. Markets are empty. This means cash is not trickling down. The poorest 50% of India’s population, who have no reserves, are the worst affected and are going hungry.

Ironically, the banned Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes are today the most used currency. Those who have these banknotes and are afraid of going to the bank, mostly because they are worried about unnecessary problems from the rapacious and extremely corrupt tax department, force their workers and suppliers to accept the banned notes.

In the local market, if you want to buy gold or silver, you must pay in the banned banknotes — ironically the sellers to do not want to accept official legal tender. The banned notes, when used in large quantities, are circulating at 80% or less of their face value. Mafias have spontaneously emerged around the country. They ensure that these banknotes are deposited across hundreds of millions of accounts. The mafia makes a neat 25% profit.

The mafia is also providing special favors to certain politicians by converting their ill-gotten money for no commission. Who thinks this will reduce corruption?

Many workers from factories and shops, even if they have not yet been thrown out of work for lack of demand or due to the cash-crunch affecting their employer, have found a very lucrative profession. They now work for the money-converting mafia. This system is already fully in place a mere two weeks after the announcement of the ban.

The underground system is rapidly distributing the banned currency notes across a large number of people who then deposit them. This market is so liquid and easily accessible, that for all intents and purposes there is no way that someone with the banned notes cannot exchange them, albeit at a loss. So much for Modi’s claim that those with large amounts of undeclared money won’t be able to convert or deposit it.

But this will get much worse. When all this is over, hundreds of thousands of small-time bullies trained by the mafia will have made a small fortune. They will have also have found out who the rich people with cash are. A social scientist will conclude that this segment of society will be extremely corrupt and criminal. These people will have gotten a taste for easy money, in contrast to patient and laborious wealth-creation.

Moral Dilemmas Galore

Poor people have traditionally never systematically robbed shops in India. Out of hunger, they are experimenting with this for the first time. They are learning that when a mob robs, the police disappears. Social relations have a taken a very serious hit, fragmenting society. Society stands hugely divided, except in terms of the thread that connects them to Modi, the autocrat.

What keeps transactions in any society going is liquidity in the money-markets. Given that most people are stuck with banned currency, they are telling anyone they owe money to that they will only make payment in form of the banned notes, which now trade at a discount.

This massive moral dilemma has come to appear because people found themselves stranded with banned notes overnight, and want to avoid the 20% hit in value that they will have to take by converting them through the mafia.

Spouses are fighting, as they have suddenly become aware that their significant other has been hiding cash for a rainy day. Poor people are almost invariably getting paid in banned notes, which requires them to line up in queues the next day to convert what they received, wasting at least 50% of their productivity –  assuming they have a job.

There are moral dilemmas galore. But this had to happen in a society run by rulers who have absolutely no sense of morals, reason, not to mention respect for private property.

Money deposited in the banks is mostly frozen, something that people are not yet paying much attention to, for all their focus is on getting rid of the banned cash. The problem of frozen bank accounts will surface once the current conversion stops by the end of this year. That is when the salaried middle class, which mostly supports Modi, will finally wake up.

It is also clear that Modi has to take more and more increasingly repressive steps to keep people from taking protective measures. As noted above, India will rapidly become a police state.

The worst sufferers are poor people, whose ownership of currency was neither unaccounted for nor corrupt. Not being street-smart and not understanding how banks work, as they are often bullied by standoffish bank officers, they are stuck with the old currency, clueless as to what to do.

They are the silent 25% to 50% of the India population. They cannot even participate in the money-converting mafia, because they don’t understand many of the things that look quite simple to members of the middle class.

Many tourists have found themselves stranded without money in India as well. Video by mint.