Financial Repression - Techniques

Techniques

In a 2011 NBER working paper, Carmen Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia speculate on a possible return by governments to this form of debt reduction in order to deal with their high levels of debt following the 2008 economic crisis. Reinhart and Sbrancia characterise financial repression as consisting of the following key elements:

1. Explicit or indirect capping of, or control over, interest rates, such as on government debt and deposit rates (e.g., Regulation Q).
2. Government ownership or control of domestic banks and financial institutions with simultaneous placing of barriers before other institutions seeking to enter the market.
3. Relatively high reserve requirements
4. Creation or maintenance of a captive domestic market for government debt, achieved by requiring domestic banks to hold government debt via capital requirements, or by prohibiting or disincentivising alternative options that institutions might otherwise prefer.
5. Government restrictions on the transfer of assets abroad through the imposition of capital controls.

These measures allow governments to issue debt at lower interest rates than would otherwise be possible. A low nominal interest rate can help governments reduce debt servicing costs, while a high incidence of negative real interest rates liquidates or erodes the real value of government debt. Thus, financial repression is most successful in liquidating debts when accompanied by a steady dose of inflation, and it can be considered a form of taxation, or alternatively a form of debasement.

"Unlike income, consumption, or sales taxes, the "repression" tax rate (or rates) are determined by financial regulations and inflation performance that are opaque to the highly politicized realm of fiscal measures. Given that deficit reduction usually involves highly unpopular expenditure reductions and (or) tax increases...the relatively 'stealthier' financial repression tax may be a more politically palatable alternative to authorities faced with the need to reduce outstanding debts."

Giovannini and de Melo (1993) calculated the size of the financial repression tax for a 24 emerging market country sample from 1974-1987. Their results showed that financial repression exceeded 2% of GDP for seven countries, and greater than 3% for five countries. For five countries (India, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe) it represented approximately 20% of tax revenue. In the case of Mexico financial repression was 6% of GDP, or 40% of tax revenue.

As noted by Reinhart and others in a June 2011 IMF publication, "financial repression issues come under the broad umbrella of 'macroprudential regulation' (or macroprudential policy), which refers to government efforts to ensure the health of an entire financial system".