By Claus Vistesen, on November 30th, 2010
So, the butcher’s bill on Ireland is in and stands at 85 billion Euro jointly financed by the EU (the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) and the European Financial Stability Mechanism), the IMF and bilateral loans from a number of countries including Sweden, Denmark and the UK. Of course, it only worked a couple of hours and today markets are reeling again in the face of the Eurozone crisis which seem to have no end. Worryingly, markets seem to be contend on going for all together larger game this time around with Spanish bonds bearing the brunt of the attention.
In principle and fact I agree with RBS’ Harvinder Singh (via FT Alphaville’s Neil Hume) that the only possible end game at this point is that things get so bad that some form of fiscal unity and/or a joint Eurozone pooling of risk through the issuance of an EMU bond. Illuminati’s Jim O’Neill is a little more sanguine although he ultimately also invokes the point that the core and especially Germany must go all in, in its effort and comittment to keep the Eurozone in one piece.
I know that all this may come of as scaremongerings, but the farther we move forward into this mess, the more it is beginning to look like calm and calculated analysis rather than prophecies of doom.
So, Can Germany Pay?
On that note, I thought that I would highlight an issue which has not yet been debated much in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. In this sense, we always hear about CDS or yield spreads to Germany and still; to the extent that we are talking “EU money” we know that it is the German taxpayer who must foot the majority of the bill.
So, can Germany really pay all this?
The recent economic narrative on Germany suggests that it can. In fact, Germany has been hailed as the rock onto which all other shipwrecked European economies must turn to in the hour of need with GDP growth rates in Q2 and Q3 (2010) exceeding expectations. And with the German export machine back in full swing, there seems to be nothing standing in the way of Germany saving the world, let alone Europe.
Now, this is not entirely true of course and one major part of the difficulties encountered in the course of the past months has been the obvious (and natural) resistance of the German taxpayer in simply accepting to pay for the mistakes and overspending of others. And one would assume that the reluctance to do so stems not only from a feeling of unfairness, but also from a genuine fear that Germany simply won’t be able to pay even if the good intentions can be mustered in the first place. As such the following point emphasized today by a friend of mine is important;
Spain’s external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% (closer to 90% today) of GDP more than it has external assets. As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I. We don’t know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.
So, when Merkel notes that bondholders must also share the losses she is naturally referring to the fact that Germany cannot be expected to bailout all the Eurozone’s periphery’s international investors. However, what she is perhaps forgetting is that Germany itself holds a non-neglieble amount of those very same net external assets that Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have built up.
However, even considering this point, the reality is still that as the economic conditions of the periphery has deteriorated and morphed into a calamity so it seems that the well known structural problems of the so-called core have been forgotten. Beauty, wealth and economic travails are as most other things a relative entity it seems.
On that note, allow me turn the tables on the discourse a little. Consequently, the Economist recently ran a special report on Japan essentially focusing almost entirely on the fact that Japan is the most rapidly ageing economy in the world and this represents the main challenge for Japan as an economy and as a society. I am a demographic fan boy, I know, but still the analysis in the Economist makes sense. Deal with the demographic challenge or else …
So, which economy might then be the second most rapidly ageing economy in the world? Right, you guessed it; Germany.
(click on pictures for better viewing)
I should think that these charts are rather self-explanatory and note in this context that the German debt/GDP has gone from about 63% of GDP in 2007 to 84% in 2010. Further, according to the IMF this will increase to just hy of 90% in 2014. Naturally, none of these calculations factor in any extra liabilities Germany will have to assume to keep the Eurozone together in that period, so your guess is as good as mine as to the final figure in 2015.
The question which seems to whisper in the wind (and which may sooner rather than later turn into a roar) is then just how Germany is going to be able to shoulder all those bailouts when the real bailout it needs to think is the one of its own welfare state as the weight of population ageing sets in. Of course, Germany could in principle sacrifice any build up of assets in Asia, Latin America and the rest of the emerging world and devote its entire surplus powers to financing excess investment and consumption in the Eurozone periphery and Eastern Europe ad infinitum. But somehow, this does not strike me as a viable long term solution since this has already been tried and well, it got us into this mess in the first place.
I guess, the contrarian Masters of the Universe might immediately see this as a case for buying German CDS in a punt on the event that the benchmark itself came under pressure. I think this would be premature, but there is definitely a narrative and discourse missing in the current Eurozone debacle not about whether Germany is willing to pay, but indeed, whether she will be able too.
By Eldon Mast, on November 29th, 2010
On Monday, markets will likely applaud the 85 billion euro bail-out of the Irish economy from the International Monetary Fund and European Union financing.
Over the weekend, the rescue package was approved at a meeting of European Union finance ministers in Brussels.
The overall financing includes up to 35 billion euro to support the Irish banking system – 10 billion euro of which will likely be needed immediately.
The Irish government applied for the loan last Sunday when it conceded the bank crisis was too big for the country to handle on its own.
IMF managers and directors say the Irish authorities propose “a clear and realistic package of policies to restore Ireland’s banking system to health.” The program and funding will put its public finances on a sound footing, “and bring Ireland’s economy back on track.”
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By Claus Vistesen, on November 19th, 2010
 The Eurozone seems to be the place where the party never ends these days as one skeleton after the other comes rattling out of the closet. Indeed, one has the impression that history is in the making these days and the only thing we can hope is that it will be for the better.
In truth however, I felt a good measure of sympathy for Ireland today as I read the Bloomberg report about how the country is now essentially on its way to accepting a deal that will have aid delivered from the EU, the IMF and, most painfully, from England.
Irish rebels fought for independence during World War I, boasting they served “neither King nor Kaiser.” Ireland may now have to do exactly that to qualify for a bailout partly funded by both Britain and Germany. Prime Minister Brian Cowen is edging toward accepting a rescue package that may threaten the country’s low-tax policies and put voters on the hook to repay loans the central bank says may be worth “tens of billions” of euros. For critics of Cowen’s Fianna Fail party, which governed Ireland through its decade-long boom, national pride is at stake. Cowen has “squandered” independence for a “German bailout with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor,” the Irish Times newspaper said yesterday. The government should be “ashamed that Fianna Fail should be the ones to surrender sovereignty,” said Michael Noonan, finance spokesman for Fine Gael, the largest opposition party.
However, Ireland largely made the mistakes itself of which the biggest no doubt was to guarantee its banking system and essentially gamble that a) the economy could swallow the liabilities of its broken banks (which with a deficit of 32% of GDP in 2010 it obviously can’t) and b) that help could be reached elsewhere.
Iza’s report yesterday over at FT Alphaville about just how much European governments have promised during the past 2 years makes an extraordinarily important point and it well worth reading in its entirety;
As all eyes focus on what should be done about the Irish banking crisis, perhaps it’s time for the European Union, IMF and other related parties to take a closer look at some of the factors that may have exacerbated the problem. After all, it’s now becoming abundantly clear that the dishing out of an elaborate 100 per cent deposit guarantee back in September 2008 was largely nothing more than a massive bluff designed to steal attract deposit flows from neighbouring states to for the purpose of propping up Irish banks. Furthermore, as we’ve mentioned already, the EFSF is already turning out to resemble something like Paulson’s bazooka in its own right too. Which means — with everything becoming a high-stakes game of ‘Call my bluff‘ — it could be time to restrict the ability of sovereigns generally to randomly guarantee things they clearly can’t afford to guarantee in the first place. (If confidence in the Eurozone is to be restored properly that is.) After all, let’s just look at the dynamics of the Irish deposit guarantee itself.
So, this is about a deposit guarantees which if course is one of those guarantees a government never really can make due on in the case of the ultimate rout à l’End of Days. Yet, the point has general validity far beyond the issue of deposit guarantees. Basically, Ireland promised to make due for its banks … now that it appear that she can’t, it is up to the rest of the Eurozone to pay.
No doubt this view is shared in principle as well as sentiment by the prowling Proell from Austria who recently fired two stray missiles into the raging debate on how best to deal with the issue of solidarity in the Eurozone. Earlier in the week, he raised serious questions about whether Austria would make due on its promist to spit into the common funding scheme for Greece now that it was obvious that the country was missing its budget target yet again and most recently, he said to Bloomberg reporters that he was very interested in talking with Ireland about its famously low corporate tax rate in connection with the bailout.
You know, quid pro quo and all that.
Now, before we get into the blame game I should note that I agree with the Economist in their most recent take on the Eurozone mess in which they implicitly highlight that while timing is always difficult in politics there is still a continuum between good and bad and Merkel’s sudden urge to remind bondholders that they too might take a loss falls in the latter category.
At an EU summit at the end of October the German chancellor won agreement that any future euro-zone rescue scheme should include a mechanism for an orderly sovereign-debt default. The principle was absolutely right: unless default is a possibility, bond investors have no reason to distinguish between good and bad credits. But the idea of making bondholders lose money when sovereign credits turn sour was aired without any guidance about how and when it might apply. Astonishingly, the Germans failed to put together a detailed proposal for the summit.
I should make it clear that I fully back to idea of bondholders taking their share of the loss since if this is not a real possibility there is no way in which to secure an orderly default which is inevitably coming sooner rather than later to some of the most vulnerable Eurozone economies. Especially, and going back to Izabella’s point above the practical distinction between using bailout funds for governents and not banks is a mirage exactly because promises have been made and anectodal contracts have been signed with the electorate and, one is tempted to note, the devil herself. As I have said before, you may not like it and I agree with Izabella that the EU and IMF would be wise to monitor just what promises that are made in the future.
And speaking of promises; if Ireland seems to be mellow enough to be put into the bailout fold, there is another small country left in the waiting room in the form of Portugal. Again I think that the Economist has the right answer;
If only both sides gave up posturing, they would agree that the European rescue funds should be used to stabilise Ireland’s banks, insisting only on certain budget targets in return. Such a deal should satisfy Ireland’s euro-zone partners, which want an end to the uncertainty, and the European Central Bank (ECB), on which Ireland’s banks have become overly reliant for funding. It would also be wise to offer a similar deal to Portugal. Its banks are dependent on ECB support, and it too is in the bond markets’ sights.
I am not exactly tuned up on the actual difference between just pouring money into the banks or giving it to the sovereign which then uses the funds to make due on a foolhardy promise to secure the entire domestic banking sector’s liabilities. But really, the distinction should be next to none I think. And if you think that all this about Portugal is just me trying to kick up a bad mood, Bloomberg pulled one better on me with this elegant report about how investors are turning their attention away from Ireland and over to … well, you guessed it I think;
The markets indicate that country is Portugal with 10-year bond yields of 6.88 percent, compared with 8.26 percent in Ireland and 11.62 percent in Greece, which received rescue funds in May from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said Nov. 15 that while “there is a risk of contagion,” that doesn’t mean the country will seek financial aid. “Portugal isn’t in the situation that it is now because of Ireland,” said Steven Mansell, director of interest-rate strategy at Citigroup Global Markets Ltd. in London. “If Ireland reaches an agreement to tap the European Financial Stability Facility or some other mechanism to support its banking sector, I don’t think that will alleviate the pressure on Portugal.”
So, it seems as if the next stop might very well be far western rim of the Eurozone and its beautiful Algarve coastline.
By Claus Vistesen, on October 15th, 2010
It is not that I don’t enjoy a good old bull/teflon run as much as the next guy but just to provide some form of balance to the current QEasy Money Hymn I almost choked on my oatmeal earlier this week when I loaded up Bloomberg and learned that everything suddenly was fine in the erstwhile whipping boy (alongside Greece) of the Eurozone as the economy apparently has the cash to starve off any foreign bond vigilantes;
(quote Bloomberg)
Ireland expects its 20 billion-euro ($28 billion) cash pile to stave off a Greek-style rescue, as the government taps the funds to avoid paying record rates to borrow. The government canceled next week’s debt auction and another scheduled for November after the yield on 10-year Irish bonds rose to a record 454 basis points above benchmark German bunds. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has said Ireland is “fully funded” through the middle of 2011. The country has 4.4 billion euros of bonds maturing next year, compared with about 27 billion euros in Greece.
I find this fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all there is root of the problem itself in the form of Anglo Irish Bank which will cost Ireland perhaps up to 30 billion Euros and will be responsible for a fiscal deficit in 2010 to the tune of of an unbelievable 32% of GDP. Naturally, this is expected to be a one-off expense and the whole exercise on cancelling auctions is because Ireland feels that the yields it would be able to borrow for at the moment would not reflect the long term health of the economy.
This makes sense. Why borrow if you don’t have to and especially if you are not happy with the terms put forward by your potential creditor. On this point I am, in principle, on Ireland’s side as it were. But what if costs for bailing out Irish banks are understated? Indeed, what is the real cost of assuming the entire bad loan book of Irish banks with no haircuts to bondholders or no restructuring of any kind? I don’t know, but more importantly; I am not sure the people concerned in Ireland know either. After all, the fact we are now looking at a +30% deficit as % of GDP in 2010 was not part of any of the official rescue manuals I think.
Consequently, let me throw another number at you; 3 % of GDP which is the fiscal deficit targeted for 2014 and which the market is supposed to take as collateral for a lower yield on Irish debt offerings in 2011.
Yet, is this plausible?
Basically, you have a confirmed 32%/GDP deficit today and you are promising to bring this down to 3% in a manner of 3 years. What are your assumptions here? What kind of nominal growth in GDP is build into the model? How will national debt evolve over this period? I am sure the good people at the National Treasury Management Agency are busy calculating just that as I type, but the problem is more profound.
Ireland has basically made the bet that in using its remaining reserves today and thus avoiding going to the market it can bring back its house in order and then return to borrow at that time, but this is circular thinking. The main question is whether Ireland has enough money to bail out its banking system such as it is. Alan McQuaid, quoted by Bloomberg, puts it well;
“They are taking a gamble that the budget will deliver and get spreads down,” said Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers in Dublin. “If that doesn’t happen, maybe you skip a few auctions at the beginning of the year. But at some point, you have to go to the market. If you can’t go to the market, then you have to look at outside aid.”
And Danske is even more sanguine, but then again they would be wouldn’t they as they own National Irish Bank and thus effectively depend on this gamble to succeed (at least in terms of the health of their Irish operations).
“The government has a significant problem” unless yields fall, said Soerensen of Danske Bank, which owns Dublin-based National Irish Bank. “But it isn’t under any immediate pressure to raise cash, and even in the unlikely event that the government had to call upon IMF/EU aid, investors would still get paid. There isn’t going to be a default.”
But I think that we are still missing the main point here. This is not only a question of how dubious it is that Ireland can get its house back in order (and what kind of economic pain it will take) it is also a matter of whether it is in Ireland’s interest to enter the market at all. Essentially, the current interest rates are unpayable for Ireland today but also in the middle of 2011 since this is where, presumably, the full force of fiscal contraction will be put on the Irish economy.
So, my reading of this is that Ireland has now played itself into whatever deal it can broker with the IMF and EU and while I may be persuaded otherwise by a credible fiscal plan it is not the actual promise I will be looking at but the assumptions of debt/gdp and nominal GDP growth which underlies it.
Until then, Ireland can continue to heed the old proverb that cash is king; it sure is … until you run out.
By Claus Vistesen, on October 5th, 2010
The Eurozone has its “does not compute” moment
First, it was there, then it left and then suddenly the Spanish prime minister Zapatero assured us that it was gone, but somehow the lingering European crisis of confidence in relation to the status of sovereign and private debt sustainability in key membership economies never seem to have gone away.
Now, please don’t think that the headline above is in any way related to the flurry of whether Spain has been faking its GDP numbers. FT Alphaville ran the story, got cold feet and took it down (although I reckon you can easily find the report if you try). Now, the flurry was real and the questions asked by the report fair I think. Clearly, if it was such nonsense it should be easily refutable and while some of the explanations I have seen for the the sudden dis-correlation between the Market Services Gross Value Added (GVA) and the Indicator of Activity in the Service Sector (IASS/SSAI) make sense (especially the import component point) the Spanish statistical office is still mute and the ministry of finance is just playing the part of an insulted child. So, if those of us who are skeptic are so stupid then really, now is the chance for those much more clever than us to give us a lecture.
But I digress.
Moving on, Ireland has recently been at the center stage of things and the latest number from the finance ministry is that the butcher’s bill for bailing out Anglo Irish amounts to more than 30% of GDP in the form of a running deficit in 2010. That is a almost unbelievable number by any standards and I would take very little comfort here in the fact that Ireland remains fully financed until mid 2011. What really matters here is that with this amount of debt overhang that needs to be transferred to the government’s balance sheet and ultimately over to the private sector in the form of taxes Ireland is being played straight into the hands of the IMF and the European Stability Fund. But this is not only about Ireland since the all the fundamental questions are still left unanswered.
- How do you correct external competitiveness deficiency from within a currency union at the same time as implementing fiscal austerity without risking debt levels to spin out of control?
- How long should Southern Europe and Ireland endure deflation relative to the core to restore external competitiveness (will Germany accept a lower external surplus as result)?
- How might a sovereign restructuring in a Eurozone economy play out?
The last one is particularly important since no official inside the Eurozone has even begun to voice an opinion on this even if it is blatantly obvious that this is where we are headed. I mean, I am not talking about the entire stock of PIGS bonds being wiped out and marked to 0, but merely of a reasonable and fair estimate of the haircut we all know that is coming. Yet, so much water has gone under the bridge that it is difficult to see how such a memo would look. For starters, the stress tests carried out recently on Eurozone banks would have to be, uhm, redone with proper assumptions of haircuts and impairment in the context of real sovereign stress in the Eurozone.
However, what really clinched it for me and what leads me to note that we have now had one of (several to come) those does not compute moments was Wolfgang Munchau’s basic bond arithmetic of the the European Stability Funds lending conditions and the means with which it allows access to its funds. From FT Alphaville …
Münchau comes up with a rough estimate that borrowers could end up paying a total interest rate of about 8 per cent — far above and much more than the 5 per cent Greece paid when it tapped its €110bn European Union emergency loan back in May.
BarCap’s back-of-the-envelope calculations has the total borrowing cost above 8 per cent. That’s about 80bps (3m Euribor) + 300bps (EFSF mark-up) + 150bps (due to the fact that the interest has to be paid on the whole loan) + 300bps (service fees). As BarCap also note, requesting EFSF funds would also likely entail some strict policy conditions, similar to IMF conditionality.
Now, let me be quite clear here. 8% or even anything in that vicinity makes the whole exercise quite pointless since there is no way that any of the Eurozone economies would be able to pay off their debts at these conditions. So, if one or more Eurozone economies were to find themselves in a situation where they could no longer tap international bond markets due to the yield on offer, the alternative would be no better. I called this a catch 22 recently and even wrote a paper, in part, about it. However, Munchau’s article makes it all so clear. Whatever funds that are paid out of the stability fund at these conditions would in itself be subject to a haircut in the context of an inevitable sovereign debt restructuring and thus it is really and ultimately a question of on whose balance sheet the final loss will be put. One would only hope that this soon will come to compute a little better with the agenda that will and has to emerge in the Eurozone at some point.
Some (academic) food for thought
As many of you might have noticed I am about to start my research degree here in the UK and while I am in general surprised and disappointed about the utter lack of creativity on the part of the economic faculty in terms of constructing a curriculum with the sole purpose of testing your abilities in math (rather than you know, uhm economics!) I hope and believe it will be fun. On that note and while the cracks have clearly not yet transcended to the way underlings such as myself are treated, I found the following paper (The Dahlem Report) interesting and important (thanks Scott for sending it over).
The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real-world markets. The economics profession has failed in communicating the limitations, weaknesses, and even dangers of its preferred models to the public. This state of affairs makes clear the need for a major reorientation of focus in the research economists undertake, as well as for the establishment of an ethical code that would ask economists to understand and communicate the limitations and potential misuses of their models.
Now, as an immediate testament to the importance of this paper and echoing my points above I can say for certain that my generation of economists will be trained no differently on a PhD level than they were, I suspect, 30 years ago. Same old axioms, same old models, same booring (and often stupidly difficult) math problems. Two of the co-signers of the paper are David Colander and Alan Kirman and I recommend readers to have a look at their work if you want a good critique of the way we (still) do economics today (don’t forget James E. Hartley too). I don’t want to be a cry-baby, but surely; running through the proof of why a utility function should and might exist (in mathematical terms) is not only waste of good time, it is an insult to any serious economist eager to get on with some real work. But now, I really(!) digress.
To balance things a bit I did actually find much enjoyment in Oded Galor’s recent synthesis of what really kicked off the demographic transition back in the days of the industrial revolution.
This paper develops the theoretical foundations and the testable implications of the various mechanisms that have been proposed as possible triggers for the demographic transition.Moreover, it examines the empirical validity of each of the theories and their signi
cance forthe understanding of the transition from stagnation to growth. The analysis suggests thatthe rise in the demand for human capital in the process of development was the main triggerfor the decline in fertility and the transition to modern growth.
Here in the 21st century such a paper essentially reads as a piece of economic history as the demographic transition never really ended and whereas some form of the quantity/quality tradeoff might have started the whole process, we are now dealing with a much more complicated process in which both a quantum and tempo effect acts as a driver of the fertility decline (and eventual or potential(?) catch-up as the tempo effect fades). However, Galor’s recent paper provides an important finetuned representation of the way we think about the quantity/quality trade off and as such it is important.
I also take more than a passing interest here since it is after all my field and while I eventually opted for the original quantity/quality model by Becker and Lewis in my thesis I have almost been turned to Oded Galor’s theory with this recent paper. Yet, the two theories are still ultimately very close to each other and for laymen the finer grained theoretic subtleties of the trade-off are not important.
Perhaps you should read Oded Galor first and then the Dahlem paper afterwards. Actually, yes you definitely should!
By Eldon Mast, on June 23rd, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said credit availability is improving and companies are building up unprecedented cash reserves, signs that the U.S. economy continues on a path of increased growth.
Further the Secretary claimed on Tuesday that the government’s management of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program has yield the desire results while costing much less than originally estimated. The unpopular program he claims “played a critical role” in loosening access to credit and putting the economy back on a solid footing.
“Credit conditions overall, which dragged our economy into a deep recession in 2007, no longer pose an obstacle to growth,” Geithner said in his testimony to the Congressional Oversight Panel. Geithner pointed to U.S. firms that are now raising money in capital markets “and have built up record cash reserves, which will eventually be reinvested and fuel growth.”
The TARP program was criticized by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers as favoring Wall Street over small businesses. Many thought the government would likely lose all of the $700 billion lawmakers had allocated to rescue large banks as well as several U.S. automakers and housing loan backers.
Surprisingly, the cost to taxpayers has now plummeted to $105 billion at last estimate, down from an estimate of $341 billion in August. And it seems now that the benefits have thus far continued to outweigh the cost of the program.
Congress authorized TARP in October 2008 to prevent a collapse of the U.S. financial system. Against the predictions of many, companies like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. that borrowed funds have since repaid the government with interest. Additionally because of the return to more palatable market conditions, Geithner said the Treasury plans to sell the remainder of its stake in Citigroup Inc. in an “orderly fashion” by year end, further reducing the overall cost of the rescue program.
In additional good news, prospects for the government’s investments in the auto industry have improved, and the Treasury plans to begin to recover its stake in General Motors Co. after the company has an initial public offering later this year or in 2011.
Losses from government investments in GMAC Inc. “will be less than forecast last year,” the Secretary said.
Geithner said the Obama administration doesn’t plan to extend TARP past its Oct. 3 expiration and called Tuesday’s hearing “a eulogy” for the program.
The TARP loans “did what they were supposed to do,” Geithner continued. The economy wouldn’t have started to rebound “without the dramatic actions we took, however unpopular, to bring down the cost of credit and stabilize the system.”
By Eldon Mast, on May 11th, 2010
“The message has gotten through: the euro zone will defend its money,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters in Brussels early Monday.
With massive resolve after a 14 hour meeting, 16 euro nations agreed to offer financial assistance worth as much as 750 billion euros ($962 billion) to countries under attack from speculators. The European Central Bank (ECB) will counter negative and “severe tensions” in “certain” markets by purchasing government and private debt.
Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit Group in London, quickly released a statement following the ECB announcement: “This truly should be more than sufficient to stabilize markets in the near term, prevent panic and contain the risk of contagion.”
“I think they will have bought themselves a significant amount of time to do the right thing,” said Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“This sets a precedent for the rest of the life of the Central Bank and will have likely surprised even the most seasoned observers,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group. “The ECB’s intervention was necessary to short circuit the negative feedback loop…”
The swift and united action will likely now turn most eyes back onto the fundamentals of a worldwide economic recovery that is accelerating.
By Claus Vistesen, on May 4th, 2010
While Macro Man opted to present a po(p)etic styling on the ongoing hardship in Greece (or was that Grease?) today came with a couple of notable developments in the story and would seem to be honourable and real efforts to calm down markets. Obviously, it is difficult to tell whether this is a true attempt to save Greece from what increasingly looks inevitable or whether it is an attempt to make sure the debacle does not turn out to be a Eurzone rout. In any case, action it seems is entering the stage on the cost of fiddling.
Firstly and as is customary in these kinds of situation, the Eurozone group of finance ministers gathered Sunday to approve the whopping € 110 bn aid package which had been rumoured last week. Euro-region governments are betting 110 billion euros ($146 billion) in economic medicine for Greece will be enough to inoculate the rest of their region from contagion.
(quote Bloomberg)
Finance ministers approved the unprecedented bailout yesterday for Greece after a week that saw the country’s fiscal crisis spread to Portugal and Spain. At the same time, they refused to say how they would help other indebted nations if the need arose, calling Greece a “special case.”
The risk is that investors will shift focus to other euro nations in the absence of a clear aid plan for the 16-nation bloc’s weakest members. The extra yield investors demand to buy Portuguese debt over German bunds surged to the highest since at least 1997 and Spain’s IBEX 35 stock index fell the most in three months last week. The euro fell against the dollar today. “It is far from assured that this program will forcefully counter contagion risk,” said Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, which runs the world’s biggest bond fund. “Heavily exposed creditors” may try to head off potential losses and sell bonds, “increasing the pressure on core European governments to also provide a backstop for Portugal and Spain.”
Greece yesterday pledged to push through 30 billion euros ($40 billion) of budget cuts, equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, in return for loans at a rate of around 5 percent for three years. The EU and the International Monetary Fund, which is co- financing the bailout, also agreed to set up a bank stabilization fund. With downgrades threatening to render Greek bonds ineligible as collateral for its loans, the European Central Bank today said it will accept all Greek government debt when lending to banks.
Two questions immediately arise here. One is the extent to which the bailout put up front as it were is enough to avoid contagion to Spain and Portugal (or god forbid Italy). Basically, it was this very issue which raised the stakes last week as the S&P moved in to downgrade both Spain and Portugal and where markets began to play the dreaded spread game as yields on Spanish and Portuguese government deb widened alarmingly. The second is the more technical question of whether this will be enough to avoid an eventual default in Greece. This depends both on the real scale of the situation (i.e. how many more skeletons can we expect to rattle out of the closet) as well as whether Greece has the actual capacity to carry through the austerity measures demanded. I am not talking about in principle here, but more in reality and with all the practical issues of having to fight your own citizens with water canons three days a week as well as accounting for the loss of production when Greece turns to the street in stead of to the offices and factory line. I am an optimist by nature, but it looks difficult, very difficult.
However, perhaps the second news coming in today might help a little bit even if it was not unexpected. Consequently and in light of the fact the Greek government bonds has long been fairing below the pedigree otherwise needed to act as collateral at the ECB (well de-facto, if not de-jure yet), Trichet and his colleagues extended a helping hand today by specifically making Greek govies eligible as collateral at the ECB’s asset facilities.
“The ECB is a key player in the rescue package designed to help Greece and it is clearly buying insurance against the likelihood of further multiple downgrades of the Greek debt, something that might lead to a halt of ECB financing to the Greek banks,” said Silvio Peruzzo, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London.
Further downgrades from credit-rating companies had threatened to render Greek bonds ineligible for collateral for ECB loans after Standard & Poor’s last week cut the nation to junk status. Had Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings followed suit, Greece’s debt would have no longer been accepted under the previous rules, threatening to inflict further pain on the economy and its banks.
This will definitely help, but it was also a foregone conclusion. Consequently, had the ECB chosen to stand aside as Greece was further downgraded by the rating agencies the yields would almost surely have risen to levels not only inconsistent with proper debt management but also ultimately to levels forcing an instant default. The point I am making here is simply that if the ECB had chosen not to do this, they would have explicitly sent the message that it is ok for the market to discriminate markedly and decisively between Eurozone debt issued by different countries and presumably, it is exactly the opposite message that they want to be sending at this point in time.
So where does it go from here.
Well, to me Greece is doomed and while this may sound excessively alarmist I see no way out for this economy. The real nutbreaker will be whether Portugal and Spain are the next one to follow. One default and you blame the defaultee, three and you blame the system and it is exactly the imminent risk of the second (almost unthinkable) scenario that I recently dealt with in a more lenghty format.
Don’t get me wrong, I salute the effort and I sincerely hope that the Eurozone will make it through in one piece, but at this point in time I need to be building hedges around my erstwhile optimism.
By Rok Spruk, on May 4th, 2010
NY Times recently reported on the agreed financial rescue assitance to Grecce from EMU (€110 billion) and IMF ($145 billion). Alongside Ireland and Mediterranean countries, the economic recovery of EMU is hampered by a high mountain of public debt and unfavorable macroeconomic data on growth, employment and current account.
Public debt in the European Union in 2009
 Source: Eurostat (2009)
The graph I attached, shows the level of public debt in EU countries in 2009. Solid horizontal blue line shows the 60 percent debt-to-GDP ratio required by Maastricht criteria for each EMU entrant.
The underlying data (link) on economic recovery in the US point out a strong and robust recovery. The data from Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the US economy grew by 3.2 percent in Q1:2010 continued from a remarkable 4.6 percent growth in Q4:2009. While private consumption expenditure growth increased by 2 percentage points from the previous quarter, private domestic investment rebounded by 14.8 percent in Q1:2010 after a remarkable 46.1 percent increase in Q4:2009. In addition, labor productivity in Q4:2009 increased by 6.9 percent – the largest quarterly increase since Q3:2003 (link) On the other side, recent revision (link) of quarterly growth rate in the EMU has shown that quarterly GDP in Q1:2010 increased by 0.0 percent, revised from 0.1 percent. Industrial confidence, an important measure of manufacturing outlook, further decline by 12.2 index points.
The macroeconomic outlook for the EMU is downsized by high public debt and negative budget deficit which led 10-year bond premium spread between EMU economies and Germany (link). The premium spread between Greece and Germany stood at 8.57 percentage points on April 28 while the spread between Ireland and Germany was at 2.54 percentage points.
High level of fiscal deficits restrains the economic recovery of the EMU countries. In 2009, Spain, Ireland and Greece faced the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio while Denmark’s 2 percent deficit-to-GDP ratio was the lowest in the European Union. NY Times recently collected annual dataset on public debt and budget deficit (link) in which an overview of key public finance indicators is availible.
The prospects of economic recovery in the EMU are further downgraded by unfavorable growth forecast. One of the key questions during the ongoing debt crisis has been whether the EMU will sustain fiscal discrepancy within the EMU since asymmetric fiscal policy undermine the ability of the common monetary policy. Even though Greece’s debt crisis is the core of the debate regarding future viability of the single currency, growth estimates for Spain and Italy in 2010/2011 will determine the mid-term macroeconomic stability of the eurozone. European Commission recently updated the quarterly economic growth estimates for eurozone countries (link). Depending on the absorption of financial market spillovers into investment and net exports, economic growth estimates for Italy and Spain are quite pessimistic. After an estimated 0.1 percent growth rate in Q2, Spain’s economy is likely to contract in Q3 by -0.2 percent and experience a slight rebound in Q4:2010. Quarterly economic forecast for Italy is positive throughout the year although the economic growth rate is likely to be close to zero. However, Italy’s economic growth rate is likely to keep the increasing pace towards the end of the year although current macroeconomic outlook deters consumption, investment and inventories’ contribution to GDP growth mainly because of high unemployment rate and sluggish productivity growth.
Robust economic growth is essential to the cure of high public debt. Since EMU countries have adopted a single currency, policymakers cannot trigger exchange-rate adjustment through currency depreciation. The latter would spill into higher inflation and modestly reduce the volume of public debt. Due to high unemployment and slower recovery of inventories, inflation rate is unlikely to rebound to pre-crisis levels.
EMU’s most problematic countries’ recovery is unlikely to be robust given public debt and deficit constraint on quarterly growth outlook. Without a prudent fiscal tightening, lower government spending, there will be a bleak economic outlook for the future of EMU countries which could result in a decade-long period of low growth, high unemployment and Japan-styled deflationary persistence.
By Claus Vistesen, on May 3rd, 2010
Edward does a nice job to sum up the flurry of the past week which saw the ongoing problems in Greece elevated to a full fledged systemic crisis in the Eurozone economy which, if it ultimately blows, will have ramifications far beyond the borders of the European continent. Being a firm believer in the notion of markets as conversation it is funny to see that although Lehmann Brothers is dead and buried, people are talking an awful lot about it.
Consequently, the official figure for a Greek bailout has now risen to EUR120-130bn and with S&P downgrading Spain on Wednesday it suggests that the ultimate cost of this mess may exceed the already dizzying number note above many times over. As the Economist neatly puts it this week;
THERE comes a moment in many debt crises when events spiral out of control. As panic sets in, bond yields lurch sickeningly upwards and fear spreads to shares and currencies. In September 2008 the failure of once-stellar Lehman Brothers almost brought down the world’s banking system. A decade earlier, Russia’s chaotic default on its sovereign debt rocked the credit markets, felling Long Term Capital Management, a hugely profitable American hedge fund. When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion.
As the Economist goes on to argue events are indeed spiraling out of control, a statement with which I concur in full. One question then which, at the moment, may not seem particularly important is how we managed to get ourselves into this mess.
In my most recent working paper entitled Quantifying and Correcting Eurozone Imbalances – Fighting the Debt Snowball I try to provide an intial answer to this question. Well actually, I don’t set out to address this question specifically. But, I do think that if you want to understand why the Eurozone has ended up where it is today and why it is essentially threatened as an economic entity you need to take a long hard look at the issue of intra-Eurozone imbalances and why correcting them from within the Eurozone is almost impossible without some form of disruptive sovereign default in key member economies.
As an introduction, here is the abstract:
This paper quantifies and discusses the concept of Eurozone current account imbalances. Using panel data estimations, the analysis shows how the external positions of the Eurozone economies can be modelled as a function of divergences in unit labour costs. Specifically, the results indicate that the formation of EMU has exacerbated the extent to which even relatively small divergences in unit labour costs may materialize in large current account imbalances. These results are framed in the context of the idea of a debt snowball effect and why the idea of an internal devaluation as a tool to correct external imbalances is inconsistent with the current setup of the Eurozone.
So, do I bring anything new to the table in terms of the overall discourse on the Eurozone’s economic problems? Not really. The story I tell is pretty well known but I still see the main contribution of the paper as the attempt to give a concrete quantitative perspective on the effect of divergent inflation rates (in my case unit labour costs) in an economic setting where countries are grouped together with seperate control over fiscal policy and no sovereign monetary policy and exchange rate.
Crucially, I argue that the forces which have lead to the build-up of imbalances are joined at the hip with the same forces which make it almost impossible to correct from within the Eurozone. Specifically the idea of a debt snowball effect is a good way to show why it will be almost impossible for some economies to correct their external imbalances without an explosive evolution in government debt and since they need to correct external competitiveness issues in order to achieve economic growth, the whole thing turns into a vice and essentially a catch 22.
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