The US Federal Reserve has thrown a pleasant surprise. It didn't move rates as expected, but it went on to say it is nowhere near considering a rate hike. On the growth front, it said that "we have made progress", but not "substantial further progress", which is what the Fed wants to see before it moves on liquidity.

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Chetan Ahya, Head of Global Economics for Morgan Stanley, weighed in on the subject and further shared his insights on India and the global economy. In an interview with CNBC-TV18’s Latha Venkatesh, he said: “As far as the Fed policy meeting was concerned, the indications from the Chairman in his press conference were very clear that they are not anywhere close to taking up tapering in the near-term. So, we think that the Fed will give forward guidance in September and then they will actually implement tapering from April 2022, preceded by a firmer indication of the plan in March 2022. I think September is the next month to watch.”

On global growth forecast, he said, “Our growth forecast is a little bit ahead of consensus, so we don’t see the need to upgrade our numbers right now. There are shut downs taking place in some regions, so at this point of time, we think that our forecast is fine. For the global economy, we are maintaining our 6.50 percent GDP growth for 2021 and 4.9 percent for 2022.”

“For India, we are 10.5 percent for FY2022 and we think it is ahead of consensus and it seems right, right now.”

Coming back to India, and on the subject of inflation and the Reserve Bank of India’s decision next week, he said: “I think the RBI can look through inflation for now. But increasingly, we are going to get to that point where growth is going to be stronger, which is what will allow the RBI to begin to think about the inflation risk. We have just got out of this second round of COVID infections and that had impacted growth. So, it will take some time for the RBI to gain that confidence, we think that October policy meeting would be the time when the RBI would sort of make some kind of forward guidance on saying that look, if growth continues to do well, and inflation remains somewhat high, we will have to start thinking about moving in the other direction.”

He added, “So, I think that kind of an indication from the RBI could be coming in as early as October meeting, but if not in October, then the next one, definitely; they should be giving you some kind of indication on moving towards the other direction. We think as a first step, the RBI will reduce excess liquidity in the system and take the interbank rate closer to the repo rate. The next step would be to hide the reverse repo, and then eventually to hike repo -- that will be the sequencing”.

For full interview, watch the accompanying video.

(Edited by : Dipika)

First Published:Jul 29, 2021 2:09 PM IST