Govt. has to stop money printing now, not in 2024: Harsha

2022/07/10

ECONOMYNEXT –Sri Lanka should stop money printing earlier than indicated in a statement by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, opposition legislator Harsha de Silva said, though legislators have already given extensive powers to the agency engage in liquidity injections.

“Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe talked about money printing,” de Silva told parliament.

“He said, the inflation is going up and the printing should be stopped. But he also said it can only be stopped by the end of 2023 or in early 2024,” Silva said.

“It cannot happen like that and you have to take a decision right now. We all must understand that if nothing is being done, the inflation will go up until 100 percent from the predicted 60 percent.”

Silva the country has already become an unlivable place for the general public and according to the CBSL data, the food inflation of the country has risen up to 80.1 percent in June, 2022.

Sri Lanka’s central bank has now created the worst currency crisis in its 72-year history.

Sri Lanka’s intermediate regime central bank was set up as a fundamentally flawed Latin America style agency with dual anchor conflicts in 1950 by US money doctor, giving soft-peggers the ability to trigger currency crises and high inflation abolishing a currency board where money printing was outlawed up to then.

However the agency had no active open market operations in the initial stages and it was restrained by a gold peg.

A reserve collecting peg collapses when the central bank prints money to keep rates down. Sri Lanka’s central bank repeatedly prints money whenever domestic credit picks up, regardless of whether state or private credit is picking up including when the US hikes rates under pseudo monetary policy independence, with devastating consequences on the people, critics have said.

However after 2015 with flexible inflation targeting the rupee was hit with extreme open market operations, to target an output gap (printing money to push growth up) creating currency crises and pushing growth down in their wake and impoverishing the people with rupee depreciation.

Under ‘flexible’ inflation targeting a reserve collecting peg was repeatedly bombarded with liquidity injections to manipulate rates down (call money rate targeting) until the currency collapsed.

The currency was depreciated under real effective exchange rate targeting including in 2017 when there was not credit pressure and the rupee was facing upward pressure and large volumes of inflows were sterilized, as growth and private credit slowed.

There is nothing politicians in Sri Lanka can do, whether in power or in opposition when Sri Lanka’s central bank decides to print money to drive interest rates down.

“I don’t know whether you can take that decision now because Nandalal Weerasinghe has been appointed as the CBSL governor,” de Silva told Prime Minister Wickremesinghe perhaps in a reference to central bank independence.

In 2018 as credit recovered, de Silva pleaded with the then leadership with of the central bank in vain to allow rates to go up as the currency was hit with liquidity injections, after giving ‘central bank independence’, to the agency during the ousted ‘Yahapalana’ administration.

Fiscal dominance including de facto fiscal dominance was removed by the Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera raising taxes, bringing the deficit down and market pricing fuel in 2019.

The central bank printed money anyway ignoring political pleas and busted the currency from 152 to 182 and drove away foreign investors in rupee bond by undermining the credibility of the peg.

However politicians have the legislative power to tame soft-pegging central bank into either hard pegs or true currency boards like Hong Kong, or currency board like pegs like in East Asia and GCC countries with restricted open market operations.

They can also curb flexible pegs with true inflation targeting and a clean floating exchange rate which will also eliminate balance of payments crises and poverty.

Over the past 7 years three currency crises were created in rapid succession under flexible inflation targeting and output gap targeting.

In the 2020-22 crisis, where over 2.6 trillion rupees were printed the rupee has now fallen from 200 to 360 to the US dollar with soft-peggers impoverishing both wage earners and the elderly.

In the 2020-2022 crisis, the banking system was pumped with excess liquidity of up to 200 billion rupees under modern monetary theory up from around 60 billion rupees under call money rate targeting and output gap targeting, which is a milder version of MMT.The entire world is now suffering from liquidity injections made by the Federal Reserve under its dual mandate which is being conveniently blamed on Russia and Ukraine.