Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday assured cash-starved Yes Bank depositors that their money is safe and the RBI is working on an early resolution of the issue. "I'm in continuous interaction with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The central bank is fully seized of the matter and has assured they will give a quick resolution. I want to assure every depositor that their money shall be safe. Their monies are safe," Sitharaman told reporters in New Delhi.
The friction with the political class is not only about interest rates and monetary policy. While the government often spoke freely about its discomfiture, the RBI had to be careful even in its response to the government as any loose statement would affect the markets.
India has 26 public sector banks, 22 private sector banks and 56 regional rural banks.
'The Reserve Bank's independence has remained a work in progress, an enduring challenge that the nation has been grappling with on an ongoing basis,' says RBI Deputy Governor Dr Viral Acharya.
Subbarao also asserted that the proposed financial sector reforms should be driven more by the sectoral regulator Reserve Bank of India than by a legislative panel.
Shaktikanta Das will demit the office on Tuesday after completing six years as the 25th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra will replace him as the 26th Governor. He was appointed as the Governor on December 12, 2018, after the abrupt exit of Urjit Patel.
Due to tight liquidity condition, RBI would cut cash reserve ratio.
India's foreign exchange reserves declined by $685.1 million to $274.81 billion in the week ended August 30 due to a dip in the foreign currency assets, the Reserve Bank said.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has approved a three-member committee of directors to run the day-to-day functioning of cash-strapped Lakshmi Vilas Bank.
'It is nice that the banking system is in good shape.' 'It is a little early to call it too good because I think it was too bad in the past.'
Remarks come at a time when he is under pressure from the govt to cut interest rates.
The banking system's liquidity slipped into deficit for the first time in the current financial year (2023-24) due to the imposition of the Incremental Cash Reserve Ratio (I-CRR) for banks and outflows from goods and services tax (GST) payments, according to dealers. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data shows it injected Rs 23,644 crore on August 21. The last time liquidity was in deficit was on March 27, when the RBI injected Rs 45,575 crore.
Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das on Monday said payments through UPI (unified payment interface) have grown exponentially in the past 12 months with daily transactions crossing 36 crore, which is up 50 per cent from 24 crore in February 2022. In value terms, these transactions are worth Rs 6.27 lakh crore, registering a growth of 17 per cent from Rs 5.36 lakh crore in February 2022, the governor told reporters while launching the Digital Payments Awareness Week at the RBI headquarters in Mumbai this afternoon. He also said the overall monthly digital payment transactions crossed over Rs 1,000-crore-mark each month during the past three months.
The comments assume importance as the traditional position of the central bank has been not to set a forex reserves target.
A day after Chidambaram asked RBI to speed up the process of issuing new bank licences, Subbarao said last Friday that it would not be possible without fulfilling the enabling conditions for the same.
With banks led by the country's largest lender State Bank of India choosing to cut spreads on certain categories of loans instead of the base rate, deputy governor Anand Sinha said on Monday the Reserve Bank would like the banks to cut the minimum lending rate to better carry forward its monetary policy measures.
Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday pitched for formulating a policy for using the Reserve Bank of India's rising foreign exchange reserves for funding road projects, saying the country needs low cost finance for such infrastructure projects. Addressing a virtual event organised by industry body CII, Gadkari further said that the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) should also have a financial arm like the power ministry's Power Finance Corporation (PFC). "We have a surplus of dollar reserves in the country. I have decided to talk with the RBI Governor, about how we can formulate a policy by which we can use this foreign exchange reserves for development of infrastructure in the country," he said.
Prospects of a bumper kharif harvest are expected to lower food inflation in the coming months, making the country's inflation outlook benign, the Union Ministry of Finance (FinMin) said in its monthly economic report for October released on Monday.
The step followed Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan's hard talk.
'The RBI's MPC will maintain the current policy rates (6.50%) at the policy meeting, given ongoing inflationary pressures.'
The Reserve Bank on Friday said the new UPA government, which is slated present the Budget some time in July, should resist pressure for another stimulus as sustained economic recovery would require fiscal consolidation in medium term.
An RBI-appointed panel on Monday recommended hosts of customer-centric initiatives for banks, including online settlement of claims by heirs of deceased account holders, flexibility for submission of life certificates by pensioners and a centralised KYC database. The report of the Committee for Review of Customer Service Standards in RBI Regulated Entities (REs) has also suggested that the operations of accounts should not be stopped pending periodic Know Your Customer (KYC) updates. It recommended that there should be a time limit for the return of property documents to borrowers after the closure of the loan account, failing which a penalty should be imposed on the lender.
The government is weighing the option of creating the post of a fourth Deputy Governor in the Reserve Bank of India to oversee activities of the co-operative banking sector, which has seen a series of scams in the last two years.
Dy Governor notes it's an era of job changes for better.
Economic activity has regained momentum from late-May after the dent caused by the second wave of COVID-19, and the pandemic's impact on the overall asset quality has been less than expected, Reserve Bank Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Thursday. However, Das flagged rising data breaches and cyber-attacks as among the risks for the recovering economy, along with others like firming global commodity prices. The governor also said the second wave had a "grievous toll" on the country.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in a Twitter post that the government appreciated all of Rajan's good work and respected his decision
Bankers are likely to urge the Reserve Bank not to hike its key-rates and mandatory cash requirement in its April-policy, as they fear that this would affect their liquidity, resulting in a sharp surge in lending rates.
Mundra fills the vacancy created by the retirement of KC Chakrabarty in April, two months before his five-year tenure was come to an end.
Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan on Friday said banking sector will see major changes in the coming years.
The Reserve Bank on Thursday tightened norms for consumer credit as it asked banks and NBFCs to assign a higher risk weight for unsecured personal loans, a move aimed at making the lenders more cautious on such advances. The risk weight on unsecured consumer loans has been raised by 25 percentage points. The new regulations, however, will not be applicable on housing loans, education loans, vehicle loans and loans secured by gold and gold jewellery, the Reserve Bank said in a circular.
Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Michael Patra on Wednesday said the central bank's views about cryptocurrencies might have delayed the government's proposed legislation on crypto assets. Emphasising that the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will be introduced in FY23 as announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Budget speech, Patra said India will proceed very gradually on the subject as there are concerns on privacy, its impact on monetary policy formulation and energy intensity. The government had plans to introduce a bill on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin during the Winter Session of Parliament in November-December 2021 but did not introduce it.
"The autonomy for the central bank, within the framework of the RBI Act, is an essential and accepted governance requirement. Government of India has nurtured and respected this," the finance minister said in a statement.
The country's foreign exchange reserves crossed the $600 billion mark for the first time after increasing by $6.842 billion in the week ended June 4, RBI data showed on Friday. The reserves surged to a record $605.008 billion in the reporting week, helped by a rise in foreign currency assets (FCA), a major component of the overall reserves, as per weekly data by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In the previous week ended May 28, 2021, the reserves had swelled by $5.271 billion to $598.165 billion.
Khan would replace Shyamala Gopinath who retires on June 20, after a seven-year stint as deputy governor.
'One of the nice things about being a central bank governor is that the markets hang on every word you say'.
Rajan sees banks passing on the benefit of lower rates regime to customers.
The RBI under former governor Shaktikanta Das resisted pressures to cut interest rates through 2024 as it kept its 'Arjuna's eye' trained on inflation, but the central bank under a new detail-oriented head will soon have to take a call if it can continue sacrificing growth. Das, a career bureaucrat who in 2016 oversaw Prime Minister Narendra Modi's highly disruptive demonetisation move, left a lasting legacy as he demitted office towards the end of 2024 after expertly navigating monetary policy for six years, the highlight of which was steering India's recovery through the pandemic.
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das has said the decision on interest rate moderation will be based on long-term inflation trajectory and not monthly data. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) headed by the RBI Governor is scheduled to meet between October 7 and 9 and take call on interest rate. The RBI kept the repo rate unchanged at 6.5 per cent for the ninth time in a row amid risks from higher food inflation.
Acharya was one of the youngest deputy governors in the central bank's history and was in charge of the critical monetary policy department which also made him a part of the rate-setting panel.