Yesterday, the Federal reserve announced another 0.75% point increase for the federal funds rate. This is the rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend their excess reserves to each other overnight. The increase in this rate is meant to help tame rising inflation; this increase however also has implications for the US federal governments borrowing costs and hence the nations fiscal picture.
Budget 2022 seems to indicate that the government continues on their path of inducing an investment led economic recovery. This budget is, just as the previous one was, very clearly supply-side oriented. The CAPEX outlay has been stepped up to Rs 7.5 lakh crores and no major money transfer into the hands of the masses, through tax cuts or otherwise, has been announced.
India’s burgeoning tax receipts have surprised those who termed the pandemic as a death knell for India’s struggling economy. Rarely has an economic recovery been so dramatic as the one being seen now.
That India’s tax collection is on track to beat pandemic hit FY 2021 is in itself surprising. Even more surprising is that they are well positioned to beat the collections of FY 2020 which was a regular growth year. Indeed, India is in the middle of an unprecedented tax revenue generation cycle.
The recent promise for the markets and the economy all started in September 2019 with the cutting of Corporate tax rates. This event, which we’ve referred to in many of our write-ups in the past 24 months, is very significant because it marks a shift in government policy away from boosting share of labor compensation in GDP and towards boosting share of corporate profits in GDP.