My 25% error rate

A month ago, in a blog post about the special open market operation (OMO) of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), I expressed the view that while this was being described as an Operation Twist (purchase of long term bonds and sale of short term bonds), it would end up as a form of Quantitative Easing (QE) with more purchases and less sales. With four such operations now over, my prediction has a 25% error rate. In each of the four operations, the RBI purchased all the bonds (100 billion rupees face value) that it had notified. When it came to sales, the RBI’s acceptance rates were 68.25% (December 23, 2019), 85.01% (December 30, 2019), 100% (January 6, 2020) and 29.50% (January 23, 2020). So I was wrong about one of the four OMOs for an error rate of 25%. The RBI’s average acceptance rate for sales in these four operations works out to a little over 70% implying a net liquidity injection of almost 120 billion.

Posted at 7:58 pm IST on Mon, 27 Jan 2020         permanent link

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