Round 2 of Reactions to the EU Summit (and some other stuff)
The consensus:
The title of the FT’s editorial — “Europe fails to reach summit” — says it all:
It should have been the climax to Europe’s thriller, a summit that would kill off the sovereign debt crisis with a salvo of confidence-restoring measures. But, apart from Britain’sdramatic exit, last week’s European summit was entirely predictable in its inconclusiveness.
To be fair, it is good news that even modest steps were taken towards closer fiscal integration. But the real, comprehensive fiscal union needed to restore faith in the euro, as opposed to a few new rules, remains elusive.
More urgently, the deal that was struck does nothing to resolve the immediate crisis. Moves to bolster the International Monetary Fund and hints of more support next year for Europe’s two bail-out vehicles are neither big enough nor fast enough to deal with the titanic task of funding peripheral countries’ debt until confidence returns.
Hopes in the existence of a big bazooka proved misplaced. Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, on Thursday quashed hopes that he would launch an unlimited bond-buying programme to help indebted sovereigns, as European rules do not allow this.
Now there is the suggestion that the ECB has a cunning plan to give the bazooka to Europe’s banks, which will be lent bags of cheap money, with which to buy their own countries’ debt.
The argument is tempting. Friday’s summit declared that there will be no more haircuts on sovereign debt. So if banks can get three-year ECB money at 1 per cent and buy Italian bonds at 6 per cent, this could help cut debt costs while bringing seemingly risk-free returns. This is not contrary to European rules and it could be in both parties’ interests. If the sovereigns go, Europe’s banks are front line victims.
However, there are many reasons to be wary of such a solution, not least because it fools no one. The ECB would in effect be funding sovereign debt through Europe’s banks. This is hardly in the spirit of the European treaty. Second, shareholders might rightly question why banks, which have been shedding periphery bonds despite having had the arbitrage opportunity for some time now, were suddenly scooping them up. Most importantly, if the current crisis was sparked by the link between sovereign and bank risk, does it make sense to intensify that link? Right now there may be no alternative to save the euro. But it amounts to little more than sleight of hand in a crisis where clarity and resolve would do much more to restore confidence.
Unsurprisingly, the FT’s Wolfgang Munchau agrees:
. . . the decision to set up a fiscal union outside the European treaties will do nothing whatsoever to resolve the eurozone crisis . . . this is not something you would wish to do outside European treaties. The existing treaties form the legal basis for all policy co-ordination of monetary union. It gets very messy when you try to circumvent them.
[...] A fiscal union set up outside the European treaty would face severe legal and practical limitations. Unless a trick is found, it cannot make recourse to the resources and institutions of the EU. Nor can it issue eurozone bonds. The only conceivable counterparty for a eurozone bond is the EU itself.
More important even, a fiscal union created through a legal trapdoor would not help solve the crisis. The eurozone is facing a generalised loss of confidence. Investors no longer trust its crisis management, the solidarity of its citizens, even the ability to conduct sensible economic policies. The EU is not going to restore confidence through legal gimmickry that will face numerous court challenges.
Leaders should have admitted on Friday that the summit had simply failed, or perhaps have given it a few more days. Negotiations might have produced a compromise. With the fake pretence of another treaty, that is no longer possible.
Remember what everybody said a week ago? To solve the crisis, the eurozone requires, in the long run, a fiscal union with a prospect of a eurozone bond and, in the short run, unlimited sovereign bond market support by the European Central Bank. What we now have is no treaty change, no eurozone bond and no increase either in the rescue fund or in ECB support.
Policy changes the ECB announced last week will help banks directly and governments indirectly. But the EU fell short on every element of a comprehensive deal. On Friday, investors reacted positively to what was sold to them as a “fiscal compact”. But once the implications of a separate treaty are understood, I fear disillusionment will set in.
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The rating agencies are equally unimpressed.
In its Weekly Credit Outlook, Moody’s says that “Pressure Remains on Euro Area Sovereigns in Absence of Decisive Initiatives” and “European Bank Recapitalization Plan Is Credit Positive, but Encourages Deleveraging”:
Pressure Remains . . .
. . . the [EU summit] communiqué reflects the continuing tension between euro area leaders’ recognition of the need to increase support for fiscally weaker countries and the significant opposition within stronger countries to doing so. Amid the increasing pressure on euro area authorities to act quickly to restore credit market confidence, the constraints they face are also rising. The longer that remains the case, the greater the risk of adverse economic conditions that would add to the already sizeable challenges facing the authorities’ coordination and debt reduction efforts.
As a result, the communiqué does not change our view that the crisis is in a critical, and volatile, stage, with sovereign and bank debt markets prone to acute dislocation which policymakers will find increasingly hard to contain. While our central scenario remains that the euro area will be preserved without further widespread defaults, shocks likely to materialise even under this ‘positive’ scenario carry negative credit and rating implications in the coming months. And the longer the incremental approach to policy persists, the greater the likelihood of more severe scenarios, including those involving multiple defaults by euro area countries and those additionally involving exits from the euro area.The credit implications of these and further measures likely to be announced in coming weeks require careful consideration against the backdrop of decelerating regional economic activity, fragile banking systems, partly dysfunctional credit markets, and the varying degree of success of country-specific measures aimed at structural change and fiscal consolidation. But in the absence of credit market conditions stabilising, the system remains prone to further shocks which would likely lead to selective rating changes. More broadly, in the absence of any decisive policy initiatives that stabilise credit market conditions effectively, our intention as announced in November is to revisit the level and dispersion of ratings during the first quarter of 2012.
European Bank Recapitalization . . .
Additional capital is credit positive as it enables banks to cope with increased stress. However, there is a risk that tighter capital requirements will encourage further deleveraging, thereby increasing the risk of a credit crunch and additional impairments.
The establishment of a sovereign exposure buffer follows criticism that the EBA’s stress test earlier this year inadequately reflected the true value of, and impairments in, banks’ sovereign exposures. Disclosures in banks’ interim statements also point to inadequate evaluation and provisioning and, in some cases, a failure to comply with international accounting standards.
[...] Supervisors are not simply seeking to achieve higher capital ratios, but also higher capital. Nevertheless, the incentive for banks to deleverage remains high and will only be exacerbated by higher capital requirements. More fundamentally, higher capital buffers cannot address the underlying cause of the disruption to the funding markets which is the sovereign debt crisis.
Fitch says that the “Summit Does Little To Ease Pressure on Eurozone Sovereign Debt”:
After the latest EU crisis meeting it is clear that politicians are responding to the eurozone sovereign debt crisis through incremental improvements. It seems that a “comprehensive solution” to the current crisis is not on offer.
This Summit demonstrated strong political support for the euro, and that its members are putting in place the institutional and policy framework for a more viable eurozone and ultimately greater fiscal union. But taking the gradualist approach imposes additional economic and financial costs compared with an immediate comprehensive solution. It means the crisis will continue at varying levels of intensity throughout 2012 and probably beyond, until the region is able to sustain broad economic recovery.
In the short term we predict a significant economic downturn across the region. The eurozone faces intense market pressure, which is triggering loss of business and consumer confidence, and weak industrial activity and retail sales. Our forecast of 0.4% eurozone GDP growth next year and 1.2% in 2013 would be significantly higher if there was a comprehensive solution to the crisis. The lack of a comprehensive solution has increased short-term pressure on eurozone sovereign credit profiles and ratings.
The latest EU Summit, like others before it, has resulted in some positive developments. There is an extra EUR200bn of funding for the IMF, the ESM has been brought forward, and there has been policy change on private-sector involvement in any future sovereign crisis. As with all Summits there is execution risk.
The extra resources for the IMF are welcome but it is not clear how and under what circumstances they would be deployed. The move away from requiring private-sector involvement (PSI) as a condition for ESM programmes is clearly positive for bondholders. The European Commission said it will “strictly adhere to the well established IMF principles and practices.” PSI has been a feature of past IMF programmes, but the Fund sets out to attract private capital to sovereigns and can be expected to use PSI as a last rather than a first resort.
Separately, the ECB also announced changes to its repo schemes that will aid bank liquidity, such as three-year liquidity lines and looser collateral requirements for structured finance. This could be positive for eurozone sovereigns if it eases pressure on them to introduce or re-activate bank debt guarantee schemes.
The Summit’s conclusions show a longer-term desire to move towards some form of fiscal integration in return for enforced fiscal prudence. We believe that most of the vulnerable eurozone countries are already implementing aggressive austerity programmes, and some are already changing their national constitutions. It is too early to judge how effective the fiscal compact will be due to the uncertainty regarding how it will be implemented.
We still believe the ECB, either directly through its sovereign bond purchase programme or indirectly by allowing the EFSF/ESM to access its balance sheet, is the only truly credible “firewall” against liquidity and even solvency crises in Europe.
Hopes that the ECB would step up its actions in support of its sovereign shareholders as a quid pro quo for institutional and legal changes that gave the ECB greater confidence in the long-run commitment of eurozone governments to fiscal discipline appear to have been misplaced.
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Lurking in the background, according to the Wall Street Journal, is an old nemesis: credit default swaps, which have been used in copious quantities by European banks:
Dozens of banks across Europe have sold large quantities of insurance to other banks and investors that protects against the risk of ailing countries defaulting on their debts, the latest illustration of the extensive financial entanglements among the continent’s banks and governments.
New data released last week by European banking regulators suggest the risks of banks suffering losses tied to European government bonds could be higher and more widespread than previously realized.
The numbers show European banks have sold a total of €178 billion ($238 billion) worth of insurance policies, in the form of financial derivatives known as credit-default swaps, on bonds issued by the financially struggling Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish governments. If those bonds default, as some investors fear they might, banks could be on the hook for making large payments to the holders of the swaps.
The banks have at least partly insulated themselves from such potential losses by buying large quantities—roughly €169 billion worth—of credit-default swaps tied to the same bonds, apparently in large part from other European banks, according to European Banking Authority data.
Some analysts and investors say they had assumed that sovereign credit-default swaps, known as CDS, were primarily sold by giant global investment banks in the U.K., France and Germany, as well as in the U.S. Those banks sell the swaps to big corporate clients and other banks and institutions.
But the new EBA data show a surprising breadth of large and small European banks—at least 38 of them—have sold instruments that protect against potential losses on Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish government bonds.
Of the total protection that European banks have written on government bonds in Europe’s five most-stressed countries, nearly one-third originated from German banks.
The diverse array of banks in the sovereign CDS market means that risks can spread more quickly through the financial system. It also means it is harder to predict how losses would ricochet among institutions and countries, analysts say.
The banks and some analysts argue that the industry’s actual exposure is far less than the €178 billion of swaps they have sold because the banks have purchased €169 billion in similar protection from other sources, which can offset the exposure. Many of Deutsche Bank’s purchases and sales of CDSs, for example, are with the same counterparties, with whom the German bank has legally enforceable netting agreements in place.
But some experts say it is risky to assume that all banks’ CDS transactions neatly cancel each other out.
“Netting is all very well provided that you trust your counterparty,” said Jon Peace, a Nomura Securities banking analyst. But in a crisis situation, “what you thought was net could tend toward your gross exposures” because certain sellers of the default insurance could themselves go bust.
For example, two of Italy’s biggest banks, UniCredit SpA and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, have sold a total of about €5.3 billion of protection against the risk of an Italian sovereign default, according to the new EBA data. The problem is that, in a default scenario, both banks likely would be in trouble themselves due to their huge holdings of Italian government bonds and the fact that their businesses are largely concentrated in Italy.
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While the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) hasn’t issued a statement setting forth its view of the results of the EU summit, the Financial Times reports that it “will warn in its latest borrowing outlook, due to be published this month, that financial stresses are likely to continue with the “animal spirits” of the markets – their unpredictable nature – a threat to the stability of many governments that need to refinance debt.”
For the foreseeable future it will be a “great challenge” for a wide range of OECD countries to raise large volumes in the private markets, with so-called rollover risk a big problem for the stability of many governments and economies.
Rollover risk is the threat of a country not being able to refinance or rollover its debt, forcing it either to turn to the European Central Bank in the case of eurozone countries or to seek emergency bail-outs, which happened to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The OECD says the gross borrowing needs of OECD governments is expected to reach $10.4tr in 2011 and will increase to $10.5tr next year – a $1tr increase on 2007 and almost twice as much as in 2005. This highlights the risks for even the most advanced economies that in many cases, such as Italy and Spain, are close to being shut out of the private markets.
While borrowing was higher in 2009 and 2010, the risks are greater than ever because of rising borrowing costs in turbulent, unpredictable markets.
The OECD says that the share of short-term debt issuance in the OECD area remains at 44 per cent, much higher than before the global financial crisis in 2007. This, according to some investors, is a problem as it means governments have to refinance, sometimes as often as every month, rather than being able to lock in more debt for the longer term that helps stabilise public finances.
The OECD also warns that a big problem is the loss of the so-called risk-free status of many sovereigns, such as Italy and Spain, and possibly even France and Austria. The latter two have triple A credit ratings but investors no longer consider them risk-free.
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Contagion from the eurozone crisis appears to be spreading to emerging markets: Indian industrial production dropped by 5.1 percent in October. From the Financial Times:
“The data are way worse than we were expecting,” said A Prasanna, economist at ICICI securities in Mumbai. “Usually output is lower during the months of October and November as there are fewer working days due to the festival season but a 5.1 per cent drop is significantly more than we predicted,” he added.
Manufacturing output, which represents about 76 per cent of industrial production, dropped 6 per cent in October, compared with a year ago and capital goods production, which is considered to be a key barometer of investment sentiment in the country, fell 25.5 per cent. Meanwhile, mining production was down 7.2 per cent, as a series of scandals in the sector and continued uncertainty over the outcome of a long-awaited mining bill hurt the industry.
