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Banking Lending Fails Despite Swelling Deposit

  2 min 22 sec to read

--By Yagya Banjade
 
The banking system has observed excessive liquidity after banking and financial institutions (BFIs) failed to boost the investment. In last four months (between Sep 6-Nov 8). The total deposit of commercial banks has increased by Rs 42 billion, while the total loan investment has increased only by half of that. The excessive liquidity has led Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) to issue the Reverse Repo several times during the period of four months. 
 
NRB issued the latest round of reverse repo last Wednesday to absorb excess liquidity from the market. As many as 21 commercial banks have bid for securities worth Rs 23 billion for the reverse repo while the NRB’s target was Rs 10 billion only. This is the sixth times that the NRB has issued the reverse repo in the current fiscal year. Among them, NRB has accepted the bid of nine companies at 0.166 per cent weighted average discount rate. NRB went for reverse repo this time with the maturity period of 15 days. 
 
NRB spokesperson Bhaskar Mani Gnawali said that the reverse repo was the regular process of the central regulatory bank. We will decide on either to issue reverse repo or repo assessing the market situation in coming days also, added Gnawali. According to NRB, the reverse repos were targeted to ensure financial stability and good governance by curbing inflation. That may boost due to the excess liquidity. Earlier in September also, the NRB had gone for outright sale auction worth Rs 8.5 billion. With this outright sale auction, the NRB had mopped up 53.5 billion rupees from the banking system. In the earlier rounds of reverse repo, the NRB had fixed one week of maturity period. 
 
However, the loan floating has remained constant in the banks.  President of Nepal Bankers Association, Rajan Singh Bhandari does not agree that the lending has not increased. “It’s not like that the lending will see a surge within a week,” said Bhandari, adding that the lending is a regular process and it would continue. He, however, admitted that the lending could not surge as comparison to the rise in the deposit amount. He attributed the excessive liquidity in the banking system to the timely budget, increase in the expenditure due to election and surge in remittance flow due to the rise of dollar price, among others. 
 
According to Economist Prof Dr Biswombher Pyakuryal, the banking lending could not rise due to the lack of improvement in the economic condition of the country as expected. The reverse repo could help in containing the inflation in the market, he said.

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