An Unusual But Interesting Argument Which May Help To Understand Why QE2 Is Now Almost Inevitable

For reasons which aren't worth going into now, I'm reading through a recent report by Deutsche Bank Global Markets Research entitled "From The Golden To The Grey Age" this afternoon. The report (all 100 pages of it, many thanks to researchers Jim Reid and Nick Burns who produced the thing) looks at the extent to which a variety of macro indicators - like GDP growth, inflation rate, equity yields, etc - may have been influenced by demographic forces over the last 100 years or so. It is certainly one of the most systematic reports of its kind I have seen, and well worth losing a Saturday afternoon to read.

But in the middle, there is an argument which caught my eye, and I thought it worth reproducing. Basically the starting point is this chart, which if you haven't seen by now (or something like it) I'm not sure where exactly you've been during the last 2 or 3 years.



Obviously, just the most cursory of glances at the thing should lead even the most untrained of eyes to get the point that what is going on around us is not some passing phenomenon, and that there are deep structural factors at work.

As our Deutsche Bank researchers put it:

As can be seen (from the above chart) there was a step change in the US economy’s indebtedness from the early 1980s onwards and then an additional one in the late 1990s/early 2000s. A similar picture is apparent across most of the Western World.

Basically from the early 1980s to the onset of the Global Financial Crisis the economy added on more debt every year and business cycles were extended as a result. Indeed the Fed and Central Banks around the world were afforded the luxury of operating in a secular falling inflation regime (globalisation) that allowed them to cut rates, further allowing the accumulation of debt, every time the economy may have naturally been rolling over into a normal recession consistent with those seen through history. This debt accumulation undoubtedly helped smooth the business cycle and contributed to the period being known as the ‘Great Moderation’. This period came to a spectacular end with the onset of the crisis and it is possible that going forward we will revert to seeing business/credit cycles more like they were prior to the ‘Great Moderation’.

Now here comes the clever part. Our researchers then go on to take a look at the the average and median length of the 33 business cycles the US economy has seen since 1854. For the overall period they found the average cycle from peak to peak (or trough to trough) lasted 56 months (or 4.7 years). However, the averages are boosted by an occasional elongated "superbusiness cycle", and thus the median length is a much smaller 44 months (3.7 years). As they comment, such numbers must look very strange to those who have only ever analysed business cycles over the last 25-30 years. Within these 33 cycles the contraction period lasted 18 months on average or 14 months in terms of median length. This equated to the economy being in recession 31% or 32% of the time depending on whether you look at the averages or the median numbers. Taking just the period before the “Great Moderation” the average US cycle lasted 5 months less at 51 months (or 4.3 years) with the median at 42 months (3.5 years). Over this period the US economy was in recession 35% and 36% of the time respectively depending on whether you look at averages or the median.

Now we used to think that all of that was behind us, but then we used to think that the "Great Moderation" had gotten things under control, and not simply temporarily extended the cycle length by facilitating long-term-unsustainable levels of indebtedness. So in fact, given that, as they say some sort of cycle or other has been with us since at least biblical time, what we might now expect are more "normal" cycles (in historical terms), which put a little better means shorter ones with more frequent recessions.

"Given all we know about the ‘debt supercycle’, it is likely that the onset of the Global Financial Crisis ended the “Great Moderation” period. Unless we find a way of continually adding more debt at an aggregate level in the Developed World it is likely that we will see much more macro volatility and more frequent business cycles going forward. Given the fact that Developed World Government balance sheets are under pressure, and given that interest rates around the Western World are close to zero, the post-crisis ability to fine tune the business cycle is extremely limited. We may need to put an immense amount of faith in the experimental force of Quantitative Easing to deliver economic stability. This will be an experiment with little empirical evidence as to how it will turn out. For now the base case must be that we revert more towards business cycles more consistent with the long-term historical data".

So then our authors do their calculations concerning the average length of US cycles since 1854 in order to make a rough estimate of when the next few US downturns will start, as illustrated in the following chart.



Now, without dwelling on the gory details, if we look at the spread between the upside, median, and downside cases, we could pretty rapidly come to the conclusion that the next US recession has a high probability of starting sometime between next summer, and the summer of 2012 - which, as you will appreciate, isn't that far away. I am also pretty damn sure that Ben Bernanke and his colleagues over at the Federal Reserve appreciate this point only too well, and hence their imminent decision on more easing, since a recession hitting the US anytime from next summer will really come like a jug of very icy water on that very fragile US labour market, not to mention the ugly way in which it might interact with the US political cycle.

I think the mistake many analysts are making at this point is basing themselves on some sort of assumption like, "if the recession was deep and long, then surely the recovery should be just as pronounced and equally long", but, as the DeutscheBank authors bring to our attention, business cycles just don't work like that.

Now, why I think this is an interesting argument is that the starting point for looking at the recovery is rather different from the norm, in that instead of peering assiduously at the latest leading indicator reading, they do a structural thought experiment, and work backwards from the result. Now, one thing I'm sure Ben Bernanke isn't is stupid, so it does just occur to me that either he, or someone on is team, is well able to carry out a similar kind of reasoning process.


Watch Out, Here Comes The QE2

In fact, it would be an understatement to say that the forthcoming QE2 launch is causing a great deal of excitement in the financial markets. As the news reverberates around the world, it seems more like people are getting themselves ready for some kind of "second coming". Right in the front line of course are the Europeans and the Japanese, and the yen hit yet another 15 year high (this time of 81.11 to the dollar) during the week, while the euro was up at 1.4122 at one point. Greeks, where are you! Can't you engineer another crisis? We need help from someone or we will all capsize in the backwash created by this great ocean liner as it passes.

But joking aside, a weaker USD is going to be both the natural and the intended consequence of the coming bout of additional QE by the Fed, and it will have a strong collateral effect on the already weaked and export dependent economies of the EuroArea and Japan.



With this prospect as the background, it should not come as a surprise that talk of currency wars and competitive devaluations is rising by the day. Japan only last week threatened "resolute action" against China and South Korea, Thailand has placed a 15% tax on bond purchases by non resident investors, and central banks from Brazil to India are either intervening to try and keep their currency from rising too fast, or threatening to do so.

And the seriousness of the situation should not be underestimated. Many have expressed disappointment that the recent IMF meeting couldn't reach agreement, and hope the forthcoming G20 can do so. But really what kind of agreement can there be at this point, if the real problem is the existence of the ongoing imbalances, and the inability or unwillingness of the Japan's, Germany's and China's of this world to run deficits to add some demand to the global pool. Push to shove time has come, I fear, and if this reading is right then it is no exaggeration to say that a protracted and rigourously implemented round of QE2 in the United States could put so much pressure on the euro that the common currency would be put in danger of shattering under the pressure. Japan is already heading back into recession, as the yen is pushed to ever higher levels, and Germany, where the economy has been slowing since its June high, could easily follow Japan into recession as the fourth quarter advances.

Indeed, I think we can begin to discern the initial impact of the QE2 induced surge in the value of the euro in the August goods trade data. The EuroArea 16 have been running a small external trade surplus in recent months, and to some extent the surplus has bolstered the region's growth. It is this surplus that is now threatened by the arrival of the QE2. The first flashing red light should have been the news that German exports were down for the second month running in August, but now we learn from Eurostat that the Euro Area ran a trade deficit during the month.

"The first estimate for the euro area1 (EA16) trade balance with the rest of the world in August 2010 gave a 4.3 bn euro deficit, compared with -2.8 bn in August 2009. The July 20102 balance was +6.2 bn, compared with +11.9 bn in July 2009. In August 2010 compared with July 2010, seasonally adjusted exports rose by 1.0% and imports by 1.8%".

Basically the eurozone countries had been managing to run a timid trade surplus (see chart below, which is a three month moving average to try and iron out some of the seasonal fluctuation) and this had been underpinning growth to some extent. Now this surplus is disappearing, and with it, in all probability, the growth. Maybe we won't get a fully fledged "double dip" in the short term, but surely we will see a renewed recession (and deepening pain) on the periphery and at the very least a marked slowdown in the core.



In fact the current situation is extraordinarily preoccupying. We are now in the fourth year of the present crisis (however you choose to term it, the second great depression, the very long recession, or whatever) and there seems to be no sustainable solution in sight. The underlying problems which gave birth to the crisis are excessive debt (both private and public) and large global imbalances between lender and borrower countries, and neither of these issues has so far been resolved, nor are there proposals on the table which look capable of resolving them.

And unemployment in the United States (which is currently at 9.6%, and may reach 10% by the end of the year) is causing enormous problems for the Obama administration. The US labour market and welfare system are simply not designed to run with these levels of unemployment for any length of time. In Japan the unemployment rate is 5.1%, and in Germany it is under 8%. So people in Washington, not unreasonably ask themselves why the US should shoulder so much extra unemployment and run a current account deficit just to maintain the Bretton Woods system and the reserve currency status of the US Dollar.

My feeling is that the US administration have decided to reduce the unemployment rate, and close the current account deficit, and that the only way to achieve this is to force the value of the dollar down. That way it will be US factories rather than German or Japanese ones that are humming to the sound of the new orders which come in from all that flourishing emerging market demand.

I think it is as simple and as difficult as that.

The problems created by the way the crisis has been addressed now exist on a number of levels. In emerging economies like Brazil, India, Turkey and Thailand, ultra low interest rates in the developed world are creating large inward fund flows which are making the implementation of domestic monetary policy extremely difficult, and creating sizeable distortions in their economies.

At the same time, a number of developed economies like Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom became completely distorted during the years preceding the crisis. Their private sectors got heavily into debt, their industrial sectors became too small, and basically the only sustainable way out for them is to run current account surpluses to burn down some of the accumulated external debt. Traditionally the solution to this kind of problem would be to induce a devaluation in the respective currencies to restore competitiveness, but in the midst of an effectively global crisis doing this is very difficult, and only serves to produce all sorts of tensions. As Krugman once said, "to which planet are we all going to export".

At the same time, two of the world's largest economies - Germany and Japan - have very old populations, which effectively means (to cut a long story short) they suffer from weak domestic demand, and need (need, not feel like) to generate significant export surpluses to get GDP growth and meet their commitments to their elderly population. The very existence of these surpluses also produces tensions, and demands for them to be reduced. But this is just not possible for them, and Japan is the clearest case. For several years Japan benefited from having near zero interest rates and becoming the centre of the so-called global "carry trade", which drove down the currency to puzzling low levels, and made exporting much easier. Large Japanese companies were even expanding domestic production and building new factories in Japan during this period (a development which had Brad Setser scratching his head at the time, trying to work out how the yen could have become so cheap).

Then the crisis broke out, the Federal Reserve took interest rates near to zero, and the United States became the centre of the carry trade. The result is that every time the Fed threatens to do more Quantitative Easing the yen hits new 15 year highs, even while the dollar continues its decline, with the result that Toyota are having a change of heart, and are now thinking of closing a plant in Japan to move it to Mexico. The present situation is just not sustainable for Japan, which is basically being driven back into what could turn out to be quite a deep recession.


Unfortunately I think there is no obvious and simple solution to these problems. As we saw in the 1930s, once you fall into a debt trap, it can take quite a long time to come out again. You need sustained GDP growth and moderate inflation to reduce the burden of the debt, and at the present time in the developed world we are likely to get neither. In the longer term, the only way to handle the presence of some large economies which structurally need surpluses is to find others who are capable of running deficits, but this is a complex problem, since as we have seen in the US case, if the deficit is too large, and runs for too long, the end result is very undesireable. Basically the key has to lie in reducing the wealth imbalance which exists between the developed and the developing world, but this is likely to prove to be a rather painful adjustment process for citizens in the planet's richer countries, so policy makers are somewhat relectuntant to accept its inevitability.


Basically, the structural difficulty we face is that all four major currencies need to lose value - the yen, the US dollar, the pound sterling and the euro - and of course this basically is impossible without a major restructuring of what has become known as Bretton Woods II. The currencies which need to rise are basically the yuan, the rupee, the real, the Turkish lira etc. But any such collective revaluation to be sustainable will need to be tied to a major expansion in the productive capacity of the economies which lie behind those currencies.


In fact, the failure to find solutions is increasingly leading to calls for protectionism and protectionist measures. The steady disintegration of consensus into what some are calling a "currency war" is, as I said above, another sign of this pressure. On one level, the move to protectionism would be the worst of all worlds, so I really hope we will not see this, but if collective solutions are not found, then I think we need to understand that national politicians will come under unabating pressure from their citizens to take just these kind of measures. The likely consequence of them succumbing to this pressure, which I hope we will avoid, would be another deep recession, possibly significantly deeper than the one we have just experienced. And, not least of the worries, the future of the euro is in the balance at the present time.

The structural imbalances which we see at the global level, between say China and the United States, also exist inside the eurozone, between Germany and the economies on the periphery (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece). These latter countries failed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the common currency to carry out the kinds of structural reform needed to raise their long run growth potential, and instead they simply used to cheap money available to get themselves hopelessly in debt. At the same time the crisis has revealed significant weaknesses in the institutional structures which lie behind the monetary union, weaknesses which go way beyond the ability of some members to fail to play by the rules when it comes to their fiscal deficits. Steps are now being taken in a night-and-day non-stop effort to try to put the necessary mechanisms in place, but it is a race against the clock, and it is not at all guaranteed that the attempt will be succesful, especially if the volume of liquidity about to hit the global financial system drives the euro onwards and upwards beyond supportable limits.

And Then There Were None

According to Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero speaking in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday the European sovereign debt crisis is over. "I believe that the debt crisis affecting Spain, and the euro zone in general, has passed," Mr. Zapatero said.

This is excellent news, but it comes with just one proviso, and that is that despite all such reassurances most financial market participants seem to be far from convinced that he is right. True Spain recently raised nearly €4bn in a successful government bond sale, with some observers suggesting the sale constituted but one more sign that what is still the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy had finally broken free from the group of “peripheral” European economies who have severe economic problems and whose debt is viewed by investors as especially risky.

In fact Spain managed to sell €2.7bn of 10-year bonds and almost €1.3bn of 30-year bonds while at the same time bringing yields down noticeably from their earlier highs - to 4.144 percent in the case of the 10-year issue ( from 4.864 percent in June), and to 5.077 percent for the 30 year issue (from 5.908 percent in June). But, at the same time, in the background the extra yield that investors demand to hold Spanish 10-year bonds over German bunds has been steadily creeping back up again, and as of last Friday (24 September) it stood at 183 basis points, below the 220 level being asked in June but still more than double what it was at this point last year.

Yet, despite all those nice words we hear from him, one of the things that is worrying investors right now is the real depth of Mr Zapatero’s commitment to reducing the deficit as planned, especially after he unexpectedly stated on August 10 that in his opinion some of the planned infrastructure spending cuts could be reversed, while on September 10 he reiterated the point, saying that lower borrowing costs may enable the government to "ease up" on some of the projected spending cuts. In fact the extra yield offered on Spanish debt has risen 33 basis points over the period since he started to mention the possibility.

On top of which all the short term indicators we have been seeing suggest that the Spanish economy started to contract again in the third quarter.

Spreads Rising Across The Periphery

Of course it isn't only Spanish bond yields which have been sneaking back up of late. Greek 10-year bonds as compared with equivalent German bunds still offer around 950 basis points (or 9.5 percent) of additional yield, only around 20 points below the all time record they hit on May 7, at the height of the Sovereign Debt Crisis

Indeed spreads on government bonds all along Europe's periphery have been rising steadily back towards (and even in some cases beyond) their May levels in recent weeks. Most notably the last week has seen both the Irish and Portuguese government 10-year bond yields surge to euro era records levels, in a way which could lead us to ask whether, rather than Spain snuggling back into the main group the big picture story at this point might not be that it is Irish and Portuguese sovereign debt that is being prised apart from the rest.

So rather than being over, what the debt crisis now may be entering is a new stage, where one sovereign bond after another is being chisled out and sent off to join their Greek counterpart in the isolation ward. Actually, in this sense the present European Sovereign Debt situation does rather resemble the plot of the well known Agatha Christie detective novel "And Then There Were None". As told by M. Christie a group of ten people, all of whom have in one way or another been previously complicit in an earlier death, are somehow tricked into travelling together for what was intended to be a short stay on a secluded island. Once there, and even though the guests are apparently the only people on the island, they are - somehow, and one after another - systematically murdered. So, in a way which may eventually come to foreshadow scenes from the forthcoming meetings of the European Financial Stability Facility management board, each morning one guest less shows up for breakfast. One by one, and little by little, each participant becomes mysteriously overcome by a seemingly inexplicable bout of some fatal variant of what could be termed "systemic instability syndrome".

As I say, Irish and Portuguese yield spreads are significantly wider than they were May 7, the last trading day before Greece finally agreed to go for their €110 billion bailout package and the European Central Bank announced the initiation of its ongoing program of purchasing EuroArea government bonds in the secondary markets.

And despite holding what was considered to be a "succesful" bond auction at the start of last week Irish 10-year bond yields, shot up`once more during the remainder of the week, hitting a new record high of 6.34 per cent (see Bloomberg chart below), while yield spreads over benchmark 10 year German Bunds spiked to 416bp, euro era another record. At the same time Ireland 5 year CDS shot up to 461 bps, which meant the cost of insuring Irish debt was $461,000 for $10m of debt annually over five years.



At the same time yields on Portuguese 10-year bonds over comparable German bonds hit a record of near 4.25 percentage points Friday, while the Portuguese debt agency paid a euro era record of 6.24 percent to holders of its 10-year bonds and 4.69 per cent to holders of the four year-bonds in its own bond auction this week. In last equivalent auction, Portugal had paid 5.32 percent on 10-year bonds and 3.62 percent on four-year bonds. Portugal’s budget gap widened in the first eight months of the year, indicating the government may struggle to rein in the euro-region’s fourth-largest deficit as its borrowing costs surged to a record.



Portugal and Ireland "Decoupling"?


In each case the issue is different, since in the Irish case it was a sharp and unexpected contraction in the economy which became the major concern while in Portugal's case it was an apparent inability to reach the political agreement necessary to get the budget deficit under control.

Data out during the week for second-quarter gross domestic product showed the Irish economy has never really left recession, since GDP contracted by 1.2% compared to the first three months of the year, following a downwardly revised 2.2% expansion in the first quarter. Irish GDP has now contracted on a quarterly basis for 9 out of the past 10 quarters, and there is no evident end in sight.



In addition Ireland’s central bank governor Patrick Honohan saw fit to give a rather ill-timed press conference (unless he objective really was to force the country's government into the arms of the EFSF) where he urged the government to implement even deeper fiscal cuts to restore balance to the budget in what seems at this point to be a virtually unrealisable bid to regain investor confidence. All of which left many observers wondering just what the country can do in the present situation, since the budget is evidently deteriorating due to the severity of the economic contraction, and further cuts in spending by anyone (households, companies, government) are only likely to feed the contraction even more, in their turn making even more cuts necessary.

Obviously Ireland is rapidly approaching a situation where it cannot move the situation forward based on its own resources. This feeling is only added to by the persistent rumours that subordinated bond holders to Anglo Irish bank may well not get re-imbursed in full. These rumours have found some confirmation in a report which appeared in the Irish Examiner suggesting that the Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan had given a strong hint that the riskiest lenders to nationalized Anglo Irish Bank may not get all their money back.

Mr Lenihan apparently explained to the paper that the bank guarantee program which will be extended once it runs out at the end of September may only cover deposits and not subordinated debt. And if the interpretation put on events by the FTs John Dizard's is correct Mr Lenihan's delay in clarifying the situation is due to the fact that the Irish government is awaiting an EU Commission ruling on exactly this issue. His most recent official statement on the topic was that the Aglo Irish wind-up plan “is being prepared for submission to the [European] Commission for approval”.

At the same time the EU’s Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, issued a statement that “a number of important aspects need to be clarified, and a new notification received, before the Commission is in a position to finalise its assessment and to take a decision”. Which Dizard interprets as meaning that while Anglo Irish might propose a buy-back of its subordinated bonds, and that buy-back might be included in an Irish government proposal, Brussels might, in the end, not approve the plan. Since this would effectively the first time in the current crisis that a significant group of investors did not have their losses underwritten (apart, of course, from the rather unfortunate Lehman incident), decision makers may be rather apprehensive, since no one really knows how the financial markets would react. Yet speculation some such decision will be taken remains rife, as witnessed by the decision by Moody's rating agency to downgrade Allied Irish ratings. Moody's cut Anglo Irish's senior bonds by three notches to Baa3, the last level before junk, but the markets' main focus was on the deep, six-notch cut in the bank's subordinated debt, to Caa1, which indicates that bondholders will be forced to pay for some of the expected bailout.

Deficit Worries In Portugal

In the Portuguese case it is the budget deficit issue which is unsettling the markets, with the spread widening sharply following the revelation that far from the deficit being reduced is was actually increasing. According to the latest data from the Finance Ministry the central government’s shortfall during the first eight months of the year rose to 9.19 billion euros from 8.74 billion euros over the equivalent period in 2009. Previously the 2010 deficit had been almost exactly tracking the 2009 one (see chart from Societe Generale below).



Portugal’s borrowing costs surged to record levels on the news, and while the spread subsequently eased back to 388 basis points, the level is still close to the zone in which Greek bonds were trading in April just before the EU offered the country emergency loans to avoid default (see Greek 10 year spread chart below).




What this means is that this year's overall public deficit could well come in at around 9 percent of gross domestic product unless there is a radical change in policy during the last few months of the year.

According to its commitments to the EU Stability Programme, the Portuguese government should be aiming to reduce the overall deficit to 7.3 percent of GDP in 2010 from last year’s 9.3 percent. The government has pledged to reach the target, with Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos saying that the country “can’t afford” not to, but so far there is little evidence that it will be able to do so, and especially with all the political bickering that is now going on in the background.

In all these cases, including the Greek and Spanish ones, this issue is not simply one of stimulus versus austerity (always a false polarity when it comes to the situation on the Euro periphery). The real issue is how to restore growth to highly-indebted and structurally-distorted economies, since without growth the debt to GDP ratios will not come down, and the burden of the debt will not be reduced.

So more borrowing is not what these countries need right now (other than to aid short term liquidity). What the countries involved all need is more exports and larger industrial sectors, and no one seems to be very clear how they are to achieve them. Simply running a double digit deficit to generate less that 1% (in the best of cases) GDP growth is not exactly a "wise" use of resources. Evidently using deficit spending to cushion programmes which would lead to a surge in exports would make sense, but in no case is this really being done, and all the emphasis is simply going on what may turn out to be a rather fruitless and self-defeating programme of achieving fiscal rectitude.

The result is that the peripheral countries are one by one being steadily "decoupled", with Portugal and Ireland now moving up towards Greece, as the following two charts from Citi Research clearly show.




For quite a long time the Irish and Portuguese spreads simply moved in harmony with the Greek ones, widening as the Greek spread surged upwards. But now it is Greek debt which can be adversly affected by sentiment over the situation in Ireland or Portugal, and not the other way round, and meanwhile the other two countries slowly but surely are moving on up there to join their Greek counterparts as the second of the two charts (which show the recent relative movements in Greek and Irish spreads) seems to demonstrate.





Vigourous Action Needed

Naturally the ongoing deterioration in the situation requires bold and far reaching action from the Commission and the ECB. Obviously we should expect to see renewed activity on the part of the ECB, buying an increasing number of eurozone periphery government bonds. Their activity on this front has been increasing of late, but weekly bond purchases are still well below 1 billion euros a week level seen at the height of the crisis in May and June. Evidently we will see calls for more of these purchases in the days and weeks to come, but what is striking at the present time is just how ineffective they have been in containing the damage.

The ECB’s bond buying program is effectively the second pillar in the EU crisis containment mechanism established in May. The other one is the Luxembourg-based 440 billion-euro European Financial Stability Facility, headed by former European Commission official Klaus Regling. Mr Regling has also been actively campaigning to calm markets in recent days. "It would be preferable if we didn't even have to intervene," he told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview, "In fact, I believe that's the most likely scenario." His hope then is that the very existence of his organization will bring calm to investors and deter speculators. "If that's the case, we'll close up shop here on June 30, 2013," he said.


Morgan Stanley’s Chief Global Economist, Joachim Fels remains pretty unconvinced by all of this. “Strains,” he wrote in a recent research report, have now reached a point where "one or several governments" may soon have to resort to the rescue mechanism. "Neither the European sovereign debt crisis nor the banking sector crisis has been resolved and both continue to mutually reinforce each other," he said, adding that the EU's stress tests for banks had manifestly failed to restore the necessary confidence. Fels's conjecture didn't need that long to get some confirmation, since according to the German newspaper Handelsblatt the ECB was last week actively considering recommending that Ireland avail itself of the fund. The Central Bank declined to comment on the story, and simply pointed out that any decision on the matter was a question for national governments, which is formally correct (and obvious) but doesn't mean that they wouldn't in fact have recommend such a move if asked.

So, like former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson before them, Europe’s leaders, having armed their bazooka may soon need to fire it. Indeed Mr Regling’s optimism that his organization may quietly disappear from the scene is not generally shared by investors, who as we are seeing seem to be continuously pricing in an ever greater likelihood of intervention.

Meantime, according to a report in the Financial Times over the weekend, Europe's leaders are once more at odds among themselves about just how much carrot and how much stick the various national governments need to get their economies back into line. Predictably it is Paris talking about carrots, and Berlin who is talking about sticks.

But all this talk of what to do about those countries who in the future fail to stick to the new set of rules which are apparently being prepared monumentally misses the point: what we need are some policies which help the most affected economies get out of the mess they have found themselves in following the way the monetary and fiscal policy rules were implemented last time round.

According to one popular analogy currently circulating , the EuroArea countries could be likened to a group of 16 Alpine climbers scaling the Matterhorn who find themselves tightly roped together in appalling weather conditions. One of the climbers - Greece – has lost his footing and slipped over the edge of a dangerous precipice. As things stand, the other 15 can easily take the strain of holding him dangling there, however uncomfortable it may be for them, but they cannot quite manage to pull their colleague back up again. So, as the day advances, others, wearied by all the effort required, start themselves to slide. First it is Ireland who moves closest to the edge, getting nearer and nearer to the abysss with each passing moment. And just behind Ireland comes Portugal, while some way further back Spain lies Spain, busily consoling itself that it is in no way as badly off as the others who have already lost there footing. But if Spain cannot hold out, and all four finally go over, each dragged down by the weight of those who preceded them, then this will leave some 12 countries supporting four, something that the May bailout package only anticipated as a worst-case scenario. In the event that this is finally what happens, Mr Reglin will certainly find that the quiet life has come to an end for him, and that he has plenty of work to do, as will Mr Trichet’s successor at the ECB. In the meantime all the rest of us can do is wait and hope, firm in the knowledge that having come this far, we can only go forward, since there is no easy way back down to the point from which we started. But for heavens sake, the only thing we don't need while we sit here biting our nails is to be told by someone who manifestly has no idea what he is talking about that the danger has already past, even as we slide, inch by inch, onwards and downwards towards the chasm that gapes beneath.

Much Ado About (Some Of) The Wrong Things

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters in Brussels yesterday (Monday) that getting their deficits down was "the only task that everyone has to fulfill for himself and for the common good." Meanwhile, over in New York, Paul Krugman was busy writing on his blog that "the most startling and frustrating thing about the debate over the fate of the euro is the way almost everyone avoids confronting the core issue" - which is, according to Krugman, that "wages in Greece/Spain/Portugal/Latvia/Estonia etc. need to fall something like 20-30 percent relative to wages in Germany". So at one extreme the Eurozone's problems are seen as being almost exclusively fiscal ones, while at the other the principal problem is thought to be one of restoring lost competitiveness.

The difference in perceptions couldn't be clearer at this point, now could it?

And if all of this is causing so much confusion among reasonably well informed economic observers, then what chance is the layperson likely to have? As it happens, reading through this piece by PIMCO's Mohamed El-Erian this morning a number of thoughts started to come together in my head. Essentially what we have on our hands are a number of distinct (yet inter-related) problems, but few studies seem to go to the trouble to differentiate these analytically, and the end result is often a hotch-potch, which given the seriousness of the European situation is an outcome which is a long long way from being satisfactory.

One point that is often not stressed hard enough and long enough is that the backdrop to this whole debt issue is the underlying problem of rapidly rising elderly-dependency ratios (and increasing population median ages) across the entire developed-economy world. Normally this implies the imminent arrival of a wave of heavily underaccounted-for-liabilities which will simply increase the pressure on the underlying structural (rather than cyclical) deficits in the worst affected economies. The strange thing is that this development had in principle been long foreseen, and indeed formed part of the underlying raison d'être for drawing the 3% deficit/60% debt Maastricht line-in-the-sand. The other part was, of course, an attempt to stop spendthrift governments being spendthrift. As is now abundantly clear, in neither case can the Maastricht package be said to have worked, but the unfortunate historical accident is that we have come to realise this in the midst of the worst global economic crisis in over half a century (indeed arguably the second worst one ever, and - disturbingly - it is still far from being over).

So one part of the sovereign debt concerns which are currently so preoccupying the financial markets is associated with the containability of state debt in the context of ageing societies, and this issue is further complicated by the fact that different developed societies are ageing at different rates. This underlying uneveness is leading some people to draw some surprising conclusions. For example, according to a Financial Times/Harris opinion poll published this morning, the French turn out to be the most nervous of developed economy citizens when it comes to thinking about the sustainability of their country’s public finances.

Some 53 per cent of those polled in France thought it was likely that their government would be unable to meet its financial commitments within 10 years, while only 27 per cent thought this outcome was unlikely. Americans were only slightly less worried, with 46 per cent saying default was likely, against 33 per cent who saw it as unlikely. Curiously, only a third of the British people polled thought a government default was likely in the next 10 years, and I say curiously since on many counts the UK economic position is far more critical than the French one is. In fact, I am inclined to think that the British here are being reasonably realistic, while the French and the Americans are not, and I say this for one simple reason: all these countries have had substantial immigration in recent years, while the fertility levels in each case are quite near population replacement level. And this means that their population pyramids are much more stable, and if what is worrying you is rising elderly dependency ratios, then this is important. Let's put it this way, if you assume (a big assumption I know) that underlying GDP growth rates are similar, and that the level of pension entitlement is the same, then the more rapidly the elderly dependency ratio rises the greater the pressure on deficits and accumulated debt.

On the other hand, the Spanish respondents were remarkably more positive about their situation, with only about 35 per cent of Spaniards questioned saying they considered default to be a likely eventuality over the next decade. Which is strange, not because I have any special insight into whether or not Spain will default, but Spain's problems are clearly worse than any of the other three aforementioned countries (in part, as Krugman stresses because they lack some key economic policy tools which could help them correct the distortions in their economy) and, even more to the point, Spain's citizens are showing very little appetite at this point for making the changes which will be needed to stave off the worst case scenario.

Without reform in the labour market, and in the health and pension systems, France's finances are just as capable as going careering off a cliff as anyone else's, but the French do have a little more time, and this, at the end of the day, could be critical. Also the French (like the Swedes) have done their homework in one department - the demographic one - so their population pyramid is inherently much more stable than the Spanish one. Indeed the Spanish government clearly indicated last week just how little they understand the importance of this question, since rather than facing up to the wrath of the Spanish pensioners (who of course vote) by cutting back on pension payments, they took the easy route (since babies don't vote, and those who never get to be born even less so) and slashed the so called "baby cheque" (which may well not be the best of pro natality policy tools, but still). Basically cutting the baby cheque instead of cutting back on pensions has to be the next best thing to slitting your own throat, just to see what happens. Societies need to invest in their future, not in their past, and having children is an investment, indeed in the age of the predominance of human capital it is one of the most important ones there is.

Basically this whole area (of the impact of ageing populations on GDP growth performance and with this the consequent debt dynamics) remains largely underexplored by most mainstream analysts, but for now I will simply state that those "doctors" who wish to offer cures for our collective ills yet fail to mention the underlying dynamics of the demographic transition all our societies are passing through (even in a footnote) have missed one very important dimension of the overall picture, and their analyses and remedies are likely to be correspondingly deficient as a result. The musings of Mohamed El-Erian, interesting as they are, would fall into this category, since I fear he is missing the biggest part of the big picture.

Secondly, there is the issue of the financial rescue which has been carried out during the crisis itself. Something strange seems to have happened to the discourse over the last three years, since a problem which originated in the financial sector has now metamorphised into a fiscal crisis for almost all modern democratic states. Indeed, such is the sense of panic being generated out there on this issue that I am already starting to see articles from investor circles asking whether or not democracy is compatible with fiscal rectitude. This is rather putting the cart before the horse, I feel.

So having identified an underlying structural issue with government spending in the previous (demographic) argument, we should not fail to notice the fact that another significant part of rising state indebtedness comes from having recently bailed out a significant chunk of the private sector. Look at Latvia for example, and the Parex bank bailout, as the extreme case, since government debt to GDP was something like 12% before the crisis, while it is now heading up to near 80%, or Ireland, where debt was around 35% of GDP before the crisis but will probably rise above 70% this year.

In fact, a rather weird circle has been created. The private sector (possibly as a result of the absence of adequate public vigilance) got itself into a huge mess of its own making. Governments all over the globe (understandably and correctly) rushed in to put the fire out, and in the process transferred the problem over to their own balance sheets. But what is most interesting to note about what happened next is how, given that the crisis itself means there are few positive investment outlets in the first world, the money generated by the bailouts is increasingly being used to encircle those very governments who initially made them. Basically a massive moral hazard conundrum has been created, as markets leverage a discourse which pressures governments for fiscal rectitude (which is contractionary - given the depth of the crisis - as far as aggregate demand is concerned), in the process creating the need for yet more bailouts, and so on (the possibility of ultimate Greek default being perhaps the clearest example here).

Actually, while the initial "fire prevention" intervention was evidently necessary, people may have been mislead into thinking that action, in and of itself, would do the trick (see Bernanke's speech on Milton Friedman's 90th birthday - with its this time we got it right theme - also see note at the foot of this post) due to a slightly faulty diagnosis of what happened during the great crash. There was, of course, a bank run: but this was by no means the whole picture, and in any event doesn't explain why the whole global economic system took so long to recover, even back then in the 1930s.

So something decisive needs to be done to break the circle which currently binds us, although at this point I am not exactly sure what. If we could agree that Mohamed El-Erian's most striking insight is that: "Industrial countries are running out of balance sheets that can be levered safely in order to minimize the disruptive impact of past excesses. ... The balance sheets that are left -which reside essentially in central banks - are not made (and, I would argue, should not be forced) to assume permanent ownership of dubious assets." then the logic would seem to be that the dubious assets need to be put back where they belong - on the balance sheets of the private sector in general (including households) and the likes of AIG, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and naturally PIMCO.

But we should be clear: any such move to do this would also be significantly growth "unfriendly" across the first world.

And thirdly, and certainly not least importantly, as Paul Krugman is constantly pointing out, here in Europe we have an additional complicating factor: the euro experiment. Whatever the pros and cons of all the various arguments here, one thing seems evident: under the existing set-up the 16 economies are not converging. Exactly why this is would take us into areas which lie far beyond the objectives of this short post, but I would say that, personally, I feel the different demographic trajectories of the countries concerned must form part of the picture. As Angela Merkel is stressing, even in the best of cases (the euro holds) the bailouts which are being prepared can only buy time in which to carry out the much needed adjustments, which in countries like Spain/Portugal/Ireland are as much to do with restoring competitiveness to an extremely distorted private sector as they are to do with applying fiscal correction measures.

As far as I can see, measures like collectively financing state debt via EU bonds and bilateral loans - plus operating some variant of Quantitative Easing at the ECB (if this can all credibly be made to stick, and the vicious circle meltdown mentioned in the second point be avoided) - could temporarily stabilise the patient while the much needed surgical intervention is carried out. But my guess is that one by-product of doing things this way would be that a lot of the toxic stuff would then work its way onto the ECB balance sheet. Thus, instead of recapitalising Spanish Cajas, what we would then be collectively into would be recapitalising the central bank, which would be just another form of fiscal sharing through the back door (with the result that, following a good Brussels tradition, what you can't explain to people directly and from centre stage, you explain to them in footnotes and in the small print). The latest data from the ECB (see this useful post from FT Alphaville), suggest that the bank is not only busy buying peripheral bonds, it is also buying private paper from countries like Spain and Portugal (although there is no breakdown available on this point).

The measures which need to be applied on Europe's periphery are all more or less obvious at the micro level - labour market reform, pension reform, reform of the public administration - but (and assuming we have at most three years to see all this though before the respective populations get very, very restless), on the macro economic side it is very doubtful such measures will have the impact which is expected for them in terms of restoring competitiveness and growth, and fiscal order can only be restored by restoring competitiveness and growth.

Given this I can see only two plausible alternatives:

a) Either the peripheral economies undertake a sizeable internal devaluation (say 20%, but this is just a rule of thumb estimate). The snag here is that at the present time most EU policymakers remain unconvinced that we need a shift of this magnitude. Yet there is surprisingly little detailed study of how the economies concerned are going to get back to growth without this price correction. Indeed the EU Commission itself has strongly pointed out that the rates of domestic private consumption growth being assumed for these economies by the respective national governments in their Stability Programme estimates are highly optimistic. What would be nice would be for someone to set up a small model to try to examine just how much ongoing growth in the combined goods and services trade surplus countries like Spain now need to achieve to get positive growth in headline GDP under a variety of different assumptions, including low or negative inflation, stagnant domestic consumption and reduced fiscal spending.

This should enable people to calculate just how much of a drop in unit costs (from a combination of productivity growth and price adjustment) you need to have to get the kind of surplus you need given the relevant elasticities (etc). In particular one of the problems I see in basing too much hope on using productivity improvements to do the heavy lifting in the correction is that while you can surely get significant efficiencies at the micro level (though not by a long way enough to do the whole job), you can in fact only achieve the result in the short term by slowing a recovery in the labour market (since you will be going for more output with less people), which means aggregate productivity (say GDP per capita as a proxy) doesn't improve that much, given that there is a huge fiscal burden and continuing stress on the financial sector as a result of all those long term unemployed. Alternatively we have another possibility;

b) Germany (and possibly one or two other smaller economies) temporarily leaves the eurozone and revalues.

Now, since option (a) looks very, very difficult to implement (especially since virtually no one apart from people like me and Krugman apparently wants to even hear of it),to which problem we could add the fact that German politicians are having increasing difficulties convincing their citizens that the "qualitative transformation" of the ECB is what is really in their best interests, then on a purely pragmatic level (b) may well end up being what happens in the end (and we had better just hope any eventual German exit is only temporary).

Having Germany temporarily separate from the Eurozone would, in fact, have a number of evident advantages. The first of these would be that citizens in the South would not need to see their wages slashed, while those in Germany would not be asked to pay for bailouts via their tax bill, or lead to blame Greeks or Spaniards for having their hospitals closed or their pensions reduced: ie it would all be politically much easier to handle at this point.

Evidentally German banks would have to swallow a write-down, as loans paid back in Euros would not be worth the same in (new)marks, but 70% of something (say) is better than zero or 20%, and the big plus would be that as the Euro devalued sharply the peripheral economies could rapidly return to growth, and government finances could be quickly turned round as exports grew, tourists returned, and (in addition) many of those coastal properties that currently stand empty could be sold. At the end of the day, what would be left would be a private sector, and not a public sector, problem, and it was (in part) the private sector who got us all into this mess (wasn't it?).

Indeed this solution does to some extent coincide with what could be termed the new economic reality, since economic growth in emerging markets mean that these are fast becoming key trading targets for German industry, as consumption in Southern and Eastern Europe looks to be increasingly "maxed out". In fact, according to the recent March trade report from the German Federal Statistics Office, the rate of interannual growth in exports to ex-EU "third" countries (34.7%, as compared with 15.1% for the euro area) was significant, while the volume of trade (34.2 billion euros as opposed to 35.2 billion euros for the Euro Area) is roughly comparable, and indeed at this rate countries outside the EU will soon replace the Eurozone group as destinations for German exports.

I say I hope this move (if undertaken) would be temporary, since I think in the mid term the German economy is neither so strong, nor the peripheral countries so weak, as many commentators assume. But being out of the zone would give the Germans the opportunity to see this for themselves.

The important point to emphasise, I feel, is what we now need is an orderly and credible solution to our problems. Simply standing back and watching things deteriorate, and keeping our fingers crossed that what won't work will, is not going to produce an orderly outcome. Au contraire! Even those precious exports we are winning as a result of the falling Euro are being put in doubt, try these headlines from Bloomberg: Mexico’s Peso Falls Third Day on European Fiscal Deficits, Yuan Appreciation Unlikely This Year Due to Europe Debt Crisis, Emerging-Market Stocks Drop Most in Six Days, Russian Stocks Slide Most in Week on Oil, Europe Debt Concern. And this is just a quick selection.

The problem is that any gain to exports outside the EU can be offset by falling risk sentiment as the currency slide continues, and markets which were previously being funded lose the ability to attract money. What we need are some serious measures which can turn the tide, and restore confidence that we are applying measures which will work.

Actually, the argument I am presenting here was first put to me by a young Barcelona IT engineer - David González - and you can find his argument in this blog post (below the Spanish introduction). As David says:

In conclusion, at the moment the EMU lacks the necessary economic long term policies to become a stable monetary zone. Obviously, we lack the free currency exchange rate needed in any free trade zone, which would work as an automatic stabilizer between different countries. But we also don’t have enough automatic stabilizers (only the exception of cohesion funds) needed in any monetary zone. First we need to recover the balance, and then we have to make sure it is a stable balance implementing measures that keep it. Otherwise the EU construction process will fail, and the hopes it has bring to so many people and countries will be forgotten. The implications this failure would have for democracy and peace in Europe should not be underestimated.

Or as Krugman puts it: "If the euro isn’t workable without highly flexible nominal wages, well, it isn’t workable". It's a sad conclusion, but that would seem to be where we are at this point. Basically, it is obvious that any road forward is now fraught with difficulty, but a situation where none other than the head of Deutsche Bank is saying that in all probability Greece will not be able to pay, and where an ECB which badly needs to operate a policy of Quantitative Easing but is at desperate pains to try to show that it isn't, is evidently not sustainable for long. Money has been put on offer, and the financial markets are now chafing at the bit to try to force it up and onto the table as quickly as possible. July promises to be another sweltering month here in Spain. Maybe it's time for a rethink.

*****************************************************************


Note: At the end of his "On Milton Friedman's Ninetieth Birthday" speech Ben Bernanke arrived at what now looks like a rather hasty conclusion: - "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again". In fact, what is at issue here is a question of causality, whether the real economy problems are ultimately caused by the absence of a "stable monetary background", or whether in fact, the demand shock unleashed by the unwinding of a highly leveraged economic boom may not be the main factor in preventing the recovery of a "stable monetary background", as we have already seen in the Japanese case. The critical question facing all developed economies in addressing their fiscal sustainability problems is where the aggregate demand is going to come from to make the adjustment both viable and socially palatable.

What A Difference A Day Made!

According to a once famous statement by the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, a week is often a long time in politics. But when it comes to financial market crises we seem to follow a pattern more reminiscent of a line from the Dinah Washington version of an old María Méndez Grever song: "What a difference a day made". The day in this case was last Wednesday, at least for those of us here in Spain, since it was on Wednesday that the ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded Spanish Sovereign debt to AA from AA+. As a result the cost of insuring such debt using credit default swaps (CDS) surged at one point to a record 211 basis points according to CMA DataVision prices. Contracts on Greece and Portugal also rose sharply, with Greece climbing 42 basis points to hit 865.5, while Portugal jumped 20 to 406.

Standard & Poor's justified their Spain downward revision by referring to their medium-term macroeconomic projections. In particular the agency cited heavy private sector indebtedness (of around 178% of GDP), an inflexible labor market (they expect unemployment to remain around 21% throughout 2010, but then continue at a very high level for half a decade or so), the country's fairly low export capacity (Spain's exports only amount to around 25% of GDP) and the general lack of external price competitiveness. All these factors they feel are likely to mean that Spain will have low growth between at least now and 2016, a factor which will make the combined burden of private and public indebtedness much harder to service.

And despite the fact that Spanish Deputy Finance Minister Jose Manuel Campa stepped forward to say he was “surprised” by the move, arguing they are based on overly pessimistic growth forecasts, the fact is it is very hard to disagree with the S&P conclusions, as investors across the globe well understand. Even the EU Commission recently responded to Spain’s Stability Programme by stating that the growth forecast it contained was far too optimistic, and the IMF are even more pessimistic than the Commission.

In fact, it now seems that the present Spanish government seems to be becoming more and more isolated from Spain's financial and corporate establishment with every passing day. As Victor Mallet points out in today's Financial Times, "it cannot be often that academic economists use pictures of Omaha Beach, site of the bloodiest fighting in the 1944 Normandy D-Day landings, to illustrate their conclusions about one of the world’s medium-sized industrial economies", but this is precisely what the prestigous Barcelona-based Esade business school's latest economic bulletin did in their “H-Hour for the Spanish economy” editorial. “The diagnosis is very serious,” they said. “This is a highly indebted country with a damaged income-generating mechanism.”

Now even if one does not entirely go along with the whole analysis they offer of the roots and remedies for Spain's malaise, there can be no doubt that they now take the situation very seriously, even if one could lament that they did not begin to do so starting in August 2007, when the wholesale money markets first closed their doors to the increasingly toxic products that were being issued from within the Spanish banking system. The warning signs were already there, and were plain to see, although, unfortunately few inside Spain were able to do so. As a result, nearly three critical years have been lost, dithering around, large quantities of public money have been wasted, and what was a private sector external indebtedness problem has now been transformed, little by little, into a fiscal crisis of the state.

If the Spanish economy is really to be put straight, and not simply go straigh back and recidivise (after whoever it is who will do the "bailing out" finally does it), then surely one major priority during the coming national soul-searching process must be for public opinion leaders to find the ability and the courage to speak openly and clearly about the Spanish economy's "inner secrets", and the strength of character needed to publicly recognise problems in order to be seen to address them in a proactive and not a reactive fashion - to be out there in front of the curve, and not constantly trailing behind it. Put another way, it's high time Spain's bank and financial analyst community finally came out of the closet.

And if that all important international investor confidence is to be once more regained then it is important that those in the Economy Ministry are seen to be aware of the problems they face, and not simply reduced to the role of "marketing department" for a government which finds itself in ever deeper difficulty, caught between the rock of its own voters, and the hard place of the international financial markets. If you don't like having rating agency downgrades, then do something to avoid them before they inevitably come. But what was it Mr Zapatero was saying only yesterday, oh yes, he personally can see "signs" the Spain's economy Spain is at long last "improving", that the "worst is now behind us", or as Miguel-Anxo Murado so ironically puts it in the Guardian's Comment Is Free: "all repeat after me, "Spain is not Greece"". I'm not sure who it is the Spanish Prime Minister currently has interpreting the signs for him - it is certainly not Perdro Solbes, or David Vergara, or Jordi Sevilla, or indeed Carlos Solchaga - but it seems far more likely to me to be one of Spain's renowned Gypsy palm-readers than any reputable and internationally recognised macro economist.

In fact, as I have often stressed (and as Paul Krugman makes plain yet again here) Spain's problem is not essentially a fiscal one. Spain's problem is one of very high levels of corporate and household debt, and how Spain's banking system is going to support these during the long economic downturn and the ultra-high unemployment the country now faces, especially as a growing number of unemployed steadily lose their entitlement to unemployment benefit. The problem is not only that unemployment is currently running at 20%, but that benefits only last two years (plus an emergency six month flat rate 426 euro monthly payment extension), while many forecasts are now showing unemployment in the 16% to 20% range in 2013 or 2014. Just how are all these people going to continue to pay all those mortgages?

So it is not simply that "public sector borrowing is aggravating external debt and leading Spain towards high-risk territory". This is happening, as Spain's most high profile and most strategic export increasingly becomes government and bank paper, but this is the aggravating factor, and not the root cause. The principal reason why Spanish debt is steadily moving into high risk territory is the continuing state of denial to be found among the Spanish decision making elite, and the absence of any credible plan that is up to the magnitude of the challenge ahead. Confidence has now become the main problem, but not the confidence of those consumers who rationally decide to keep their money in the bank (to earn those very attractive 4 percent interest rates those banks who now anticipate having difficulty funding themselves in the wholesale money markets are offering) rather than going out and spending it.

The real issue is to be found in the confidence (or lack of it) those who Spain and its banks owe money to that the country (as a whole and not just the government) is going to be able to pay it all back. And in this context the sea change in mentality that Victor Mallet describes - assuming it is maintained - will be crucial. Those of us with rather longer memories - ones that stretch back to January for example - may wonder whether, once the immediate pressure is off, all that new found national resolve may not simply drift back into the mists from which it emerged, as has happened only too often in the past. Maybe the simplest and quickest way to help everyone feel comfortable that this was not going to happen would be to call in the IMF now, not becuase a bailout loan is needed yet, but as David Cameron is suggesting in the UK case, to carry out a "no holes barred" policy audit, so that everything which should be transparent actually is.

Who Really Likes Having A Dose Of Ebola


Of course the problems which became all too apparent on Wednesday went well beyond Spain. Along with the CDS prices, bond spreads widened all across the European periphery - with Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, and Irish yields all widening in tandem. Yields on Greece's two-year bonds briefly even hit an incredible 21%, following Standard & Poor's downgrade of the country's sovereign debt to junk status the day before.

All of this and more finally forced the EU’s hand, and officials had to go rushing to the microphone to reassure investors that Greece would soon be able to access an aid package, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel going so far as to state that talks about providing aid should now be accelerated.

Then the numbers started to be filtered out, and evidently they were much larger than many had been expecting. According to press reports IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn told German policymakers that Greece might need EUR120-130bn over three years, a number which the German press quickly calculated would mean that the German contribution might then go up to EUR25bn.

Certainly, at the point of writing we still don’t know what the exact number will be - and it is not even sure they have decided yet - but the reality is that once the EUR120-130bn number is out there from an authoritative source, it will be hard not to hit it, if not exceed it.

Then followed the announcement that IMF staff have reached an agreement with the Greek authorities on a 3-year program that will include draconian fiscal cuts (of the order of 10pc of GDP) and a series of structural measures aimed at driving nominal wages lower, reforming the pension system and building better institutions. Thus, the message this weekend to investors is: stop worrying about Greece for the next three years; you can continue to speculate in the secondary market, but the Greek government will be fine. And debt restructuring with the private sector now seems to be off the table for, at least for as long as the Greek government stick with the conditions – which will obviously be the aspect to watch carefully going forward. And even if there is an eventual default, the main counterparty will be other European governments (and the taxpayers who back them) and not private bondholders.

On the other hand, Europe’s institutions have, at a stroke, opened themselves up to a large slice of what is known as “moral hazard”, since the implicit message is : what we are doing for Greece we'll do for any other Euro-zone country, if needed. So from this moment on, we are all in up to our necks, if not beyond.

This "historic moment" point-of-no-return dimension did not escaped the notice of Dominique Strauss-Kahn either, since following his meeting with German politicians he was at pains to stress the potential contagion affect lack of backing Greece to the hilt would have had on the euro and the rest of Europe in the days to come. “I don't want to hide behind a rosy picture. It's not easy,” he said. All this “ can also have consequences far away. We have to face a difficult situation. We are confident we can fix it... But if we don't fix it in Greece, it may have a lot of consequences on the EU.”

Highly respected US economist and Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein went even further, saying that in his opinion Greece will eventually default on its bonds and he feared other euro-area nations may follow, most probably Portugal. “Greece is going to default despite all the talk, despite the liquidity package,” he said. Portugal's name is mentioned frequently these days, since although the government deficit and debt levels are lower in Portugal than in Greece and the Portuguese government has much more fiscal credibility than its Greek counterpart, when you add private sector debt to the public part the number is not far short of 300% of GDP, and in fact the underlying problems are very similar to those which are to be found in Greece.

But it isn’t only in the South the the EU has to worry, since probems in the East continue to fester. The Hungarian forint had a fairly hard time of it over the past few days, and had a two-day intraday loss 3.6 percent on Tuesday and Wednesday, its biggest such fall since March last year. At the same time the cost of credit default swaps on Hungarian debt rose 23.5 basis points to 240. The drop followed revelations from Hungary’s incoming Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the country’s underlying fiscal deficit had in fact been rather higher than the previous government had acknowledged. So contagion may now be also moving Eastwards, meaning that EU institutions may now increasingly face a battle on two fronts, since the wobbling won’t simply stop with Hungary, there is Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania to also think about (just to name the first three that come to mind).

As Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary General, said this week: “This is like Ebola. When you realise you have it you have to cut your leg off in order to survive...... it is contaminating all the spreads and distorting all the risk assessment measures. It is also threatening the stability of the entire financial system.”

The Greek Tragedy Continues

The future of the Eurozone is decidedly hanging in the balance at the moment. As I said earlier in the week, the problem isn’t a simple question economics anymore: everything now is all about credibility, about who does what, and when, and how everyone else reacts. As the crisis trundles on and on, news that Greek bond spreads have hit ever higher post European Monetary Union records has become such a regular event that the process now seems almost a monotonous one. However, what happened on what we could now call this week’s Greek “Black Thursday” certainly marked a new, and more worrying milestone in the ever evolving crisis. The news this morning that Greece has demanded the activation of the EU-IMF loan - news which apparently took even the EU Commission itself by surprise it seems - only adds to the general sense of confusion that abounds.

The problem we are presented with is not only that Greek 10-year bond yields reached 8.83 per cent, their highest levels since 1998, or that the cost of insuring Greek government debt against default hit a record high of 616 basis points. The really disturbing development was that spreads on government bonds all around Europe’s periphery – including countries like Hungary and Bulgaria - widened sharply, raising heightened concerns that Greek contagion may move from being a mere possibility to becoming a reality. And the cost of protecting peripheral eurozone borrowers against default also hit record levels, with Spain and Portugal touching record highs for their Credit Default Swap prices.

The surge in Greek bonds followed news that Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical service, had revised its estimate of the country’s 2009 deficit to 13.6 per cent of gross domestic product from 12.7 per cent, and the announcement that Moody’s Ratings Agency had downgraded Greek sovereging debt to A3 from A2.

Markets are obviously nervous at the moment, and understandably so, with two issues in the forefront of their minds. In the first place the real level of commitment of core Europe, and especially Germany, to supporting the periphery through several years of difficult and painful structural adjustment is far from clear. On the other, the ability of political leaders in Greece and other affected countries to carry their citizens with them through the sacrifices which will be required to maintain the monetary system intact continues to remain in doubt.

German voters are notably uneasy about lending money to Greece, and a sizeable majority of them are against any form of aid. Reticence on the part of Angela Merkel’s coalition partner also makes obtaining parliamentary backing for the loan difficult, and the FDP senior spokesman on financial questions, Frank Schaeffler, stated bluntly this week that either Greece needed to intensify its austerity plan or it should leave the Euro.

Most observers, however, consider a Greek withdrawal to be only a remote possibility, given that any return to the Drachma would make the country’s debts even less payable. In fact the threat to the integrity of the currency union comes from an altogether different quarter. What is in now increasingly in doubt is the ability of Germany’s political leadership to carry voters with them should either Greece decide to default while continuing with Euro membership, or should other member countries be forced to apply for loans.

At the same time, some sort of Greek default is now no longer simply a theoretical possibility among many others, indeed talk of the inevitability of some form of debt restructuring (albeit voluntary) grows with every passing day. Erik Nielsen European Economist with Goldman Sachs said this week he is expecting Greece to offer some sort of “voluntary debt-restructuring” to creditors over coming months, while JP Morgan issued a research note saying that while such restructuring may not be imminent, the move would make sense given that Greece could be seen as “the sovereign analogue of a ‘bad’ company with a bad capital structure”.

Restructuring is simply a polite word for default, with the difference that it is normally carried out by agreement. The most likely form of restructuring in the present context would be debt rescheduling, whereby short and medium-term debt is converted into a long-term version, as happened with the so-called “Brady bonds” devised by the US Treasury to resolve the debt difficulties of a number of Latin American countries in the late 1980s.

One indication that the ground may be being prepared for some kind of restructuring can be found in the decision reported by German Deputy Finance Minister Joerg that any aid to Greece would come in the form of pooled loans from the euro-zone countries and not through the purchase of Greek bonds. Plans to purchase bonds are “off the table,” he said. This procedure implies that government loans would be strongly guaranteed, while private bond holders would really pay the price for the Greek “rescue”.

At the same time voices are now being raised asking whether it would not be a better idea for Germany, rather than financing more and more loans, simply to put its losses down to experience and go back to the Deutsche mark? According to Joaquin Fels, Chief Global Economist at Morgan Stanley, the Greek rescue measures could “set a bad precedent for other euro- area member states and make it more likely that the euro area degenerates into a zone of fiscal profligacy, currency weakness and higher inflationary pressures over time,” in this case “countries with a high preference for price stability, such as Germany, might conclude that they would be better off with a harder but smaller currency union.”


Evidently such statements can be read as bargaining postures, attempts to get politicians and voters in the South of Europe to focus their minds on the problem in hand, but they can also be read as warnings of what could happen if they do not. At the present time the situation is extraordinarily confused. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's formal request for financial financial support seems to have taken almost everyone completely by surprise although it shouldn't have, since as I reported in my earlier post the Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou had previously warned that his country could call on loan backup from the EU and the IMF even while talks with the 20 strong EU, ECB and IMF mission were continuing. Actual details of the level of financial support which will be offered remain scant at this point. According to G20 sources who spoke to Reuters, the Greek government have only asked at this point for a first tranche downpayment, to give them working capital to keep going while the talks continue (think of the JP Morgan distressed company talks with the receiver analogy). What is quite striking, however, is how the government let things come to this pass before striking the decisive agreement - evidently they could not hold out till after the German regional elections, and that is another worrying sign. When all is said and done, one thing is obvious, the forthcoming loan will clearly have some kind of super-senior status (which means it would be payable before ALL other creditors - German voters would settle for nothing less), and this implies that it is likely to be existing bondholders, and not EU national governments, who are going to be invited invited to pay for the Greek bailout. How they will react to this realisation is what remains to be seen in the days and weeks to come.

Do I See Movement In The Greek Trenches?

This isn't about economics anymore, this is now about who does what, and when, and how everyone else reacts.

Certainly the news that Greek bonds hit another post-EMU record high yesterday can hardly be said to have come as a surprise. 10-year bond yields reached 7.76 per cent at one point and closed up 26 basis points on the day. This morning Greece comfortably sold 1.5 billion euros worth of 3 month Treasury Bills - in the end they sold 1.95 billion euros of them - but the yield on the bonds more than doubled to 3.65 percent, from 1.67 percent for a sale of similar debt on January 19. And the the extra yield investors demand to hold Greek 10-year bonds instead of German bunds, the euro-region’s benchmark government securities, rose again today - to as much as 472 basis points - the most since Bloomberg records began in 1998. The average spread over the past 10 years has been 61 basis points. Greek two-year notes also fell, pushing the yield 23 basis points higher to 7.51 percent.

On the other hand, Bundesbank President Axel Weber was out there yesterday telling a group of German lawmakers that Greece was going to need more, not less money.

Greece may require financial assistance of as much as €80 billion ($107.92 billion) to escape its debt crisis and avoid default, Bundesbank President Axel Weber told a group of German lawmakers Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The estimate, considerably more than the €45 billion that European countries and the International Monetary Fund are currently prepared to extend Greece this year if it needs a bailout, suggests that a rescue of the country may come in several stages and reach beyond 2010.

Why, I ask myself, is a conservative, and normally discreet, figure like Axel Weber out there stressing precisely this point at this moment in time, when German voters are notably nervous about any sort of aid to Greece, reticence on the part of Angela Merkel's coalition partner makes a parliamentary debate on a loan difficult, and voices are even being raised about whether it would not be a better idea for Germany simply to put the losses down to experience and go back to the Deutsche mark?

Germany might consider exiting Europe’s current monetary union to create a smaller bloc as the Greek crisis threatens to turn the euro area into a region of “fiscal profligacy,” Morgan Stanley said.

Greek rescue measures “set a bad precedent for other euro- area member states and make it more likely that the euro area degenerates into a zone of fiscal profligacy, currency weakness and higher inflationary pressures over time,” said Joachim Fels, co-chief global economist at Morgan Stanley in London, in an April 14 note. “If so, countries with a high preference for price stability, such as Germany, might conclude that they would be better off with a harder but smaller currency union.”

All these statements can be read as bargaining postures, attempts to get people in the South of Europe to focus their minds on the problem in hand, but they can also be read as warnings of what could happen if they do not.

Certainly, nothing at this point is very clear. Especially, as the FT reminds us this morning, when we live in a world where the unthinkable has finally become thinkable. So we could now ask ourselves whether the financial markets are not in fact, and before our very eyes, gearing themselves up for an event which many had not previously been factored into the realms of the possible: Greek debt restructuring.

Even as Greek bail-out discussions continue – talks between representatives of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF were delayed on Monday by the volcanic ash cloud – market watchers are starting to question whether, in the long term, Greece can avoid a restructuring of its debts or even an outright default.

“Investors and analysts are now running the numbers to see what a haircut to Greek bonds would be,” says Steven Major, global head of fixed income research at HSBC. “One way to do this is to compare restructurings for emerging market sovereigns. Based on the defaults over the last 12 years the average long-term recovery rate is close to 70 per cent. Ultra-long Greek bonds currently trade at a price below this.”

The Financial Times also reports that the IMF is likely to raise the question of debt restructuring at their forcoming meetings with the Greek finance ministry - you know, the ones that have been delayed by the symbolic intervention of all that volcanic ash. According to the FT source it is not likely to be a detailed discussion “just a pointed reminder of the debt forecast”.

The IMF has already told the finance ministry informally that Greece’s debt will reach 150 per cent of GDP by 2014, according to this person. Greece’s debt to GDP level – 113 per cent in 2009 – is already the highest in the eurozone. The IMF calculates that Greece will need to find €120bn ($162bn) over the next three years.

Of course, the term "debt restructuring" does sound a lot better than default, and the expression does cover a wide range of possible outcomes, running from unilaterally changing the terms of the bonds one the one hand, to voluntary renegotiation to ease refinancing pressure at the other.

One proposal which has been advanced (most recently by Wolfgang Munchau) is for recourse to some form of Brady bond:

Restructuring is a form of default, except that it is by agreement. It could imply a haircut – an agreed reduction in the value of the outstanding cashflows for bond holders. The Brady bonds of the late 1980s, named after Nicholas Brady, a former US Treasury secretary, worked on a similar principle. An alternative to restructuring would be a debt rescheduling, whereby short and medium-term debt is converted into long-term debt. This would push the significant debt rollover costs to well beyond the adjustment period.

Brady bonds were initially issued to ease the debt difficulties of a number of Latin American countries in the late 1980s (and they are modeled on the earlier Japanese par bonds - you can read more about them in wikipedia here). The essential idea in the Greek case would be that current debt instruments would need to be swapped for some longer term bond with a lower than market rate coupon (or implied interest rate).

Of course, as Munchau points out, in order to get the existing bondholders to trade their debt on a voluntary basis, they would have to be put under some sort of pressure:

One way to force the debate would be to attach super-senior status to the EU loan to Greece. I understand this is still an unresolved issue. Super-senior means this loan would be repaid before existing debt. Should Greece ever get into a liquidity squeeze, bondholders would be put in a back seat. In such a situation, they might prefer rescheduling.

Which makes this little detail about the form of the EU loan rather more interesting than it might seem at first sight:

Any aid to Greece would come in the form of pooled loans from the euro-zone countries and not the purchase of Greek bonds, German Deputy Finance Minister Joerg Asmussen said Tuesday.

He also said that Greece will be an issue at the meetings of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations this weekend in Washington.

"Of course, Greece will be an issue," Asmussen told reporters Wednesday. He also said that "if financial aid for Greece will be given, then the pursued path will be to provide pooled loans." Germany would provide its share of such loans through the state-owned KfW Banking Group and the loans would be guaranteed by the government.

Plans to purchase bonds "is off the table," he said. The advantage of providing pooled loans is that there can be stricter conditions to paying out such loans, such as demanding the implementation of fiscal reforms.

So we could imagine that the forthcoming loan would have super-senior status (German voters would settle for nothing less), and, if this interpretation is correct, it will be existing bondholders, and not the EU governments, who will be being invited to "bail Greece out". Well, maybe we won't have to wait too much longer to find out, since the Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou stated today that the country could call on loan backup from the EU and the IMF by as early as next month depending on loan conditions and the progress of talks with the EU, ECB and IMF joint mission, which is composed of around 20 people according to reports. Plenty to talk about, and plenty of people to do the talking. Too many, perhaps?

Angela Calling

Angela Merkel is a Chemist. In her doctoral thesis - entitled "Untersuchung des Mechanismus von Zerfallsreaktionen mit einfachem Bindungsbruch und Berechnung ihrer Geschwindigkeitskonstanten auf der Grundlage quantenchemischer und statistischer Methoden" - she demonstrated herself to be a thoroughgoing expert when it comes to analysing the speed of disintegration of chemical compounds once the bonds which hold them together are weakened. Unfortunately she is now having to apply all this acquired expertise and know-how in a determined attempt to avoid the break up and falling apart, not of a highly complex chemical substance, but of an even more complex economic and political one, and the bonds which are the focus of all her attention right now are not chemical, but financial and social.

The problems we in Europe all now face together ("wir teilen ein gemeinsames schicksal" in M. Trichet's words) have not arrived just "suddenly one springtime" as it were, indeed they come from afar. Right from the very begining it has been no easy matter for German society to achieve the consensus necessary to accept the idea of participating in a common currency, the Bundesbank has long maintained its by now well-known reservations, while not a few have been the voices expressing the view that having so many diverse countries all sharing the same monetary unit would inevitably create a structure which was too unwieldy to be manageable, and too weak to hold together when the real storm weather came. What was needed, it was argued, was a two, not a one, speed Europe.

Unfortunately, all these simmering issues have once more resurfaced during the last week, over the tricky question of what to do about Greek financing needs, and Germany's economic and political leadership now seem to be locked in an intense debate about exactly which path to take. Meanwhile Greek bond spreads simply work their way onwards and upwards, while capital flight from Greek bank deposits has forced the banks themselves to go rushing to the government for a further 18.000 million euros in funding just to keep them alive.

The current issue came to a head last Monday afternoon, following a brief report on the Financial Times website stating that progress with the decision on any Greek rescue plan was effectively deadlocked due to the inability of the Germany to agree with her other European partners the precise rate of interest to be charged on any loan to be provided. Ironically it is this single issue which is currently bringing European decision making to a dead halt, and creating a level of uncertainty and debate of such intensity that, if it is not resolved decisively, could bring the very future of the Euro into question. And it is not a trivial matter, since the rate charged will become a precedent, which other, larger, countries can refer to later.

Essentially the problem is this. According to the US economists Carmen Reinhardt a Ken Rogoff (in a widely quoted paper Growth In A Time Of Debt) a potential tipping point exists once government debt breaches the 100% of GDP level in the aftermath of a financial crisis. After this point the impact of additional state spending is, paradoxically, to effectively reduce growth (given the weight of interest repayments, and the additional risk price charged for lending, and the impact of more government debt on investor confidence) and indeed far from helping a country to recover, further borrowing may mean the economy actually shrinks rather than grows.

Let's take an example. Imagine Greece has debt at the 100% of GDP level (in fact it is somewhat over 115%), and the price investors charge for buying the bonds is around 6% (or more or less 3% more than the German government has to pay to sell equivalemt debt). Now let's also imagine that Greece has zero inflation and zero growth (they are in the midst of a massive correction which will last some years, so these are reasonable, and indeed possibly even optimistic assumptions). Then Greece will need to produce what is know as a "primary surplus" (or difference between current spending and current income) of around 6% just to stand still, and not see its level of gross indebtedness increase. But Greece, in 2009, had a primary deficit of some 7% of GDP.That is to say, simply to not get more in debt Greece has to withdraw something like 13% of GDP in demand from the economy, and this is massive, which is why all the experts anticipate a sharp contraction in the Greek economy over the next 3 or 4 years, and why rather than looking to domestic demand the Greeks will need to look to exports for support (The US economist Charles Calomiris has an excellent detailed explanation of all this here, while Peter Boone and Simon Johnson dig even deeper here) .

Which is where the European Union comes in. Basically, if Greece has to pay such a high interest rate differential to support such a large debt there is every likelihood she will not be able to continue to finance herself, and default will become inevitable. You can only demand so much effort from the reformed alchoholic before they are driven back to drinking in frustration. On the other hand the EU could help by making the interest rates charged cheaper, but unfortunately there is a 1993 decision of the German constitutional court which makes it effectively illegal for the German government to participate in such a subsidised loan. The IMF can help, they are reportedly willing to make a loan of up to 10 billion euros at very favourable rates, but there are limits to how far they can go, since they cannot justify favouring comparatively rich Europeans when they deny such funding to poorer countries in the third world.

And the quantity Greece actually needs is massive. Initial reports spoke of a total loan of around 25 billion, but this is surely not enough. At least 50 billion will be needed, and some estimates put the number much higher (see Peter Boone and Simon Johnson again). And remember, we are not talking about fancy theories here, all of this is all simple arithmetic: either Greece gets a large, cheap loan, or she will default. They will have no alternative. So European decision making is gridlocked, while on Thursday Greece's 10 year bond interest rate differential hit record post-EMU highs of 4,63%, and the ineterest being charged was not 6% but near to 8% at one point.

Naturally, if Greece were to do the "honourable thing", and leave the Eurozone and default, "all would be light". But they won't, and there is no good reason why they should do so. Now, enter Professor Starbatty of Tübingen University. He has another proposal. Not Greece, but Germany should leave the Eurozone, and go back to the Mark. And before you start to laugh, you should bear in mind that he is very serious in his proposal, and many Germans agree with him. Indeed so seriously does Angela Merkel take the possibility that any cheap loan to Germany will encourage supporters of Professor Starbatty to go to the Constitutional Court and ask for a ruling that German participation in the common currency is illegal that she has frozen the whole Greek bailout process.

And it is not clear, at this stage what the view of the Bundesbank is. According to German press reports, accepted by the bank itself, the Bank is currently considering an internal report on the rescue loan proposal which states "This agreement of the heads of government, which according to our knowledge has been reached without any consultations from central banks, implies risks to stability that should not be underestimated," (my emphasis).

And before anyone complains that the Germans are too dependent on exports to the South of Europe to do anything which makes selling these more difficult, please consider that domestic demand growth in all four Southern European members of the Eurozone is expected to be extremely weak over the next decade, while growth in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Indonesia is predicted to be massive. The markets are moving, so why not move with them?

Of course, none of this means that the Eurozone, like one of those chemical compounds Angela used to study, is about to fly apart. But we should not underestimate the stresses the currency union faces at this point. As former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff pointed out in the Financial Times this week, "if investors gather with enough sustained force, and if the central bank lacks sufficient resilience and resources, they can blow out a fixed exchange rate regime that might otherwise have lasted quite a while longer." What the countries in the South of Europe need to give the Germans right now are not arguments about how they would be foolish for them to leave, but arguments about what they themselves are prepared to do to make it more attractive for them to stay. The German giving machine is all done, and the Germans themselves are now more than tired of being continually told they need to pay, pay and pay again for events that now took place over half a century ago. Calling, Berlin, calling Berlin, hello, hello, is anybody there?