This issue is discussed in past on the forum multiple time. One which I remember it this thread:
And if you go through the thread, you will see that back then too there was no unanimous answer to this. Apart from what is already discussed in this and that thread, only points I would like to make are:
- Making conclusions at top of cycle is generally not very helpful. Today we are at top of gold cycle, Trailing returns look very attractive and hence in hindsight it looks like issuing SGB is a dumb decision for govt. But that was not always the case, nor it will continue.
To give some idea, I bought my first SGB in 2016, and till 2020 returns on it were really mediocre. Till that time it appeared, I made a dumb mistake buying it and govt looked smart. Post covid things have changed
- Govt does lot of odd things which is difficult to quantify simply based on ROI, especially in short term. I think this is one of those things.