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Greek Default 2015. Possibilities.

What is the situation in Greece?

· Government finances have been improving during the austerity measures,  the current account is now in surplus, the budget in primary surplus and economic growth has recovered, however, unemployment has risen sharply to 26%.

· Syriza has chosen a far right nationalist party, the Independent Greeks as their coalition partner. The Greek government is therefore strongly anti European Union and anti austerity.

· Syriza will likely have to stick by its election campaign promises to end austerity and seek a write-down of the national debt.

What is the troika’s stand?

· The largest creditor of Greece is Germany and she will not countenance a debt write-down.

· Initial discussions between the Greek finance minister and the European Union have been adversarial.

Will Greece default?

· Nobody can foresee what will happen. The troika is clear that any debt reorganisation will be contingent on Greece continuing its austerity and reforms. Greece is clear that austerity has ended. We have a standoff.

· In the coming months Greece is expected to receive loans as part of the initial bailout plan, loans that may now not be disbursed given recent developments. Greece may face a cash shortage and difficulty in refinancing it’s national debt in the next two months.

What would happen if Greece were to default?

· Greek creditors would face a write-down of their assets, in this case Greek bonds. A legal process would begin to reorganize the debt.

· Greece would lose access to bond markets until it was clear if it would be allowed to remain in the currency union.

· Greece would likely be ejected from the currency union and have to introduce a new Drachma at an initial exchange rate of 1 Drachma per Euro. The Drachma would likely devalue rapidly. There would be shortages and import inflation would surge. A deep recession would follow. Drachma borrowing costs would also soar. However,  the flexibility of having independent monetary and fiscal policy and a flexible exchange rate would place the  responsibility and fate of the Greek economy with the Greeks.

· Risk assets across the world and particularly in Europe will sell off. Portuguese bonds would suffer especially as they are not part of the ECB QE program. Greek stocks would crash.

· In terms of real economic impact, Greece is 2% of the Eurozone economy so
the impact would be contained.

Would Greece defaulting be a Lehman Event? What are the contagion risks?

· The real economy impact would be small. Greece represents 2% of the Eurozone economy.

· Impact on investor sentiment will likely be serious and risk assets would sell off. The ongoing ECB QE would likely limit the downside in Eurozone sovereign bonds although Portugal might suffer as it is rated BB and thus not part of the ECB QE program.

· The Eurozone now has banking union and a bailout fund. In the past year, the ECB has required Eurozone banks to shore up their capital.

· The financial damage will not likely be as wide ranging as Lehman’s insolvency because Greece is not as systemically integrated into global financial systems. Importantly, in the post Lehman world, riskier swaps are collateralized with high quality investment grade collateral so transitive counterparty default risk is mitigated.

What are the longer term implications for Europe?

· Syriza’s victory in the polls will embolden other Euro sceptic parties such as Podemos (Spain), National Front (France), the UK Independent Party and Alternative for Germany for example.

· If Syriza is successful in defying the ECB and Germany it might set a precedent for other members such as Italy, Spain and Portugal to abandon austerity.

· If Greece is forced out of the union, depending on how painful it is and to whom, it could be a template for other members to exit.

· For Greece the choice is one between the long term ache of staying in the Euro and the short term excruciating pain of leaving it. A Greece with an independent currency, central bank, monetary policy and fiscal policy would be responsible for its own fate. A Greece in the Euro might benefit from short term analgesics such as the ECB’s QE and bail out loans but be hostage to the policies and principles of Brussels and Frankfurt.

 




Negative Bond Yields and Interest Rates. Neither A Borrower Nor A Lender Be. And Now We Are Both…

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and negative yields dulls the edge of policy.”

Now many countries are both.

10 year Swiss and German government bonds currently carry a negative yield. When one moves to shorter maturities, such as 2 years, we find that France, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan all trade at negative yields. This means that investors, if you can call them that, pay to lend to these governments. One species of large investor willing to pay to lend is the central bank.

So far the negative yields have not been a phenomenon of primary issuance, save in a few circumstances such as Japan. This example is interesting because it pays the issuer to issue. The more issued, the more solvent the issuer. All this needs is a sufficiently motivated lender, the central bank.

Imagine a more extreme example of a negative coupon bond. The only investor willing to buy such an instrument would be the issuer, or their central bank. The mathematics of such an issue would require the suspension of disbelief. The issuer would be paid to borrow and the more the borrowing, the more the payment. At last it would be possible to borrow oneself into solvency, surely the Holy Grail of public finance. The buyer would, however, guarantee themselves a loss. Any other institution than a central bank could therefore lend itself into insolvency if the size of such lending was sufficiently large. Central banks, however, are special. They can meet obligations by creating money. All this is of course a circuitous route for a government seeking to spend and fund its spending with bits of paper.

So far the money creation has not multiplied through the economy to encourage economic growth. Instead the velocity of circulation of money has slowed, nullifying the money base expansion. Why is this? It is hard to tell but one possibility is that the transactional demand for money simply isn’t there. Consumers are cautious and businesses are sceptical. Trade is complicated by competitiveness, policy and productivity. Governments could spend. If, however, despite the largess of their central banks, governments, for ideology or other reasons, decide to rein in spending then it is no wonder that output and employment languish. A practical case in point is the ECB’s bond buying program. While the scale of the program is large, by requiring Member State’s conform to the Maastricht debt criteria, the EU is neutralizing QE. So QE works if it monetizes debt incurred when the government spends on behalf of the private sector and is much less effective if the government does not.

If a country can borrow at negative rates of interest, expand its central bank’s balance sheet without bound and target a budget deficit to replace deficient private demand, what is the cost and what are the limits?

Private and external investors may be discouraged from buying bonds. This can impair liquidity and price discovery in the bond market. God forbid anyone should discover the true price of a bond. With negative interest rates, investors will naturally seek alternative stores of value. Central banks inducing negative interest rates may find themselves the sole buyers of their sovereign’s bonds. Captive domestic investors may not have the luxury of directing their capital elsewhere. Examples of this are state pension and social security funds. If private investors are discouraged from buying bonds it means that central banks will have difficult exits and find it painful to reduce the size of their balance sheets. Any reduction of central bank bond buying would lead to higher yields. The US experience today confounds this analysis but here, a stabilizing budget and the changing structure of treasury financing are responsible for keeping yields low. And, yields may still rise for we are still in uncharted territory. The US is in fact further along this path than their brethren. The Fed’s balance sheet has only shrunk in the last two weeks having peaked at USD 4.516 trillion on January 14.

The currency might weaken. This can improve the competitiveness of the country’s exports but can also import inflation through higher input prices. Yet not everyone can be a net exporter, try though they might. Since 2008 countries have tried to debase their currencies in an effort to improve competitiveness and export their way to recovery. Weakening a currency is a risky strategy since excessive weakness brings its own problems. Hyperinflation is seldom the consequence of bad economics. They are the consequence of a failure of confidence, a failure that is often the consequence of bad economics. A beggar-thy-neighbour strategy requires a steadily declining currency. A volatile and acutely weak currency can lead to capital flight, spiking interest rates and end in capital controls and market failure.

Confidence is one of the most important factors in finance. Loss of confidence can lead to acute acceleration of trends leading to currency crises, credit crises and hyperinflation.

Efficacy. The intent of policy is to revive private demand. Government spending can improve headline output but can also crowd out private demand with little impact on private output and employment. The poor efficacy of multiple rounds of QE in the US is illustrative. While the money base was expanded nominal output languished as the velocity of circulation fell. The private economy has a natural metabolism which cannot easily be accelerated simply by association. There was simply no multiplier effect to the government’s fiscal efforts to boost the economy as liquidity was soaked up by saving.

Artificial depression of interest rates across the term structure are intended to reduce borrowing costs, but if rates were already low, policy may be pushing on a string. Again, the private economy’s natural metabolism cannot always be accelerated by the provision of cheap credit. ‘Build it and they will come’ doesn’t translate well into ‘offer to lend and they will borrow’.

Nominal output may grow but there is no guarantee that real output will grow. The growth might be entirely in prices, that is inflation. Moreover, nominal output would include all goods and services as well as assets. The growth may manifest more in asset price inflation. Asset price inflation supported mostly by liquidity and a dearth of viable alternatives can easily be deflated in disorderly fashion.

Nobody knows what market prices are. For factor inputs, assets or goods and services. As a result, certain markets will not clear. When central banks buy sovereign bonds they impact prices. In order to avoid acute price distortion bond purchase programs may have limits on how much of an issuer’s total debt or how much of a particular issue or issues in a particular maturity range may be bought. This is not effective because apart from the direct impact on pricing central banks’ intentions signal to the market future demand leading the market to react accordingly. This may be helpful at the initiation of a bond purchase program as the market aids the central bank in depressing borrowing costs but can be less helpful on the exit. For the central planner the price distortion is a difficult problem. Since the market price absent intervention is unknown, the impact of withdrawing from intervention is unknown. This uncertainty discourages central banks from exiting intervention until it is too late.

 

Some tidbits:

In a sense, central banks are going back to their roots. The Bank of England was established in 1694 to fund William III’s defence spending. The government issued debt of GBP 1.2 million, which was subscribed by the bank in a very modern QE type move, and carried an interest rate of 8%, which would surely have sunk modern United Kingdom. What was different was that the Bank bought a primary issue loan and the government promptly spent it building a navy. Imagine if the government was told to maintain a 3% budget deficit limit.

The world’s oldest central bank, the Riksbank, was established in 1668. Its predecessor was Stockholm Banco, whose founder Johan Palmstruch was condemned to death for bankrupting the bank through over issuing bank notes; he was later pardoned and is today unconsciously emulated by most fashionable central bankers. Riksbank was the first bank to use negative interest rates, lowering its deposit rate to -0.25% in July 2009. Its motto is Herefore Strength and Safety.

You may now stop suspending disbelief.




Greece under Syriza. A Compromise. A Debt Exchange Offer.

A compromise for Greece and the troika.

 

  • A debt exchange offer.
  • New debt at much extended maturities. Face value smaller than existing face value.
  • New debt to feature step up coupons to equalize the NPV of cash flows versus the existing debt.
  • Effectively a refinancing.

 

Very quickly after winning the Greek elections, Syriza has approached Independent Greeks as a coalition partner. A coalition of the radical left and nationalistic right make strange bedfellows. Syriza’s 149 seats to Independent Greeks’ 13 mean Syriza will mostly have discretion in policy. With the elections out of the way, the question is, what next? Alexis Tsipras had made conciliatory sounds during the election but victory can change things significantly. Syriza had campaigned on a decidedly anti austerity ticket which was softened slightly during at the eleventh hour. With a stronger mandate than they had expected, Syriza may return to a more intransigent position. Indeed they may be expected to by their supporters.

Tsipras is in an unenviable position. On the one hand he has promised an end to austerity and to renegotiating the national debt with the ECB, EU and IMF, specifically seeking a one third write down of face value. The Germans have signalled that debt forgiveness is out of the question and that a Greek exit from the union is a practical possibility.

The Greeks will want to end austerity, to renegotiate the national debt and to reduce the face value of the national debt, as well as to benefit from the ECB’s bond purchase program. The Germans will want the Greeks to maintain austerity, continue to service their debt, and not write down any debt. A compromise needs to be found. There is no guarantee it will be.

A practical compromise would involve the following. Austerity measures could be partially rolled back so that the government could run a budget deficit. The terms of debt would be restructured to provide the Greeks more time to achieve cash flow solvency and balance sheet stability. Specifically, the coupons on the debt would be reduced but the maturities of the debt would be extended. The debt would include a 10 year moratorium on coupon payments but step up in later years. The average duration of Greece’s liabilities are just over 16 years. The debt could be restructured to push the average out to 30 years. The coupons would start in year 10 and step up. This would satisfy the Germans that there was no bailout but rather a constructive reorganization. New debt could also be issued on a novel basis requiring an explicit senior and secured claim on a proportion of tax and other government revenues. This innovation could be adopted even for non distressed issuers.

 

Even then, the ECB will not be able to buy primary issue, and of the secondary issue, special arrangements are required since the ECB already owns more than 33% of the Greek national debt, beyond the limit specified in its current QE program. For Greece to benefit from QE. It would have to make some concessions on austerity and it certainly could not seek a debt writedown. What Greece could seek is an exchange offer in which the longer maturity step up coupon debt is exchanged for the existing debt. Theoretically, the face value of the new bonds could be less provided the NPV of the cash flows is equal to the NPV of the old cash flows. This would require a higher average coupon or a much extended maturity. The former is not feasible given Greece’s current cash flow but the second is certainly a possibility. These are details of course but as is so often when politics interferes with economics, a compromise solution is more cosmetic than real.




Suppose the US Fed Decides To Delay The Rate Hike.

Yet another FOMC meeting has passed and the market continues to scrutinize the language of the FOMC statement for clues of what the Fed intends to do, heavily assuming that the Fed in fact knows what to do. The details will have been circulated ad nauseum by the financial press so we won’t delve into them here. Instead let us consider possibilities.

The market has been expecting the US Fed to raise interest rates, the timing is fluid but sometime this year seems to be the expectation. The Fed has to raise interest rates eventually if nothing else to reset an important policy tool. The strength of the US economy where employment is finally catching up to headline GDP growth is another factor. The current growth the US is experiencing is reminiscent of the mid 1990s Goldilocks (not too hot, not too cold, just right) economy, helped by depressed oil, energy and commodity prices. The weakness in the global economy is also helping the US grow without a pickup in inflation. China’s growth is decelerating, Japan is in recession and the Eurozone while recovering is barely clinging on to positive growth.

The consensus is therefore that the US has done with monetary accommodation and low rates while the rest of the world, stagflationary economies excepting, are in monetary loosening mode. What if the Fed was to postpone its rate hike? What would be the consequence? What is the likelihood? The USD could weaken. The consensus is for a strong USD and this is a very strong consensus. In the absence of a rate hike, the market could be quite unpleasantly surprised. The 10 year US treasury yield could move towards 1% and the 30 year to 2%. This could happen anyway while we wait for the rate hike. Fixed coupon issuance is likely to slow as tax receipts improve and debt is issued in FRN format. The demand and supply dynamics could flatten the curve.

Why might the Fed delay a rate hike? Low inflation might be one reason. 5 year 5 year forward breakeven which traded between between 2.4% to 2.6% has fallen steadily to 1.94% in Jan 2015. Deflation risk might stay the hand of the Fed. Slowing international growth is another possibility. The US is currently the main engine of growth. Of course people forget that the 7% growth rate that China puts out is a big number for a big economy, but even that number is shrinking. Latin America is flirting with stagflation. Brazil’s rising rates since March 2013 have not stopped the Real from steadily losing ground against USD. Europe has only just begun its money printing and debt monetization activities. If the European QE takes time to bite and Europe slows further, the US may not be able to raise rates for a while. In these scenarios, however, a weak USD is not likely since other currencies would be debased aggressively. Then there is the little question of the US treasury’s interest expense, currently 416 billion USD a year. A 0.25% hike in rates could, depending on debt maturities, issuance and impact on the term structure, result in interest expense rising some 50 billion USD, a 12% increase. Gently does it Janet.

 

 




From Pawnshop to Used Car Dealer. You Want To Impress Me? Buy New Cars. ECB QE. Will It Work?

The ECB, from pawnshop to used car dealer:

If you want to get more money out there into the economy, and get that money circulating instead of sitting in a dusty corner, you can’t just be a pawnshop. Lending cash against investment grade bonds is a pawnshop business, a.k.a. LTRO. Buying bonds in the secondary market is a used car business. You want to get the economy going, buy some new cars. Supplying money is one thing, stepping in where private demand is deficient is another. Buying used cars pushes used cars around at increasing prices making profits for other used car dealers but it does little for car manufacturers, output and employment.

And yet the ECB’s mandate excludes purchasing primary issues since this appears to be interference in fiscal policy. Purchasing secondary market issues apparently is not despite the issuers being clearly the same. Somewhere there is an argument that buying bonds from private holders does not explicitly bail out the issuers. True I guess. Bail out the holders of the debt, not the borrowers. Perverted but true.

Will QE work? The European economy is already recovering, so the timing of the announcement is fortuitous. Because trend growth globally, not just in the Eurozone, is slower than before 2008, policy will continually be miscalibrated. The European economy has slowed, but it has also very likely hit bottom and will recover. And now, the ECB and their QE will get the credit for it. On its own, QE would not have worked. QE depresses cost of debt, debt which nobody wants to incur. QE also depresses yields which are already well below US treasury yields. The analogy of pushing on a string was never more appropriate.

What is needed is more demand for goods and services, not more supply of credit. In the absence of private demand, governments need to target a budget deficit. Yet Europe is obsessed with fiscal restraint and budget discipline. What is ultimately required is a bond purchase program which is free to buy primary issue not only of sovereign debt but also of covered bonds and ABS. A To-Be-Announced mechanism of ABS and covered bond issues should be underwritten by an ECB asset purchase program. By actively encouraging demand instead of passively enabling it, policy makers might be able to awaken the moribund economy.

The current policy lifts asset prices but does little to address underlying demand deficiency and the failure of factor markets clearing. The ECB will simply have to do more later on thus fuelling a protracted asset boom while output and employment languish.