Creditworthiness: Does the govt warrant its (local) AAA rating?
Standard & Poor’s, a New York-based credit rating agency, downgraded US government debt from AAA to AA+ when the American political process got too divisive to make key fiscal decisions. Yet despite the complete inability of any government in Pakistani history to manage the country’s finances adequately, the only two credit rating agencies in Karachi have yet to downgrade the government of Pakistan from AAA.
While international rating agencies such as S&P rate Pakistan B-, the two local agencies – Pakistan Credit Rating Agency Limited (Pacra) and JCR-VIS – rate the government’s debt AAA. They also rate the debt of any state-owned company AAA, almost automatically assuming a sovereign backstop.
The difference in the two ratings is striking, but not surprising, at least to the people who create and maintain the ratings.
According to JCR-VIS Chief Rating Officer Sabeen Saleem, local rating companies don’t take the likelihood of currency devaluation and government default into account.
“The government can always be expected to issue cash and maintain liquidity,” she said. Moreover, she said, local agencies don’t take the political situation into account while dealing with sovereign ratings.
Divergences between local and foreign ratings of government debt are not out of the ordinary. For instance, ICRA, India’s leading rating agency, which is affiliated with America’s Moody’s Investors Service, rates the Indian government Aaa, the highest rating. This is despite the fact that Moody’s current rating for India is Baa3, nowhere near the best.
While Pakistan’s fiscal deficit is high and the government relies heavily on inflows from foreign governments and lending institutions, the total debt-to-GDP ratio – a key measure of indebtedness of a government – is at 60%, a ratio that is considered manageable even by as conservative an institution as the European Central Bank.
Yet Pakistan’s revenue collection, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, remains the lowest in Asia at 8.5% of the GDP. The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) admits that for every Rs100 it collects in taxes, it loses another Rs73 to tax evasion.
The government also has a poor record in paying its own obligations, as proven by the inter-corporate circular debt in the energy sector, which began because the government was unable to pay the subsidies it promised the energy companies.
Despite all of these considerations, however, Pakistan’s credit rating agencies maintain a AAA rating on the government, essentially stating that the government will never default on its financial obligations, even though the government does at times fail to pay what it owes (though not on its bonds, which are paid on time every time). The reason for this, it seems, is commercial.
“Giving your own sovereign a bad rating isn’t good for business,” admitted Saleem. “It is never a good decision to downgrade your own sovereign.” Yet even though the ratings may be somewhat shaky, the financial markets in Pakistan do not seem perturbed, mainly due to a lack of choice.
“There is no corporate debt market in Pakistan. Anyone who wants to take exposure in long-term has no choice but to buy government bonds,” said a senior treasury official at one of the largest banks in the country. “There is no choice for the lender. There is no corporate debt market in our country.”
Yet the banks clearly are not willing to go along without exacting a price. In 2010, the government cancelled treasury auctions because it received bids for interest rates from banks that were too high. And banks are less willing to invest in longer term treasury bills, forcing the government to do most of its borrowing on three-month treasury bills. Both measures seem to suggest that the bond market in Karachi rates the government a lot less than AAA.
The banks, it seems, are worried that while the government may simply print the money and pay them back, doing so would create so much inflation that their assets would be rendered severely devalued. This is not an idle fear: it is exactly what happened between June 2007 and November 2008.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 27th, 2011.
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I think Mustafa and Sobia have pretty much covered all the points on which this article is technically incorrect - unlike Mustafa, however, when I read the title on the main page I expected something ludicrous.
I would, however, like to take this opportunity to decry the extreme lack of meaningful financial or economic analysis in any Pakistani newspapers. I mean, we have over 100 CFA charterholders, hundreds of finance degree-holders etc., and all we get is crap.
On the flip side, it is interesting to read these two articles on the same day:
http://tribune.com.pk/story/240209/last-ditch-option-ipps-ask-govt-to-invoke-sovereign-guarantees/
http://tribune.com.pk/story/240478/president-gives-go-ahead-to-adb-on-diamer-basha-dam/
S&P downgraded the US not on its actual inability to pay its debts, but because of political instability caused by the debt ceiling vote. they even said that a USD 2 trillion miscalculation was irrelevant because of that. So based on the above two articles, and the high level of mismanagement prevalent in our country, I actually see grounds for downgrading the local rating of Pakistan too!
Mustafa? Sobia? What say?
While S&P has made huge waves by its downgrade of US debt they, alongwith their associates, stand disgraced. This is the same institution that gave AAA ratings to toxic mortgage-backed securities that percipitated the deep financial crisis of 2008 -- from which America and indeed the global economy (with a few exceptions) has yet to emerge.
I believe the US Justice Department is looking into the criminality of their actions. I wish they had done that earlier because it does smack of retaliation.
These rating agencies have been rightly called "hot-beds of conflict of interest". Few people know that they are paid by the very same people they rate! It does not get any more sordid than that.
We does the author wants the creditworthiness of government downgraded INTERNALLY when it only means higher interest rates!!
If a government is not AAA internally, the country has no right to exist!
While it essential that we debate the creditworthiness of our government it has to be done with proper research and analysis. When I started reading this article I thought I was going to get an interesting perspective from an informed and knowledgeable source. Instead I was treated to a blend of factual inaccuracies and poor analysis.
First of all using the S&P rating of B- and contrasting it with the sovereign rating of AAA from JCR and PACRA is pointless. S&P ratings first of all are from the perspective of foreign lenders who have to worry about PKR devaluation, credit default swaps and FX reserves. If the S&P does not differentiate between Pakistan's USD and PKR denominated debt it has clearly not done its homework not unlike the author of this article.
Secondly the claim that there is no corporate debt market in Pakistan is plan and simple wrong. There are over 100 different corporate bonds in the domestic market which have been issued by companies like UBL, Bank Al Habib, ENGRO, Mobilink, PEL, ORIX, Standard Chartered and Allied Bank to name a few. These bond issues are traded on a daily basis and anybody claiming there is no such market obviously has no practical experience in the matter.
Thirdly the claim that the government cannot get people to invest in longer term treasury bills is another factually incorrect statement. Please check the recent Treasury Bill Auctions and you will find that participation is heavily tilted towards the one year T bill as compared to the three month T bill. Secondly contrary to your claim above, the government has been able to raise more than its stated target in its PIB auctions which are expressly for longer term i.e. 3 year to 30 year government debt.
I know our economy is plagued by severe structural fiscal problems, that the corporate debt market is in its infancy, that tax collection is low and government borrowing is high. I also think it is essential that we debate the strength of our government's sovereign guarantees. But that debate should start from an objective and accurate assesment of our problems, not with articles that have done no research and are premised on inaccuracies.
PACRA and JCR-VIS are both a joke anyway
The author in this article doesn't call out that Moody's rating for India as Baa3 is for India's foreign currency debt. On the other hand, ICRA's AAA rating for India is the government's local currency debt. The two debts are obviously different, and hence rated differently. This has nothing to do with ICRA being a local agency v/s Moody's being a foreign agency.