Finally, a better map of the world in the RBI Bulletin - moving away from that degrading Mercator projection.
Toll collections are back, but EWay bills are still not close to the peak in March, yet.
Vehicles and transport don't look greawt. Petrol consumption (by volume) is up above Feb 2020, but Diesel and others are still low. Vehicle registrations still struggling.
Surprisingly, Steel consumption is down big time. Cement is okay (just 5% more than 2019).
Air passenger traffic sucks (40% of Feb 2020 domestic, 15% of international)
But cargo is back to Feb 2020 levels. Has not risen though.
The labour market (read: not you people on twitter) is struggling to reach back to the 2020 pre covid levels:
Interesting move in the Vodafone Idea game - the government will convert about 37,000 cr. of debt into equity - buying about 3700 cr. of shares at Rs. 10 each.
Since its your money as a taxpayer, you will rightfully ask, but hello, aren't the shares at Rs. 6.80 in the market?
Well, of course, but there is a rule that you cannot issue shares below "par" so we have to cough up 50% more.
Does this help Vodafone idea? There is a song, "Doobne waale ko tinke ka sahaara hi bahut" (To a drowning man, even a twig is a saviour". This song has no idea about drowning men, but Idea now has a twig.
It's a twig. Vodafone Idea owes the government a ludicrous 210,000 cr. Of which it will only reduce the debt by 37,000 cr. now.
And there is no fresh money coming in. So everyone is getting diluted just like that.
Gold bonds wise - the worry isn't that the government didnt hedge the gold, the worry really is that they didn't do enough of it to change any imports at all. In fact they raised the duty on gold, making gold even more expensive!
The idea of the SGB was that if you only cared about it as a financial asset, then you could just buy an SGB. The lower interest of 2.5% (versus typical bond issues of 8%+) would help the government raise funds at lower interest and hopefully, reduce imports.
Gold imports in USD terms is about $50bn a year. It was $34bn in FY 2015. So about 50% up in 10 years, which isn't big at all in terms of value, less than 5% a year in dollar terms but meaningful in rupee terms with both duty and USDINR going up.
Bad news on the inflation front. 6.21%! Food inflation and personal services has gone bonkers. This is quite deep and we should probably not expect a rate cut unless this moderates quickly.
The difference between last year's numbers and this years is growing - that's what has caused the rise. Very steep.
Even Core CPI (without fuel and food) seems to be rising, through it's still less than 4%. Trend matters more than the numbers.